In the first episode of The Fixer (STV, Monday, 9pm), a boy phoned his girlfriend to tell her he loved her.
Hasn't he seen an ITV crime drama? You should never, ever tell someone you love them because it means you'll be dead within minutes. Especially if you phone your girlfriend from an alleyway with poor municipal lighting.
Sure enough, a short while later, he was dead, shot by a gang member angry that he had snitched to the police. Quickly on the case was Peter Mullan aided by a gang of crime fighters including John Mercer and Tamzin Outhwaite. Their mission was to rescue a young boy from the gang (the plot was copyright Mr Charles Dickens).
As usual, Mullan was intensely watchable, but, more importantly, listenable. Years of yelling up closes have made his voice one of the best in acting. And that face. What a brilliant face. It's not widely known that if you took all the wrinkles on his face and laid them in a line they would stretch all the way from Glasgow to Edinburgh – or Edinburgh to Glasgow if you prefer. It is brilliant, and necessary, that men on television are still allowed to have wrinkles – and terrible that women aren't.
The only problem was that Mullan was way better than everyone, and everything, else, especially the script. There were admittedly some good ideas flapping around the place: the idea of what gang culture does to young men, the suggestion of a child gang run by a modern Fagin and some attempts to look at the role of young women in poor communities. But none of these ideas seemed to be developed. They just got kicked out of the way in the undignified scramble to keep the plot moving.
The production was rushed and wobbly in places too, particularly in the casting of the children who were supposedly living a life of poverty and abuse but were clearly lily-pure stage-school kids who'd been dropped off at the TV studios in people carriers. Even the dogs, supposedly part of a dog-fighting ring, looked a bit fluffy and actorly to me. I'm sure they'd just come from a dog food commercial.
And the bigger problem was the usual one. The Fixer, which was first shown in England in 2009, is one of only three types of drama allowed on television at the moment: the big costume drama (Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs), the big American blockbuster (Lost, Homeland) and the big crime drama (everything on ITV).
But the important question is: where are the stories about me? And you? And the person next to you? If you regularly wear a top hat or a corset, if you're part of a criminal gang, if you're stranded on a tropical island full of polar bears, then great – TV drama is catering for you. If none of those things applies, it's failing us. In fact, I think TV drama is panicking a bit just now and resorting to old behaviour patterns. It's having a kind of nervous breakdown – and we're the ones left to watch the side effects.
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