A Mother's Son (ITV1) | ITV Player
The Thick of It (BBC2) | iPlayer
Paralympic Games (C4) | 4OD
How treacherously quickly do 21 years pass. Dallas, it said on the schedules, was coming on again, and nice, I thought, and silly, and wondered idly how bonkers it would be, and how long it had been off our screens, maybe a decade or so, and then read it had been 21 years, and stopped breathing for a bit. As Tony Hancock would have said, that's practically half a lifetime. Never mind where Dallas went, where did my life go? What have I been doing?
The bad news – I've just phoned various exes, churches, the police, etc – is that we can't go back. The good news is that, thanks to the return of the Ewings and Barneses, we hardly have to. As soon as those opening titles, that anthemic music, fat trombones combining wistful wild west pioneering with proud 80s screw-the-poor disdain, tripped and triptyched across our screens again, we knew the past had instead returned to us; suddenly I was basically back at school being derided for being the only one who openly fancied the apparently de trop Charlene Tilton. And the plots and dialogue, despite our beloved/ behated favourites having aged by, ooh, about 21 years, are just as gloriously stupid, and immensely watchable, as before: it's still simply the best soap ever, and leaves our homegrown favourites sounding like the endless rattle of thin gruel on corrugated hatred, written by sociopathic misers.
JR Ewing was first seen in a care home, near-comatose. He pretended to be asleep when Bobby came to, again, attempt brotherly reconciliation and give him a little peck on the cheek. Bobby then hardly had the minutes to, in a fast-moving, intriguing and did I mention bonkers plot, get to his doctor in time to contract stomach cancer. JR's eyes only blinked open after about 40 minutes when his own son, John Ross, visited to ask him to tear up his mammy's will, just to screw over Bobby. The kraken woke, leathery eyelids blinking in homage to Ray Harryhausen, intrigued by one more intrigue before death, and was soon up and about in a fake Zimmer, spreading charming poison among the untermenschen. Patrick Duffy as Bobby is still Captain Bloody Nice; a sheep in wolf's clothing, dreadfully hard to take seriously when he gets "angry", and would obviously rather be running a sweetshop in Poughkeepsie, smelling faintly of unctuous sherbet.
But, grand as Duffy and Larry Hagman still are, the stars now will be their sons, the true fathers' sons: Jesse Metcalfe as the too-nice Christopher, Bobby's son, trying to find "safe oil", and Josh Henderson as the conflicted but essentially baaad John Ross. Both are not just good actors but good-looking young actors and, to help us differentiate until we really know their faces, John Ross has been given a ferrety moustache and a gin-swill habit, and Christopher has been given a too-sweet-to-be-true fiancee. Whose parents appear to have died when she was 12, leaving her just a charmingly wayward brother. I haven't seen the next episode but the brother is obviously her lover, and she's scamming, as Christopher's father was so often scammed, the kind, hangdog git. Trust me, ingenues: I've seen this line before, and now will more than happily see it again. A loopy, overstuffed, genuinely loving and absurdly triumphant return.
Good acting too, I had thought, by both Hermione Norris and Martin Clunes in A Mother's Son, ITV's apparent standout drama of the week, playing divorcees, each with two boy/ girl teens of their own, settling down together with ease and goodwill (and frankly money) on the lovely Suffolk coast. This was, unfortunately, one of those things which appear worse in hindsight. Clunes was good but fatally undermined, as can happen with stars on ITV (but particularly Clunes) by also having to appear in the ad breaks talking like a simpleton to the world's most punchable insurance dog. And Norris, having ratcheted suspense during episode one when she suspected her own son of some even-oblique involvement in the murder of a local girl, had little to do afterwards, once she'd a) decided not to confront her son about the, ahem, bloodied trainers she'd found under his bed, b) decided not to confront him about the supremely worrying content she'd found on his internet browser and c) decided firmly not to go to the police, but stare soulfully into space and utter endless windy angsty sighs about, presumably, motherhood. Instead, Norris, whose sighing character was becoming as infuriating by the end as the verbally challenged insurance dog, quivered inwardly about a very motherly dilemma. No denying it's often a real one – how blind should a mother remain to the potential defects of what was once a lovely babbie boy? – but a dilemma significantly simplified, I'd suggest, by the finding of bloodstained trainers "lost" just after a murder. And then she fought and broke up with that nice Mr Clunes. Certainly, the fragile tensions of divorcees with kids, trying, sometimes pretending, were bisected and skilfully spreadeagled, the dialogue tense, the sweeping shots and washed-bone colours perfect, but the essence of the plot was as poopy as a teen's trainer. The only true surprise was the brilliance of young Alexander Arnold as son Jamie: watch this space.
For a plot which truly fizzed, and in un-nitpickable fashion, and gripped like a very nasty man – or Jimmy McGovern, for it was he – holding huge red metal pincers around your neck, you needed the last of Accused. I think we did touch on this a few weeks ago, but it's been such a searing and darkly truthful delight for four weeks that much still lingers, not least the astonishing versility of some of our actors: Sean Bean, Olivia Colman, with whom I and half the country are now officially In Love, and, last week, Anna Maxwell Martin.
She and Ewen Bremner, as scarily and transparently rank as he's been in anything since Trainspotting, did little that will have drawn them goodwill emails from the PR department of the Prison Service but much which deserves to draw more meaningful snail-mail from Mr and Mrs Bafta. Watch it; watch all of them again, and shiver a little, and hug yourself that we have all this.
As we also have proof that The Thick of It doesn't, always, need Malcolm Tucker. He's not back until next week, in mournful bored opposition. Meanwhile, the coalition is being eviscerated on screen as cruelly as in real life. Tory Roger Allam's stuttering, excruciating few minutes before a crowd of tech-wise schoolchildren – he's a happy Luddite but to others a "digitard", a word which will become as useful as "omnishambles" – is equal to any other three minutes of comedy this year.
And a fellow Tory lambasts Lib-Dem colleagues thus: "You're basically a couple of homeless guys we've invited to the Christmas lunch… don't whinge when we don't let you carve the turkey." Somehow, this week in particular, this resonates. Too many good lines to fit in even an entire piece; too much happy brilliance.
