Twin Peaks (Sky Atlantic)
The Trial: A Murder In The Family (C4) | All 4
Paula (BBC2) | iPlayer
White Gold (BBC2) | iPlayer
The two anniversaries might seem unrelated but, for the purposes of a little conceit about which I’m tolerably excited, let’s relate them. Fifty years since Sgt Pepper’s, 25 years since Twin Peaks, and yet, pretend as we may, we knew neither as groundbreaking in their time. Fierce numbers of people were blithely unaware of the 1967 album, getting on with jobs and kids and rain and being busily ignorant of drugs; by the end of Twin Peaks’ second season, 95% of the US wasn’t watching.
It took a loose-sprawling subsequent decade, in each case, for the respective effects to be even acknowledged, let alone rightly celebrated. Only in hindsight, with oceans of cultural retro-referencing, did we start to appreciate what gamechangers they had been. David Lynch’s 1990-91 TV series, as the few Peaks-freaks first excitedly knew, terraformed the subsequent small-screen landscape: beautifully odd, technically brilliant, narratively chock-full of demands and rewards. I choose to hope we still might have had The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, box sets and binge-watching, even Happy Valley and Fargo, without it, but Lynch was first to slot quality small-town weirdness into two places: the box in the corner, and the office water cooler. TV didn’t grow up fast, in those drear days of Falcon Crest and Murder, She Wrote. But it did, thanks be to Jebus, grow up.
Could Mr Lynch do new again, a quarter-century on? Initially I just wallowed: the lime/pink titling, Kinny Landrum’s spooksome synth-bass, Laura Palmer’s hair-up photo as homecoming queen, an image as iconic to my times as that of Marilyn’s subway-breeze to another generation. And Laura (Sheryl Lee) and Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), quarter-centuries older, and she’s bending to kiss and tell him “sometimes my arms bend back”, sound and film acted backwards yet played forward – ahh, here we are again. Then, of course, it got weird.
I won’t even start on the plot, because that would entail making silent fish-wibble motions with my flapping mouth. Parts are nonsense, parts are narcoleptically slow and stuttering and stilted, parts wryly, lingeringly funny. What it is not, in any way, as the original almost was, is a relatively simple tale of homespun whodunnit with gothic twists and damned fine cherry pie. The Log Lady was among the most toweringly sane characters this time around, what with the lost arm/dancing dwarf having somehow mutated into a brain in a tree, Agent Coop’s evil doppelganger breathing leathery death throughout the tri-counties, much more playing with notions of time, and a man actually being paid to gaze moronically into a big, unrewarding glass box (don’t start). But yes, I think Mr Lynch may have done it again. Just call me a Peaks freak, but I think I know what’s going on, or will in about 25 years; for the moment, jes’ enjoying the ride, ma’am, and hugely.
A flawed but roughly successful experiment (as, indeed, is the very idea of the jury) concluded in The Trial: A Murder in the Family, which you didn’t necessarily have to follow all week. The jury, and the barristers, were real people, in tooth and claw and prejudice, and something of a reality star has been found in defence silk John Ryder QC. Only the accused and witnesses were actors, and only three knew the truth throughout, though you could tell they all relished out-improvising reality itself.
I had begun to mither at the jury’s predictable gender split: the men sought logical doubt, the women turned it all back to relate, however nebulously, to their own lives. Hubbie Simon was, as we finally found out in the interminable flashbacks (most red herrings; we only truly needed, of course, the one), guilty, and royally so. And, what do I know, the four touchy-feely women had unerringly settled on precisely the correct verdict. The rest vacillated, and the jury was hung, a famous waste of time and money. Yet, obliquely, this served to demonstrate the very value of the jury system today. More of this kind of thing soon, please.
Paula, by the playwright Conor McPherson, is set to enthral even more than the recent The Replacement. Olivier award-winner Denise Gough out-acts all with her gutsy rendering of a woman rightly quite unafraid of what society chooses to make of her. On one hand it’s a punchy, celebratory calling-out of hypocrites everywhere, men and women, for still judging behaviour as most behoving of the relevant chromosomes; on the other, it’s a genuinely gripping revenge thriller, with toxic rats both large and small.
White Gold, the latest retro-drama wheeze from the Beeb’s busy kitsch-decor department, was funnier than Count Arthur Strong, but so is duodenal bleeding. The only question is… why? Ed Westwick made a smarmily confident Essex fist of Vince, leader of the rancid pack, but where is the surprise, where any comic subversion of stereotype, in the fact that early-80s double-glazing salesmen were squirmily cheating turdlets whom you couldn’t trust as far as you could spit a rat? Didn’t we, um, know that, queasily?
Oddly enough, I was far more appreciative of the accidental facts vouchsafed along the way – how plastic, being cheaper than timber, helped hold up Thatcher’s right-to-buy council houses in those years, and how rotten finance left many paying more for the windows than the very house. The fact that I found these random moments more elucidating than the whole show means I’ll be ready for Gardeners’ Question Time soon. And only the gods are laughing.
