THE TV event of the week was Criminal Justice, a nightly legal drama and a tale of presumed innocence – but even TV events must be put on hold for unscheduled, change-to-our-published-programme, pre-invention-of-the-watercooler moments of Great Briti
sh sit-down-togetherness.
Andy Murray was presumed too pasty and gallumphy for a gladiatorial contest lasting five sets. He was presumed too radge-like to focus on the crucial points. And he was presumed too Scottish to be clasped to the hearts of the Centre Court, Henman Hill and all of the English Home Counties. But last Monday he proved the armchair tennis correspondents hopelessly wrong. And if those armchairs were World of Leather, you must have been pretty sticky by the end.
During the third set, the producers of the BBC's Wimbledon coverage must have been equally presumptuous. ("As we were, Murray's going out.") But suddenly the evening's transmission had to be reorganised. ("Murray's coming back!") The match was shunted from BBC1 to BBC2 and back again. No programme was safe. Murray and his French opponent Richard Gasquet were like cartoon superheroes whose slug-out destroys cars and entire buildings, and I desperately wanted them to lay waste to The One Show (BBC1, 7pm).
What theatre! And what a load of manky towels Murray left behind after victory was his. If I can be permitted to rip off Clive James, the doyen of goggle-box critics, this was the most exciting tennis match since Dan Maskell beat Henry VIII. I couldn't say "I was there" but the next best thing was quickly claimed: "I saw it, babies went unbathed, the doorbell went unanswered, and dinner became a bumper bag of Kettle Chips and three Peronis."
And so, with its delayed start, to Criminal Justice. Peter Moffat's saga told of a 21-year-old asthmatic's Kafkaesque stumble through the British legal system after 99 ice-creams with a pretty young woman progressed to vodka and knife games and then wild sex before she ended up dead. Did Ben Coulter do it? My hunch changed so many times I felt like I was back watching the tennis. And Ben Whishaw as the accused is obviously destined for great things, though I appreciate British acting hopefuls can be a bit like the tennis kind: a thrilling start, then straight into the commentary box/the corner shop in Midsomer Murders.
It was, reckoned DS Harry Box (Bill Paterson), the most open-and-shut case on this old-school detective's Essex patch – nickname: "The Arsehole" – for many a year, and Ben was banged up to await his fate. Moffat, an ex-barrister, then had the most tremendous fun scaring us witless about the law and especially prison and how Ben's only real explanation – "Sometimes things just happen, don't they?" – can leave the most respectable lad at the mercy of both.
I don't know what was more terrifying – jail, where psychos will rearrange your face and forcibly inject you with heroin while bent wardens turn a blind eye and the prisoners who think they're dogs howl at the moon... or the courtroom. On balance, probably the latter.
Lawyers are compromised by ego, forensic experts by fat fees and the police by ridiculous government conviction-rate targets. The legal profession were apparently unhappy with the way they were portrayed in Criminal Justice but I don't know why, because Ralph Stone seemed pretty heroic for a duty solicitor, a "slappers and dippers" man according to Box, with a scabby foot and this attitude to telling it like it is: "You really, really don't want to do that. I don't want to be stuck with the truth."
Con O'Neill as Stone vaguely reminded me of Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy and, while Box's echoes of Apocalypse Now's Bill Kilgore were even more distant, the evidence could still be fudged to make the connection. Both O'Neill and Paterson were superb, and the penis-swab scene – Ben: "Will it hurt?" ... Box (sympathetically sadistic): "Yes" – is one I won't forget in a hurry.
Fallout shared some themes with Criminal Justice, most obviously a knife-attack victim, a police force struggling to follow government directives and a region of this septic isle that might have prompted Harry Box to wonder if his beat wasn't actually quite cushy. It suffered in comparison with the BBC series because the latter was made for television and benefited from claustrophobia-inducing camerawork – in prison van, cell and dock – which had me tugging at my shirt collar before realising I wasn't actually wearing one. Fallout rarely stopped looking like a filmed play, having originally been written by Roy Williams for the stage. Still, as part of Channel 4's week-long Disarming Britain season about the street violence scourge, it made for compelling viewing.
Joe (Lennie James) was a bright, black kid who escaped a dreadful sink estate, joined the police and vowed never to return. But when another boy with high hopes of getting out was killed for his trainers, the detective was drafted in to help the murder investigation.
Joe's resentful white colleagues dubbed him "the poster boy sent to get the natives to talk", while among the feral, tracksuited urchins of the Cleveland's grim walkways he was a "white man's bitch". Like Criminal Justice, Fallout showed policemen bending the rules. Euphemistically, you might call their methods "traditional". But they didn't believe themselves to be corrupt. Crime brutalises everyone.
Williams' skill was to engender sympathy for everyone, including the doomed tribe. The youngest was a latch-key kid whose mother had three jobs; the oldest had a crack-addicted father who called him by the wrong name. In such hopeless circumstances, bad things will happen. As Shanice, the Cleveland's princess, put it: "There is always a reason."
In Britain's Missing Top Model (BBC3, Tuesday 9pm), young disabled women are competing for a fashion mag photoshoot. Normal rules apply, with the judges milking the selection process for drama. But our responses – choosing favourites, sneering at the rest – cannot be the usual ones. This is either a) a brilliant show, b) a cynical one, c) the end of reality TV as we know it.
The full article contains 1054 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
