Prime Suspect ITV1
Holy Cross BBC1
How Clean Is Your House? C4
Louis and the Brothel BBC2
Let's just get it over with, shall we? Prime Suspect: The Last Witness was the very rarest sort of television, the kind that makes a critic feel justified in spending the bulk of her working life welded to an armchair, toting a remote control.
Week after week there is still far more good stuff on television than you might imagine but, obviously, there is a great deal less that is truly great - just as well, really, because spouting a geyser of hot praise does not become a critic. I can, for example, rustle you up at least four virtually unqualified 'brilliant's in relation to Prime Suspect (for the acting, directing, writing, photography) but where's the fun in that? Like the family silver, the usual adjectival suspects tarnish very quickly, even if you only need to get them out once or twice a year. Mine have remained unpolished since State of Play.
Despite being the cliche standard-bearer, Helen Mirren continues to make Det Supt Jane Tennison so much more than just a crisply effi cient copper sacrificing her private life for her work. With the consummate film actor's ability to register complex emotions by the subtlest facial recalibrations, Mirren appears to act at a sort of subatomic level. And the older she gets, the better she does it.
A wrinkle will always be the enemy of actresses who seek to hide behind a character rather than reveal themselves within one, but that's not Mirren's style. Wrinkles are a part of her emotional arsenal. She looks great but, more importantly, she looks real, and this level of humanity seems to rub off on the performances of those around her.
Prime Suspect gave us glorious support from, among others, Frank Finlay as Tennison's father, Robert Pugh as Tennison's old-school, rozzer-by-numbers subordinate DS Simms, Ingeborga Dapkunaite as the troubled illegal immigrant Jasmina Blekic, and Velibor Topic as her killer, Duscan Zigic (who, rather against the odds, managed to elicit something approaching sympathy from the viewer despite the fact that his dialogue could have fitted on to one sheet of A4). And perhaps finest of all was Phoebe Nichols as a chillingly callous and superior spook. She had a very classy speech (in which she told Tennison to back off from her investigation of a suspected Bosnian war criminal because he was under the protection of the British Government) the delivery of which made her subsequent comeuppance even more emotionally satisying.
If there was a weak link (and I'm really fishing here) it was Oleg Menshikov's Milan Lukic, the baddest of baddies, whose psychopathic charm offensive ensured he eventually came across like a panto villain. The dénouement, in which he held a knife to the throat of his wife's small daughter, was unnecessarily heavy-handed, but this is a minor quibble. Prime Suspect was one of the most worthwhile TV experiences of the year and Mirren is, basically, a goddess.
It was a good week for meaty female roles but the stars of the BBC's Holy Cross, the estimable Bronagh Gallagher and Zara Turner, must surely have rolled their eyes and gnashed a little when they saw the schedules. Who'd want to be up against Monday night's final dose of Prime Suspect?
Holy Cross was a worthy attempt to portray both sides of the unedifying story that dominated the news in the first 10 days of September 2001, in which loyalists hurled disgusting abuse (and worse) at their nationalist neighbours while the latter pig-headedly dragged their terrified daughters to school through the riot police-lined streets of north Belfast.
In this version of events enormous pains were taken to ensure nobody came out of it terribly well at all; and, indeed, nobody did: they were all as good or bad, right or wrong or merely just as stupid as one another. Dramatically, however, this made life quite difficult for the viewer. We need to be able to take sides, and if that opportunity is removed then it isn't quite enough, after watching 90 minutes of shouting, to be able to nod sagely to your sofa cohabitee and say, 'Ah well, yes, of course I can see both points of view. And they're both wrong. And yet, both oddly right, too. Which is interesting. Let's discuss.'
When watching a drama about a subject as sizzlingly confrontational as Northern Ireland we shouldn't be forced to sit on the metaphorical fence in order that a dreadful real-life event can be given a politically correct makeover. In a drama you have to care about somebody, after all, while being forced to care about everybody means, inevitably, that you end up caring about no one.
Despite it's lack of subtlety, Holy Cross would be in the running for Best Drama most weeks of the year; unfortunately this week it was judged against the delicately wrought story structure of Prime Suspect, which made it look almost as insular, crass and charmlessly parochial as its leading protagonists. Oh, and one other thing: the soundtrack featured a St Winifred's-style school choir singing an airy if oddly staccato little ditty with all the lyrical brilliance of a subsection clause from the Good Friday Agreement:
They ask us
Where do we come from
We tell them
We're from Holy Cross
They ask us
We tell them
We're from Holy Cross
Who we are
We're from Holy Cross
Which was so utterly toe-curling it threatened to turn a sensitive drama into a scene from Annie: 'Yes, the loyalists will come out tomorrow/ Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow/ There'll be sectarian violence.'
The unlikely recent Channel 4 hit How Clean is Your House? returned with indecent haste this week and was almost painful to watch. Not so much for the filth, which was retch-inducingly, gag-makingly horrible merely to look at (spare us the innovation of digital smellovision) but for the tragically untold story behind the owner of the house, one Georgina Taylor, oh-so-ironically a cleaner by profession.
Chastised relentlessly by dominatrix-cum-bad cop Kim while good cop Aggie went round taking swabs for analysis, Georgina stammered and occasionally attempted to justify herself but spent most of the show looking like a rabbit in the television headlights. She was, quite obviously, suffering from severe psychological problems (when Kim and Aggie returned a fortnight later she was already losing the battle against tidiness and cleanliness). The net result was that I felt quite despicable for allowing myself to watch this poor, childlike woman (how many adults living in their own home opt for a single bed?) being bullied in the name of light entertainment. Genuinely filthy television.
On the other hand you might have tuned into Louis and the Brothel expecting some slightly filthy television but, if it was hands-on muckiness you were after, it was hard to find. Louis Theroux spent several weeks living at Reno's Wild Horse Resort and Spa among the working girls and their relentlessly, almost sinisterly, cheerful madam, Susan (who had been rescued from her life as a deep-throat specialist by her favourite client, Lance - viewer, she married him - and therefore kicked herself upstairs into management), Theroux soon looked like he'd forgotten he was in a brothel too. Until, that is, he spent quality time with girls such as Belle ('21 going on 12') who appealed to 'the paedos'. Belle was married to a 'great guy' but they had a few financial issues to sort out, so Belle was hustling her pert little bod. Hell, couldn't hubbie just do some minicabbing?
Anyway, the thing which just about set this show apart from every other 'let's poke fun at those freaky Americans while ostensibly-exploring the dark underbelly of the American Dream' programmes (ie any episode of Daisy Daisy ) was the powerful chemistry between Louis and the charismatic, free-spirited, alcoholic prostitute Hayley.
Louis's refusal to 'party' with her was clearly an affront, so a game of emotional cat-and-mouse ensued. It was impossible to say who was winning the war of manipulation but, at the end, when both sides waved white flags and kissed their chaste goodbyes, you felt there was a bit of unfinished business. If Louis's girlfriend, whom he referred to, watched this film and didn't feel provoked to a little light domestic dispute involving crockery, then she's a woman he should probably be hanging onto for dear life.
Anyway, what did we learn? That prostitutes often lead pretty miserable lives (I think I knew that) and that Louis is a lousy journalist (when told by Susan that Hayley was deaf in one ear because her husband had shot her before turning the gun on himself, Louis couldn't find it in himself to ask her about it). But mostly what we learned is that Theroux's charming, faux bumbling Englishman persona is about as genuine as Hugh Grant's, and occasionally far less convincing.
