wordcraft

There's nothing intrinsically WRONG with this series. The cast is pretty good, and Nicola Walker improves most everything she takes part in, but I'm surprised nobody has observed now eerily similar it is in feel to RTE's "Striking Out" (2017).

That is a story set in a very glossy Dublin, featuring Amy Huberman and Neil Morrissey, with a female solicitor who defiantly breaks away from the "family firm" (check, in Huberman's case the in-laws' firm), a sequence of family law cases that often mirror the protagonists' own messy lives (check), steroidal dysfunctional families (check), rather oversexed and unrealistically attractive colleagues galore (check), lots of heavy drinking in chic bars (check), shiny glass and steel office milieus (check), big panning Tourist Authority shots of throbbing metropolis as character stands - deep in thought - on office's rooftop terrace (check), strong but troubled female lead (check), and so on and so on.

One might even have imagined Abi Morgan taking surreptitious notes at a brainstorming session for the earlier drama, but perhaps there simply is a limited number of legal practice storylines out there. A pity.

One or other of John Cleese's former spouses has done the arts a grave misservice by milking him of his earnings from the days when he was a genuinely funny man. He ought to have been able to swan off into the sunlit uplands of a well-earned retirement some several years/decades ago, but sadly he apparently cannot afford this luxury, and so must ply his trade long after he has ceased to amuse us, except perhaps in vintage clips of yesteryear. He does absolutely nothing to redeem this dire sitcom, but in fairness it was already so grindingly bad you feel that even if he were NOT well past his screen sell-by date and had turned in an epic performance, it would still have been embarrassingly awful. Since I am allegedly in the demographic to which this dross was pitched, I can only wince at what younger eyes and ears would make of it. Steer well clear, cast manoeuvring with extreme difficulty. Worst thing I have seen in many a year. It even made me log in and post this - it was THAT ghastly.

When I watched Part I of this two-part series (sight unseen, no peeking at the newspaper blurb), my immediate reaction was that it HAD to be an international co-production, since it suffers from that curious and embarrassing mannerism of nearly all productions made jointly by two (or three) national broadcasters, namely a perceived need to show countless clichéd images of the countries and cities concerned, presumably so that the Aussies can see "what London looks like" and the Brits can see how nine kinds of wonderful Sydney is.

Hence the action was punctuated every few seconds with expensive helicopter footage of locations like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the London Eye, the Sydney Opera House, Big Ben, the Gherkin, St. Paul's, Piccadilly Circus by night (have I left anyone out?) and we got no authentic sense of "place" at all, simply bleeding chunks of what some imagination-challenged advertising agency thinks tourists want to see, OUGHT to see.

This approach actually seems a little pathetic and lacking in national self-confidence for a mini-series made in 2009 (and not a film from 1959), as though the show somehow still felt obliged to serve up eye-candy vignettes of the places to be at all "relevant".

The British do not feel a similar need for these postcard shots when they are working alone and/or for a domestic audience, and I rather doubted the Australians would really be so gauche that they think their own grown-ups need to be treated to an open-top-bus sightseeing tour between snippets of violence or dialogue.

Well... it turns out I was dead wrong about the co-production angle. It seems to be an OZ production plain and simple (and several people have mocked the wandering accents of the cast, too), sold on to UKTV, whose involvement was thus presumably only financial and not "artistic".

I'm not sure what that says about the mindset of the makers (or perhaps after all they got seed-money from the NSW Tourism Development Office and other similar instances in the UK), but personally I found the tacky inserts immensely intrusive and annoying, and I couldn't help thinking that if they had spent less on them and more on the nuts & bolts of script and direction (and had even hired an actor with a smidgen of dramatic skills and no facial paralysis to play Ian Porter) they might instead have been able to create a thriller that held my attention.

Still, they are definitely not the first to fall into this trap, and sure as hell they won't be the last. Unfortunately.