This Way Up (Channel 4) | All 4
Der Pass | Sky Atlantic
I Am Hannah (Channel 4) | All 4
False Flag | Fox
The Secret Teacher (Channel 4) | All 4
Comparisons will surely be made with Fleabag, and Catastrophe, and increasingly I don’t know why. Why not simply describe This Way Up as a very smart, beguilingly addictive comedy drama with a pained heart, rather than focus on the fact that women are the entire driving force? I read recently that cultural changes are now happening with such speed that 10 months now equates to a decade in old money: get with the programmes, gramps.
Aisling Bea and Sharon Horgan, for it is them, are a twitchingly fast double act as Aine and sister Shona, swapping one-liners and skirts with quicksilver finesse. Horgan’s Shona is reliably mouthy but sensible, yet it’s to Aine the eye is nearly always drawn, thumbing her nose at life after a nastily unspecified breakdown, quipping her pawky, clever way through the days yet still quietly sinking to her knees by the bathroom basin in lonely despair at a minor snub.
It helps, of course, that it is – rarity of unicorns – actually intensely funny. There’s a great sequence early on when Aine, thinking to use the Kardashians to aid her sparky EFL teaching, herself becomes hopelessly confused between who is exactly whose untransitioned mother, sister, father, etc, and where the gendered pronouns come. This six-parter, already available in full on All 4, is a sheer delight so far, yet a darkness broods.
Der Pass is a near-shameless remake of The Bridge, but I have to wonder whether there’s anything wrong with that as a pitch. It’s set on the German-Austrian border – a body has been found high in the mountains, just on the crossing line – and the Germans are cast as the organised (Swedish) batch, the Austrians as the relatively shambolic, instinctive Danes. In Nicholas Ofczarek, who plays Gedeon Winter, they’ve found a shambling bear of a man given up on life, and a grumpy new star: Julia Jentsch is counterpart Ellie Stocker, and yet so far she’s no Saga Norén. Maybe give it time: our Saga’s a hard act to follow.
It’s a step away from the bleak intensity of Scandi noir; instead, this production seems to be going heavy on the pagan symbolism. Which you can get enough of, frankly, with the lazier outings of Midsomer Murders (as if there’s any other kind), and yet a great deal of this is done well enough to become genuinely unsettling. When something as routinely and procedurally banal as a police artist doing a hospital bedside sketch has the power to shocklift you out of your seat, you know you’re into something intriguing.
I Am Hannah drew to a close Dominic Savage’s trio of peerless semi-improvised dramas, aided immensely by the stars Vicky McClure, Samantha Morton and now Gemma Chan. It left me wanting a great deal more, though I can appreciate just how much fierce hard work went into each unique episode, and had me musing heavily on a new need to have one-off dramas highlighting single-issue modern moral dilemmas rather than whole sprawling, overarching box sets. You could even call it, I don’t know, Play for Today or something.
Chan was subtly searing in her portrayal of Hannah, half-ballsy (and beautiful) tippler, half-tearful singleton, caught between lousy men and the ceaseless demands of her mother and valuable (yet smug) friends to settle down. Her impassioned speech to one of them, about the tiny, tiny gap between being told at 20 your life will be over if you fall pregnant, and the clamouring din of advice that you have to get pregnant by 35, will have resonated among the many moderns in that precise situation.
“And what’s the point in being with someone who isn’t right? I see so many women… they’ve panicked and settled for the next guy, like he’ll do, like I’ve just got to have kids.” Instantly memorable, if ultimately rather blue – no rose gardens or whitewashed picket fences for our Hannah, just a confused and shrugging doom – this was still hearteningly high-quality television.
False Flag does what so many drama series aspire to, yet so few deliver on: takes you lurchingly into a world none but the few has any experience of, and makes it fascinatingly real. The second series again plunges into the world of Shin Bet, the Israeli security service, after a terrorist explosion derails an Israeli-Turkish oil pipeline plan that had offered vaulting hope for stability between the countries, if not even for the wider region.
The crime/terrorist/security stuff is exciting enough. My goodness, you really don’t want to go up against Israeli intelligence without the brains and savagery to give as good as you gets. But what it excels in are the smaller details of daily life – the cities are slightly grubby, often drizzly, the meals snatched, the faithful observance often cursory. You can watch it as a simple thriller, yes, or experience a whole new and fascinating culture.
The Secret Teacher is one of those things, such as The Secret Millionaire, which purports to attain some valuable sociological insights but in truth is mainly there just for the tearjerking “reveal” when the meek employee (in this case the flailing supply teacher) casts off their weeds to be revealed as some supercool business titan.
In this series, more valuable than some, we actually do get insights into the unconscionable hoops through which schools are having to jump after a decade of austerity, the impossible choices, the herding-cats lunacy of instilling order on a class of 60 adolescents buzzing with sugar. Self-made Paul Rowlett duly jerked those tears when, six weeks in, he came clean about not being “Mr Williams” and offered private tutoring to Courtney, a bright lass beset by lack of confidence, who previously had prioritised “good eyebrows, then good social life, then – good grades?” Yet eyes and eyebrows sparkled both at Paul’s big reveal: she’ll work and work hard. Similarly Loui, intense with gratitude hidden by bluster.
One interesting adjunct was that some staff had, justifiably, bemoaned the school’s amenities and decor – “Our aim is to raise aspirations,” said one, “yet how can we tell students, ‘You’re not really worth that brand new shiny building’?” But the students, by and large, didn’t give a flying fig about their surroundings; far more crucial were quality of teaching, support and class size.
The Radio Times told me helpfully that a new thing on Sunday, The Mind of Herbert Clunkerdunk, was “quirky” and “surreal” – the word “zany” might also have been employed. It added: “If Kenny Everett were alive, you feel he would approve.” Warning duly appreciated, thanks; clickety-bye. Actually, I relented and watched an episode and a bit. It is, rather startlingly, even worse than I’ve made it sound.
