Without You (ITV) | ITV Player
Come Date with Me (C4) | 4OD
The Great British Property Scandal (C4) | 4OD
Black Mirror (C4) | 4OD
After Life: The Strange Science of Decay (BBC4) | iPlayer
Jealousy hobbles almost all of us at some stage; its many nastinesses ramped to unbearable levels by the fact that it is one of mankind's happiest attributes, our own imaginations, which is doing 90% of the nasties. And how much worse, then, to be jealous in retrospect, when someone's dead and you can't even scream at them, ask them, let them know how much it hurt, and hurts?
This intriguing theme, wrapped in a deft little murder (or was it?) plot, underpinned Without You, the latest adaptation of a "Nicci French" book, which means it's one by Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, the married writing team who somehow manage to co-author thrillers without throttling each other and then launch them into the bestseller charts and get them filmed rather well.
Seldom better than here, with Anna Friel on some of her finest form ever as Ellie, married for 12 years to Greg, and in love and trying again for a baby, when he's killed in a crash. (Or was it a crash?) Ellie's grief hardly has time to get a look-in, because confusion and, yes, jealousy kick in instantaneously: a mystery woman also died in the car and no one knows how they even knew each other. Unless they were… you know. Tongues wag, as they do. They wag in the coroner's court; they wag, the tongues of even her best friends, during the wake at Ellie's home when they think she's upstairs sleeping. Ellie is too far gone to worry much about the wagging. She needs to know the answers for herself, if only to begin to grieve with genuine love or consign the marriage to the bin, and toughens up visibly throughout this first hour.
I'm never sure, when reading the books, who writes which bit, and who re-edits, and who throws the frying pan first, but one thing that comes through, especially in adaptations, is the terrific strength of having the minds of two opposing genders at work, pretty much seamlessly. "I don't know why because I've done nothing wrong but I feel the most terrible… shame," says Ellie at one stage, which strikes me as a very womanly thought, though goodness I could be so wrong here; as I could with the suspicion that her laborious drawing-up of a whiteboard timeline of dead Greg's last month, with Post-it notes and cross-references and crosshatching, is the work of a male mind. I could be deeply wrong, but I know that the formula works and usually terrifically: a thriller that understands (deeply) both women and men. And is also, simply, a rather gripping tale – I won't spoil the end, but if you've started on this you'll be hooked until the denouement, just before Christmas – and makes you think about grief and love and retro-jealousy and which one would win out, depending on your strength of character. This is as deliciously welcome at this cold but saccharine time of the year as salt in your porridge.
They all tried to cook – actually, some of them even managed, though none attempted porridge, this being Englandland – for one another in Come Date With Me, a slightly spurious spin-off, though I'm sure it'll be none the less fabulously successful for it, of Come Dine with Me, one of the surprise "reality" successes of late.
Best thing about these shows is, of course, the gleefully critical voiceovers by Dave Lamb; his cynical delight at the many failings of Generation Britpop is starting to sound like a Greek chorus for our age. Undoubtedly the worst is the interminable previewing and recapping pre and post adverts, as if we were unable to remember what had happened on our screens three minutes ago, when the only way we were actually likely to forget was by being driven to a state of loll-tongued torpor by the interminable recaps.
The twist here is that it's not one girl being successively wooed by a series of chaps, individually, with their massively varied cooking skills and levels of charm, but by all of them, each night. This means the chaps have to cook not just for one pretty girl – Tracey this time, a petite 28-year-old "trainee drama teacher" – but for her other four suitors as well. I had thus expected much dreadful Apprentice-style willie-waving, but actually the guys, for the first couple of nights at least, seemed actually to like one another, even though they all fancied Tracey. Perhaps this metrosexual Generation Britpop is less chest-bumping than my own. Perhaps there are snakes bubbling under the skin, as yet unleashed. Ghastlily, guiltily watchable.
There's too little time and space to get into the intricate successfulnesses of (Restoration Man) George Clarke's two programmes on The Great British Property Scandal but, trust me, he is now doing for empty homes what Jamie has been trying to do for food. National Low-Cost Loan Fund might not sound the foxiest soundbite in the den, but it's his answer, and it would work, by getting government and councils to let absent landlords (not all ill-intentioned) borrow £1,300 bloody quid and do up their empty homes to a lettable standard.
The angrier he got, the angrier I, and I hope you, got. The government/council lunacy of having families cooped in damp, rat-infested, poke-holes possessed of staggeringly dubious electrical safety, while round the corner lies a perfectly good "empty" which the owners, what with no one lending anything, can't afford to twitch up to a lettable standard, hurts in that very bad way that happens when your mind hears stupidity.
Clarke managed, eventually, to show how even a little money can turn it around: the family needing not to live in squalor did up the house themselves, more than willingly and actually rather tastefully; the nice owners/landlords got some rent rather than a crippling mortgage for emptiness and a whole family was newly happy. Simples? I have already joined the website which allows you to help in your own area, or at least find out who in charge locally is helping/ unhelping. Empties are like chewing gum on pavements. We never noticed them: now we do.
Black Mirror, on a full week ago today but I insist on mentioning it, was brilliant. You couldn't get further away, for the next two Sunday nights, from Downton. Thank God. Rory Kinnear, as the PM who had to (after almost the most deranged twist yet in the mind of writer Charlie Brooker, what fun he must have had in the three minutes after thinking of it) – there's no way round this, "shag a pig on live TV to save the life of the kidnapped princess" and director Otto Bathurst somehow imbued the dreadful, dreadful act with… dignity. Stoicism, then, or a kind of elevated bathos. The whole thing, perfectly shot and acted, said a lot about Twitter and the cyberspace "hive mind", but it said more, near the end, about humanity.
This gloriously mad premise had, of course, the world wanting to watch. London's streets were emptier than in 28 Days Later: everyone was about to watch the PM… do… a pig, on live TV, to order, to save a life. We saw the glee-keen audiences, the pubs and hospitals, fail as the hour of his act chugged on. Heads were turned, hands thrown to eyes. Laughter turned to tears. Twitter-glee turned to shame, just for watching, for having wanted so much to watch. People remembered they were people, not perennial gossipy spectators on life. For something that was ostensibly about kidnapping, execution, pig-shagging and focus-group polls, it was strangely life-affirming. And very quietly, very wisely, very funny.
