The Innocents (Netflix)
Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage (C4) | All 4
Horizon: Stopping Male Suicide (BBC2) | iPlayer
Manhunting With My Mum (C4) | All 4
You know you’re getting old when you start siding with the parents against the teenagers in a supernatural-themed love story. Eight-part Netflix series The Innocents is aimed at the ever-thriving teen/young adult market, where the tone usually wavers between gateway goth and GCSE emo studies. In this one, devised by Hania Elkington and Simon Duric, we first meet June (Sorcha Groundsell) just before her 16th birthday, as she’s kissing a love note to her young beau, Harry (Percelle Ascott), who has a mysteriously afflicted father and hardworking cop-mum (Nadine Marshall), neither of whom seem to deserve a runaway son (see what I mean?).
June is plotting to abscond with Harry to avoid being taken, with her brother (Arthur Hughes), by their seemingly overprotective stepfather (Sam Hazeldine) to a secluded island (the geography on The Innocents seems to whirl confusingly between Britain and Norway), where their mother (Laura Birn) is being studied by an obsessive professor, played by Guy Pearce. Unbeknown to June, she’s a shapeshifter, something she only finds out about herself when she and Harry are on the run and she temporarily morphs into the body of a man from the island (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson), who attempts to abduct her – leading at least one viewer to wonder how Harry might be feeling about his suddenly six-foot, burly, bearded, male “girlfriend”.
This obviously isn’t aimed at someone like me, but I rather enjoyed the two episodes I sampled. Granted, June and Harry start off so drippy their scenes require damp-proofing. However, in fairness, it is called The Innocents, and their unworldliness is in line with this modern, unearthly twist on Romeo and Juliet, while the overall look and tone is more Brothers Grimm via WhatsApp. If you’ve got the patience to sit through a mildly baffling over-stuffed opener, this could shapeshift into something interesting.
In Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage, the Turner prize-winning artist aims to tackle the big questions of life – birth, coming of age, marriage and, in this opening episode, death, of which Larkin piquantly wrote: “Most things may never happen: this one will.”
Perry, a driven, immersive presenter, wondered whether the western, secularised way of dealing with death and burial was too sterile and distant, which is a fair point – sometimes, it seems more of a hurried, squeamish, quasi-waste disposal issue than the huge, psycho-emotional wrench it is. While Perry didn’t attend his own estranged mother’s funeral (seemingly a long story that he didn’t care to go into), he’d gleaned from his sister that the service was bizarrely inappropriate and impersonal. Perry also posed the intriguing question: when do people truly die – when they stop breathing, or when they’re no longer remembered?
On the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, we saw how people postponed burying loved ones for a year or more, keeping the (obviously embalmed) bodies with them at home – one beloved cadaver still had her specs perched on her nose. Back in Britain, Perry let his art do the talking, making an icon of 17-year-old Jordan (killed by a drunk driver) for his shellshocked parents to place on their makeshift shrine (including, strangely movingly, Jordan’s favourite cigarettes) and walking around his area in Middlesbrough in a small procession to mark his young life.
Elsewhere, Perry helped to organise a living-funeral ceremony for Roch Maher, a man with motor neurone disease (now dead, but who was then preparing to withdraw his own breathing tube) – fashioning an urn where Roch’s family and friends could place their memories. Ultimately, very delicate subjects (death, impending death, grief) were handled well and originally, with Perry managing to be thoughtful, challenging, even exuberant (“I want us to feel more alive in that moment of death”), without any sense of clodhopping intrusion or insensitivity.
The Horizon documentary Stopping Male Suicide dealt with harrowing facts, not least that suicide is the biggest killer of males under 50. As presenter Dr Xand Van Tulleken observed: “The most likely thing to kill me… is me.”
From there, it was a harrowing tour of the suicidal, and those left behind, including bipolar sufferer Kevin Hines (who survived jumping from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge), and devastated father Steve Mallen, who publicly vowed at the side of his son’s coffin to do all he could to prevent suicide.
With such a variety of possible factors (sex, health, employment status and postcode being just a few), there’s still a problem in spotting people who are most likely to kill themselves. The Henry Ford Health System in Detroit adopted a “zero suicide” objective with its patients, which, although being private healthcare (thus excluding the always-vulnerable poor), had noteworthy success. Back in the UK, the stoical Mr Mallen was shown launching the Zero Suicide Alliance, a collaboration of NHS Trusts, charities, businesses and others committed to tackling the problem.
In Manhunting With My Mum, presenter AJ Odudu, 30, travelled with her mum, Florence (who had had a happy arranged marriage, producing eight children), to her native Nigeria to see if she could find a husband. In short, she couldn’t. Although excited to date a local prince (“Move over, Meghan Markle, there’s a new princess in town!”), sparky, Blackburn-raised Odudu was unimpressed by being expected to do all the cooking and housework, and even more so at the thought of kneeling before her husband to “show respect”, observing sagely: “I wouldn’t be treated like royalty.”
A devout virgin and a musician were next to be swiftly rejected, while Odudu grappled with the conflict of loving Nigeria and Nigerians but wishing to remain modern and independent. Eventually, Nollywood actor Timini came through with a cool attitude, and an even cooler date on a speedboat in Lagos, though it became clear that they mainly shared a passion for Instagramming.
If Odudu was a funny, frank delight, Florence was a veritable life force, blasting her daughter’s suitors (“He didn’t give me anything to make wow!”), and as for the notion of kneeling to her own husband of 40 years: “No way, thank you very much!” Go, Florence! While Odudu didn’t find a match, this remained a love story of sorts – between her and her fabulous mum.
