Perfect Strangers BBC2
Nigella Bites C4
Sam's Game ITV
Greed C5
After mentioning, in passing, last Sunday, that I didn't think much of it, I have received angry mail from fans of Stephen Poliakoff's Perfect Strangers, and after episode two I'm still baffled as to why this visually sumptuous, emotionally stunted drama has been hailed as, variously, 'brilliant'/'moving'/'powerful'/'a triumph' - though I'm clearly in the critical minority. While every would-be Dennis Potter is probably entitled to his Blackeyes, I can't quite erase the memory of Poliakoff's The Tribe (1998) which was something else again - a fabulously fatuous drama about a quasi-religious cult of beautiful young people, apparently dressed by Giorgio Armani, who wafted around south London wearing dark glasses, selling cut-price electrical goods and having sex with each other. It was so bad it had critics weeping with laughter and I don't think Joely Richardson's career has ever quite recovered.
In the first episode of Perfect Strangers, Poliakoff introduced us to the rather grand Symon family at a big clan gathering in Claridges, as viewed through the eyes of a twentysomething surveyor, Daniel (Matthew Macfadyen), son of Esther and Raymond (Michael Gambon). The combination of Raymond's failed business ventures (in the unspeakably unfashionable London suburb of Hillingdon) and a tendency to speak his mind mark him out as a black sheep. But though loyal to his father, Daniel is soon seduced by the snobby glamour of this newly acquired extended family - their money, big houses and, in particular, his beautiful, aloof cousin Rebecca, her edgily louche brother Charles and their glamorous, distant aunt (Lindsay Duncan, who has been quoted as saying that she didn't much like the idea of playing an older character, but I've never seen her more incandescently beautiful than she is here).
Then, via snapshots unearthed by the Symons' obsessive family archivist, Stephen (the compelling Anton Lesser), Daniel begins to recognise that his own past may be more closely connected to the rest of the Symon family than he had previously thought.
So far, so potentially intriguing. But the problem for me (or one of the problems) is that after this absolutely nothing happens. Nothing happens very prettily, admittedly, but it also doesn't happen very, very slowly and with dialogue so banal, self-conscious, pretentiously stagy, wilfully opaque and riddled with non-sequiturs that I found myself longing, perversely, for the simplistic attention-deficit disorder exchanges of the soaps, in which things actually get said, give the viewer some sort of insight into the state of mind of the character and thus move the plot forward. This doesn't happen in Perfect Strangers: words are spoken but sentences are left billowing, blowsy with portent and faux-gravitas, telling us nothing about anybody and taking us nowhere.
It is very difficult to care about characters who not only rarely say what they mean, but who don't apparently mean very much when they do say something. For example, in the first episode, Gambon's Raymond was given little to do until the last few minutes, during which Poliakoff suddenly granted him a soliloquy. On the stage of Claridge's ballroom, in front of the assembled family, he then ranted drunkenly, interminably, about his childhood, while a roomful of people, including his wife and son, looked on as he dug himself deeper into a pit of Bafta-winning despair. Gambon is always a rivetingly watchable actor but he was squandered here, with his cut-price Lear. And it was an irritatingly implausible dramatic device to force Raymond to collapse with a stroke before anybody had bothered to save him from himself.
In last week's second episode, Daniel (a protagonist obsessed with asking questions - preferring, indeed, to answer questions with questions - but much less so with getting any answers) may have managed to sleep with his cousin (the oddly distracted Rebecca, given to dramatic mood swings or possibly just melodramatic moodiness) but this didn't bring them any closer to intelligent - or intelligible - levels of communication. How about this for a pointlessly meandering yet dramatically stillborn exchange, munching precious screentime to no apparent end:
R: This will seem a rather unconventional request, but I want you to take a message for me.
D: Take a message? Where to?
R: Just back to the hotel.
D: Right you can't fax it?
R: It's a verbal message.
D: I see. Sorry to be so plodding, but why not use the phone?
R: Because this is how it has to be delivered. It has to be done by somebody else.
D: And who's the message for?
R: It's for Alice. You don't look surprised.
D: I had no idea what you were going to say, not a clue. What is the message?
Oh, and it went on it went on and on, slowly, slowly, until, slowly, you forgot what it was they were talking about. How long did it go on for? Well, it went on for let me just say that it went on for a long time. Is that enough information for you, reader? Is it? Well, if it isn't, I'm sorry. Though perhaps I am not really sorry. No, maybe I'm not really sorry at all. In fact, you will never know if I am truly sorry or not. Why? Because you don't really know me, you just think you do. And anyway I am not going to tell you. Not now, not ever. And I'm sorry about that, even if I am not sorry about not giving you the answer to the question about how long it went on for. Do you understand? Do you care? Do I? Do what? Doo-wop Do-be-do-be-doo Scooby Dooby-Doo where are you?
I could go on but, suffice it to say, a stellar cast and pretty lighting is far from enough to make Perfect Strangers a 'masterpiece' and surely, somewhere, Dennis Potter is spinning, over and over, over and, yes, now this review is over too.
Which doesn't give me much space left to rave about Arena's deeply entertaining And the Winner Is (BBC2), or discuss the nuts and bolts of contemporary perambulator technology in Trouble at the Top (BBC2), or mention that An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (ITV) was very enjoyable apart from the fact that the plot didn't get resolved, or observe that the fragrant Ms Lawson should rename her show 'Nigella Swallows', because she is the most uninhibitedly gluttonous guzzler of her own cooking I have ever seen. Presumably it's a contractual obligation for her to be seen 'ooh'-ing, throwing her head back and nibbling lasciviously at strings of hot, oozesome mozzarella - but pre-watershed?
Nor, indeed, do I have much space left for Sam's Game, Davina McCall's ill-advised foray into sitcom. I think Davina is a very good TV presenter: engaging, empathetic, able to attract viewers from eight to 80, and probably their dogs, too - but she has nothing to gain from this cheery, cheapo, hyper-energetic, sub-Friends flatsharing farce. In fact, the best thing that can be said of it is that she doesn't make a fool of herself, but then she's not acting, simply being Davina. Or at least the TV presenting/M&M-flogging 'Davina' the nation has warmed to, rather than the not overtly people-orientated clipboard-wielding nightclub doorwoman I remember meeting in the early 1990s. (Mind you, I've done a bit of clipboard-wielding myself in my time - 'no, sorry, you're not on the guest list, George Michael' that sort of thing - and the power does rather go to your head. Before, of course, you grow up and vow never to set foot in another nightclub again). Still, let's forgive Davina Sam's Game - but only on the condition she doesn't make a habit of it.
Jerry Springer surely hopes that 'let's get greedy!' will become a beloved national catchphrase. It won't (unless a political party, light on manifesto and low on the vision thing, adopts it as a mission statement, which isn't entirely implausible) but his new C5 gameshow, Greed - a combination of Millionaire and Weakest Link, with another million-pound jackpot and some suitably dumb questions - is good. Despite multiple-choice answers, I couldn't name the title of the first Carry On film (It was Carry On Sergeant, apparently, and I could've sworn it was Doctor) but then an excess of numbing, dumbing Carry On Election coverage is bound to addle the brain eventually.
