TV reviews: Scarpetta, The Capture, A Woman of Substance, Gone
From Barbara Taylor Bradford's Yorkshire maid-turned-business mogul to Holliday Grainger's Lara Croft antics in The Capture, this week’s television has been heaving with women of substance. For gawd’s sake keep it to yourself, or who knows where such madness will end.
Among the first to drop by was Nicole Kidman, taking the title role in Scarpetta (Amazon Prime Video). As someone who spent many years buried in Patricia Cornwell’s novels about the forensic pathologist, I had a firm idea what she looked like. “My” Kay Scarpetta was tiny but mighty, a bustling nonna on a mission to catch serial killers. She was not Nicole Kidman.
With a story that jumped back and forth from three decades ago to the present, there was quite enough going on in Scarpetta to fret too much about Kidman. Two timelines meant two lots of characters and two investigations. After a while, the chaos started to make sense, only for Jamie Lee Curtis to turn up as Scarpetta’s wayward sister and reprise her Mama Grizzly act from The Bear.
Kidman and Curtis in a shouting match was a simple thing of joy in what was otherwise a tangled tale. That wasn’t the worst of it, however. Haven’t we moved on from the whole naked woman on a slab scene? Or naked woman dumped on waste ground? Kay, my Kay, would not approve.
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Nor, I suspect, would the recently retired Vera, played by Brenda Blethyn. She was back - Blethyn, not Vera - in A Woman of Substance (Channel 4, Wednesday-Thursday). This was a new adaptation; a previous one, in 1985, attracted a record audience of 14 million to Channel 4. But hey, no pressure.
Blethyn plays Emma Harte, “the world’s richest woman”. As we watch her stride from her chauffeur-driven car into a department store with her name on it, Emma is a blow-dried vision of power. Not that life has always been so sweet … Cue the flashback!
From 1970s New York the action rewinds to Yorkshire at the birth of the twentieth century. The mill-owning Squire Fairley is in his big house while young Emma, after a hard day’s maiding, goes home to her happy yet impoverished family. There is barely enough coming in to buy food, never mind the medicine her mother desperately needs. “Get out and get on,” is Mum’s advice to her clever, resourceful daughter.
Barbara Taylor Bradford, like Catherine Cookson and Danielle Steel, is part of that group of women authors who quietly empowered generations of readers with their resilient heroines. Within the pages of their novels they dispensed lots of invaluable advice, chief of which was the importance of keeping a hand on your ha’penny and not believing the honeyed words of rich young men to the manor born. Emma, alas, will learn that lesson the hard way.
Irish actor Jessica Reynolds makes a terrific Yorkshire lass, her hackles rising at every demonstration of the Fairleys’ wealth and power. Will Mellor as her father and Lenny Rush as her brother supply the tear-jerking moments. Also on the side of decent men is Niall Wright as Mac the handyman, while Emmett J Scanlon (Kin) is the devilishly handsome swine you’ll love to hate. And Blethyn? Sheer class.
When The Capture (BBC1, Sunday) first landed in 2019, deep fakes and other online scams were still novel, and the idea that seeing should not necessarily be believing was still a shade “out there”. But we’re all in the loop now, so where’s the writer of a cyber conspiracy thriller to go next?
Fortunately, Ben Chanan’s creation is to surveillance what Line of Duty is to police corruption and Spooks to spying. It’s a hook on which to hang a drama. The viewer doesn’t need to know their terabytes from their midgie bites, but a smart young heroine battling to stay ahead of shadowy bad guys - that will do nicely.
In the first series, Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) was a fast-track graduate out to make a name for herself. She has since risen through the police ranks by staying ahead of the deepfake game, and now she is the acting boss of Counter Terrorism Command. Among those on speed dial is fellow hotshot and Home Secretary, Isaac Turner (Paapa Essiedu).
Carey hardly has time to enjoy striding along the corridors of power before she is put to the test - and how. Chanan keeps the action coming at a tremendous lick. Where another show might make the viewer wait half a series for a decent setpiece, The Capture packs three into the first episode.
In contrast, Gone (STV, Sunday-Monday) is an old-school, slow-burning crime drama. David Morrissey plays public school headmaster Michael Polly. The name suggests a modern Mr Chips, but Polly is as soft and yielding as a rugby pitch in January. A precise, controlled and controlling man, he returns home one day to find his music tutor wife gone. Though their daughter is worried, it is a while before he contacts the police - one of several hints that all is not as it seems with this marriage, this man.
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The officer assigned to the investigation is DS Annie Cassidy (Eve Myles). She is struggling to get a read on Polly. He’s a “funny fish” all right, but that doesn’t make him a killer. As news of his wife’s disappearance spreads and parents demand he step down, Polly’s meticulously ordered world is crumbling around him.
Morrissey (Sherwood, The Missing) can scowl for England. So accustomed are we to him being a grump, he was almost unrecognisable as the cheery grandfather in the recent Daddy Issues (turns out he’s pretty good at comedy too).
Since several of his scenes in Gone take place when he is alone, we are reliant on Morrissey being inscrutable. He doesn’t disappoint. Ditto Myles, who seems to be on every drama going at the moment, but who’s complaining? Gone may creak in parts, but Morrissey and Myles spark up a storm.
Television has moved on from the days of Britain’s Biggest Hoarders and Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners. Once audiences realised there was generally more behind a cluttered home than met the eye, the jig was up.
The programme that has done more than any other to make the format respectable again is Sort Your Life Out with Stacey Solomon (BBC1, Tuesday). The former ITV talent competition contestant turned BBC favourite chose Fife to kick off the sixth series of her Bafta-nominated show. The result was one of the best episodes yet.
We met the King family - Gerry, Trish and their three adult children, two of whom still live at home. He’s a retired architectural technician, she’s a care worker, and they have been married almost 30 years. “You can tell already they are a really warm family,” says Solomon, rocking up with her team like the gang from Scooby-Doo.
Gerry was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s at the age of 55. Seven years on, his condition is worsening, and a cluttered house is not helping. Besides constantly losing things - a daily grind in itself - he has fallen a few times.
The clutter affects Trish in other ways. “I hate that I’ve let it get like this,” she says. “This is all down to me. I feel like a failure.” Solomon soon knocks down that idea.
With spirits lifted, it is on with the tried and tested Sort Your Life Out formula. This involves packing up the house, setting out the contents in a hangar big enough to accommodate Concorde, and sending half the items to be sold, donated or recycled. The Kings’ 350 boxes included 1296 greeting cards, 702 ornaments, and 106 instruction manuals for electronic goods. Oh, and one baby tooth in a jar.
One person’s clutter, however, is another’s life marker. As they go through the items, stories start to emerge - of anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, Gerry’s poetry and drawing, Trish’s DIY. Whole lives set out for sorting. It’s an emotional process, as anyone who has moved house or dealt with a loved one’s estate will know.
It would be far preferable, of course, if people with progressive degenerative conditions did not have to wait for a TV show to come along to “sort their life out”. But if a programme can dispense some useful tips (motion-sensitive lights on the stairs, anyone?) and raise awareness of this cruel condition along the way, you would have to be a prize curmudgeon not to wish it well.
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