Everyman: Hallelujah Kids BBC1
In A Land of Plenty BBC2
A Touch of Frost ITV
The West Wing C4
Lafontaine, Indiana is a tiny backwoods town with the flimsy 2D appearance of a temporary movie set and a church both big and robust enough to cater to the town's entire population of 1,000 souls, hallelujah. It's the brainchild - godchild, even - of passionate evangelical pastor Mike Walters and his keepin' it in the family, fire and brimstone preachin' sons, Shaun, 19 and Jacob, 10.
'They will come,' said Mike of his potential congregation, enthusiastically showing us his 'overspill' room - waiting in case they not only come, but keep on comin'. Like Kevin Costner in a god-fearin' remake of Field of Dreams , Mike believes his faith is more than enough to provide. Through donations he finds $2,000 a month to keep the show on the road in states where the radio ad voiceovers solicitously ask: 'Have you been raped, incested [sic] or molested? You can be freed from your past hurts. The "Point of Pain" package is yours for a gift of just $49 or more...', while phone-ins lament the black arts practised by Harry Potter. You couldn't make it up.
Christopher Morris's Everyman was a pretty, wistful, sad and slightly surreal follow-up to a film he made for Children's BBC five years ago - An O Brother Where (fore) Art Thou? , with shades of David Lynch's The Straight Story . Back then, Shaun was a ferrety-faced 14- year-old close to perfecting that idiosyncratic southern preacher's pulpit delivery: 'Hallelu-ya, I-ya-have-a dream-a...', while covering 400,000 miles in a Cadillac driven by Mike, living in motels, eating in diners and casting out demons, as ordained teenagers are wont to do. Five years on and the Walters have upgraded to a shiny RV, with younger son Jacob now a part of the act.
Walters has made demons the speciality of his House: 'With Mike it's all devils and demons,' said his ex-wife, Sheila, who despairs of her eldest son's future: 'He should be havin' a job, datin' girls'. But now Shaun, an introverted young man who really only comes alive in the pulpit, has been diagnosed as mildly autistic and is persistently haunted by the tools of his trade. 'Am I happy? Not really. Devil's fought me way too much. Tried to destroy my life too many times.'
In less sensitive hands this could easily have been a freak show, but viewed in the week of the hideous Jerry Springerish circus surrounding the adoption of the 'internet twins', Belinda and Kimberley, it was clear that Mike Walters was not the Parent from Hell - his love for his sons and his faith in the Lord were all-too tangible - but simply out of his depth. Jacob even appeared to be flourishing - as well as could be expected of any child from a broken home who was about to be ordained as a child minister at a clapboard 'Love Cathedral' on the wrong side of Cleveland's tracks.
None the less, the viewer was left knowing that Shaun's prospects for any kind of a normal life were receding faster than the two-lane blacktop in the RV's rear-view mirror. Even his mother recognises that Shaun urgently needs both sustained professional help and 'a pair of glasses'. Blind faith indeed.
After a languorous opener I'd expected the second episode of BBC2's 10-part drama In a Land of Plenty might start indulging us with a bit of a plot, but we only got one in the final few minutes when Helen McCrory (as troubled matriarch Mary) dived out of a heavily-leaded window in slow motion - made to look considerably easier than one suspects it must be. Still, this tale of rich and boorish northern industrialist Charles Freeman, his fragile, sleepwalking, poetry-writing wife, Mary ('doom spins a grey halo around disconsolate heads'), and the four variously neglected and indulged children all clattering purposelessly around a 28-room house, is such sumptuously gorgeous viewing that everything that doesn't happen happens very seductively indeed.
The slowest of slow motion, richly saturated colours (though that may just be my TV, which tends to give even a naked 40-watt light bulb a full-blown Spielbergian glow), lingering close-ups and a wonderfully rich use of music (from kitschy latin bossa novas to the theme from Z-Cars wafting from an off-screen TV as Mary's car made a late-night getaway), have all conspired to sustain interest and create a pretty momentum. But another eight parts?
So far I don't feel as though I'm watching episodic dramatised snapshots of the Free man's lives, but that I've been invited round for supper and then, somewhat reluctantly, kidnapped. So slowly do events unfold that, given that the plot now hovers around 1969, by the end I could well be in my sixties.
But, if you've already been seduced, for as long as In a Land of Plenty remains just the right side of pretentious, I'd advise sticking with it. TV drama too often fills up all the available empty spaces as if afraid of its own potential visual strength, but by allowing the gaps to weave their own story Plenty pretty much takes the opposite approach - fittingly, since its subject is childhood memory and the games that memories can play. It's really quite brave.
Still, this softly-softly approach ensures ratings of 2.2 million, as compared with, say, 14.2m for last week's exhaustingly densely-woven A Touch of Frost. Indeed, this was so plot-heavy that the only way David Jason could justify an on-screen snack was because even the sandwich turned out to be responsible for another complicated strand of sub-plot.
Meanwhile, was the woman whose hand had been amputated before she'd been mashed to a pulp on the railway line (and who worked for Simple Simon's Sarnies) part of the plot featuring a nasty female heart-surgeon, Dr Gibson ('No one in my team is going into his chest without excluding other inter-cardiac anomalies.' So there!), whose post-operative patients kept dying, especially if they were put in bed five?
Unfortunately I wasted far too much time trying to make a link here, thus missing most of sub-plot three (ish), about the unpleasant young man smuggling cigarettes and rubber ducks and intimidating the owners of Denton's corner shops. But I rallied just in time to worry about Jack Frost's new sidekick, methadone-using Falklands war veteran Reid, who had nearly killed himself trying to arrest a Det Insp Jack Frost impostor who (in sub-plot one) had been busying himself groping Denton's female population. Then I faded again by the time we'd uncovered sub-plot four: the hospital's waste management scandal (timely shades of Bedfordshire here, with body parts, not to mention dead female heart surgeons, left in highly unsuitable locations overnight).
The Serbian doctor turned out to have murdered Dr Gibson, of course. And, in sub-plot five (come on, keep up!), Anne turned out not to be Frost's long-lost daughter after all, which was a shame.
Since the demise of Morse, Frost is now the pre-eminent late middle-aged male detective with a sorry past and no life to speak of, so we must make the most of him. But, if only for the sake of viewers' health, he ought to relax and take up whisky and Wagner in at least a couple of scenes each show.
But then along came The West Wing, the long-awaited (on terrestrial TV, at least) and now nostalgically Democratic White House drama, which made the complexities of A Touch of Frost suddenly look like the test card as viewed on a particularly quiet Monday afternoon in 1974.
I know this was the pilot, so every character not only had to be introduced, provided with a back story and a job description and then given something else to say, too... but hey! guys! like, slow down!
Was it Leo or C.J. who was chief of staff? And what, if any, was his working relationship with Rob Lowe's deputy communications director, Sam? And who is Senator Russell? And was the escort agency girl a plant to lure Sam into a honeytrap, or was she really keen on him? And who was the guy who suddenly arrived at the end of the show, reciting the first commandment? Nope, it wasn't Mike Walters, it was Martin Sheen as a President whose clearly absurd levels of decency and commitment were indicated by the saccharine violins that accompanied him - revealed, in the credits, to have been over-orchestrated by my very favourite inspirational TV music maestro. So, congratulations on making it all the way from thirtysomething to the White House, W.G. Snuffy Walden - there's hope for the Free World yet.
