Life (BBC One) | iPlayer
The Comey Rule (Sky Atlantic)
Honour (ITV) | ITV Hub
Brave New World (Sky One/Now TV)
Life, which began its own six-episode one on Tuesday, is simply the best soap opera ever devised. If all soaps were like this I’d be boring you weekly with breathless updates about Corrie or ’Stenders or the other one. Not everyone, however, has the luxury of garlanded playwright Mike “Doctor Foster” Bartlett on board, nor the ability to round up the usual suspects, a sublime team of our finest homegrown character actors. It’s lovely, enthralling, exploratory and a little bit cheesy all in one; I could have watched these people for a long, long time.
Pretty much everyone excels in this tale of a big Manc house converted into four flats, whose residents variously spin from the realms of stability, achieve closure, pain, babies, loss, joy, and eventually whirl back round each other all over again. The interconnectedness of all things has seldom been better expressed since Douglas Adams, unless it was in 2019’s Years and Years.
Alison Steadman goes without saying – but Peter Davison, as the (outwardly caring) pompous fool who micro-controls and belittles her: well, were he not almost 70 and rather well known anyway, I would declare: what a find! As, incidentally, is young Calvin Demba as the lovely Andy, whom Melissa Johns’s Hannah is unaccountably rejecting. Adrian Lester, or a phenomenal Saira Choudhry, the list goes on… but the absolute fist-in-the-air victor is Victoria Hamilton, reprising and expanding her role as uptight neighbour Anna in Doc Foster, now having left her smug husband and renamed herself Belle.
As a study in an oft-disappointed soul for whom perfection has replaced the desire for friendship, warm human contact even, she is… well, perfection. One scene (of many) still lingers: I hope I’m not spoiling too much, it’s all on iPlayer now, but when she gives her truculent niece a valued brooch for a birthday, then instantly takes it back with a patchy smile and a “You’ll only lose it!”, she is the embodiment of all souls who know how difficult they are being yet yearn for someone to understand their need for control. Which is, of course, born mainly from a previous pain.
It all gets a teensy tiny bit Richard Curtis in only the last episode, what with declarations and jiltings and resolutions and whatnot, but as an exhumation of the human condition it will hardly be bettered this year. Also, it manages to draw a subtle distinction between between serious, chronic, psychological pain and the more usual slings and arrows that harrow us all.
In a timely fashion, Jeff Daniels strode his rather leggy legs on stage to tell us the story of James Comey, ex-FBI head, in The Comey Rule – caught between a rock and a big, bastarding boulder in July 2015 when the first allegations regarding Hillary Clinton’s personal email servers surfaced. So 31,000 deleted emails, hmm, yet if he raised concerns might it spin the election for Mr Donald Trump?
It’s all told honestly and solemnly, with a welcome gaggle of alumni from Martin Sheen’s West Wing, and Daniels is marvellous in his mix of personal charm and pious boy-scoutery. Comey’s story is in itself a twitch forgotten but savagely relevant today: the Russian interference, where the only intention was to disrupt, disrupt, disrupt America. The splenetic, liberal anti-Trump blindness: pressured by wife and daughter to not reopen the Hillary investigation a week before the election, boy-scout boy asks: ‘If she broke the law, wouldn’t you want to know?’ The answering scream of “No!” has, in its own way, served to factionalise America.
Brendan Gleeson, I can’t think of a nicer way to put this, was born to play the thudmonster Trump. Sorry Brendan. I had thought his performance might be verging on parody, if truthful and awesome parody, but then I caught that Biden debate. Which both splits and shames America. Hugs all round, smiley face.
Honour was one of those dramas that the ITV drama department does so well. Keeley Hawes was Caroline Goode, the officer who brought, with tenacity and pain and sterling help from a little dedicated team, the killers of Banaz Mahmod to justice. They were, basically, her family. It was an “honour killing”, a term that I might beg be wiped from the lexicon.
Quietly searing in its slow condemnation of ancient, raddled, cultish thinking, it was also just a damned good investigation.
One has to sympathise, if only a little, with the team behind Brave New World, an ambitious attempt at a launch for the new US streaming service Peacock, available here on Sky. Did they remain faithful to Aldous Huxley’s text – written, if you remember, as a dystopian take on 1920s America, which he saw, and not in a good way, as a postwar mire of addled consumerism, hedonism run rampant and unfulfilled personal lives, where “pleasure” was all, yet nobody was actually happy? Or did they update it, Black Mirror-style, to reflect more modern truths – inequality, say, or social media, or the new tribalisms?
In the end, sadly, they did neither. What we’re left with is an undoubtedly slick sci-fi something-or-other, which neither manages (or even sets foot on the road) to explore Huxley’s darker philosophical intentions nor to offer us reimagining, relevance. It’s just a story about “New London” (the rules are: no privacy. No family. No monogamy. Everyone is very happy) and a few individuals’ search for more soul, away from their perpetually pleasant chemical blur, in the rebellious “savage lands”: thus it ticks Huxley’s boxes, but only in a digested-read kind of way.
There are many good-looking, writhing bodies, but it’s not actually sexy; in fact the overall experience is like popping a pill of soma, the ubiquitous drug that leaves everyone beaming yet, ultimately, nigglingly dissatisfied. Jessica Brown Findlay, Alden Ehrenreich, Demi Moore, the wonderful Nina Sosanya all do their level best but… it’s just a – meh – easy watch. Which is a problem in itself – it’s rather hard to imagine any viewer, after having spent long hours on the sofa grazing and gazing at nine 50-minute episodes of escapism and shallow orgies, being moved to condemn or reject the idea of a world beset by the mindless pursuit of dull pleasure.
Sadly no previews were available for Spitting Image by the time this section’s presses roll, but the makers have trailed Britbox’s great hope fairly endlessly. Two observations: not every sketch is going to have you in stitches but, crucially, it never did. We all remember our favourites – pub conversations will always revolve tediously around Thatcher’s vegetables, David Steel, Tebbit as the Chingford skinhead – but forget the long acres we waded through unsmiling. And one trailer made much of Trump and Johnson together in a sauna, and I rather wish satirists would desist in conflating the two. While Agent Orange may be – no, definitely is, even as we speak – tearing his own country apart, our own PM is not, actually, literally, Adrammelech, mephitic Assyrian commander of hell. He’s Alex Johnson, posh-boy chancer.
