The problem with a beautiful landscape is that, before long, a human being will turn up and spoil it.
Jane Campion kept pointing this out in her new drama Top Of The Lake (Saturday, BBC Two, 9.10pm). In the background the whole time was the diorama of the South Island of New Zealand – the corn fields, the warm mist, the MGM mountains – but then into the foreground would stagger a pale-skinned man in a vest slugging from a can of lager. Time and again, Campion put the two together: the beauty of the planet and the ugliness of its inhabitants. It was her way of making us look more closely at what humans are like, and it worked.
The worst of the ugliness was Peter Mullan's character, an unpleasant, disturbed Glaswegian who's violent and drinks a lot and is about as accurate a guide to what Scotsmen are really like as Bertie Wooster is to what Englishmen are really like. But that doesn't matter because as usual Mullan gritted his teeth and narrowed his eyes and dared us not to like him. In everything he does he is good, even though it is often the same act over and over again.
His character, a violent waster called Matt, was right at the centre of the plot, which follows a 12-year-old girl who discovers she's pregnant and then runs away to a women's commune. The commune is headed by a new-age guru played by Holly Hunter (the lead in Campion's film The Piano). Hunter's character is, like almost every other character, unpleasant and selfish but that's a good thing – it was Campion making her nihilistic point again that Paradise (the name of the commune) can never exist because there will always be human beings in it.
Despite this bleak manifesto, Top Of The Lake is part of an extremely positive trend in television. For years, for decades, for ever, British television reflected only ourselves and the Americans, but gradually The Killing and The Returned and now Top Of The Lake have been pulling us away from this UK-centric view. Not only that, Campion believes there's a massive change going on in television: new, intelligent drama that's making cinema look like the big, dumber brother.
"I was at home looking after my daughter and just watching a bit of TV," she said recently, "and I saw this thing called Deadwood. I went, 'Freaking hell, what is that? This is the most exciting thing I've seen anywhere. There's a revolution going on.'"
Sadly, most of the revolution Campion has observed – if it exists – is happening outside of Britain, but at least bits of it end up here. What's striking about Top Of The Lake is how beautifully made it is, the huge landscapes under blue light, the restrained, careful writing, the bravura acting; but what's also striking is how unusual it is in the schedules. Amid its anodyne, flat surroundings, Top Of The Lake is unusual, unmistakable, unmissable. Like one of the mountains on New Zealand's South Island, it stands out and makes it hard to look away.
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