100 years of hopes dashed by an overdose of Lefty nonsense

The Village, BBC1, Sunday; Arne Dahl: The Blinded Man, BBC4, Saturday; Off Their Rockers, ITV Sunday

At 9.18pm yesterday, my last hope for BBC1’s blockbuster drama, The Village, shrivelled and died. After last week’s ambitious beginning, this second episode was a bitter disappointment.
My high expectations had dwindled through a succession of ugly, ham-fisted and often unrealistic scenes. At last I had to concede that this show isn’t working.
I really did want to like The Village. I’m a sucker for costume drama, and there’s been a Downton-shaped hole in my life since Christmas.

 

The Village: My high expectations had dwindled through a succession of ugly, ham-fisted and often unrealistic scenes

Though it was nothing like Lord Julian Fellowes’s lost world of toffs and servants, writer Peter Moffat’s concept looked strong and seductive. He would tell 100 years of English history through the story of one rural community.

CATCHPHRASE IS BACK

Nice to see you, to see you nice: Catchphrase is back after 11 years, and new host Stephen Mulhern has clearly studied the master, Sir Bruce Forsyth. Lots of insulting banter and despairing looks into the camera from Stephen . . . but he needs one thing more. His own catchphrase.

It’s a genuinely ambitious project, a projected 42-episode story spread over several series.
But again and again last night, set-piece scenes turned into clunkers as Moffat tried to ram the grim injustices of bygone England down our throats like fistfuls of bitter pills.
My patience was worn down by the aristocratic daughter’s storyline. We could tell Caro (Emily Beecham) was mentally frail because she swanned about in a nightie all the time.
The village boys had killed her lap dog in a fit of patriotism — it was a German dachshund — and Caro dug up the decomposed remains and tucked them into her bed.

 

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Then the family doctor noticed Caro was five months pregnant. Her mother (Juliet Stevenson) made sure the entire village heard about this, by hiring a police detective from the big city to hunt out the father.
If this had really been 1914, poor Caro would simply have been sent away for a ‘rest cure’ and no one would ever have heard about her baby.

The Village: The series was conceived as a 42-part epic and the first six episodes will be aired in the coming weeks

As the plot fell apart, I felt sorry for Stevenson. She was trying desperately to be convincing, with a character more wooden than a puppet, and lines like these: ‘Don’t speech-make at me, Edmund! You’re not in the House of Commons now. I’m your mother — I’ve seen you mewl and puke and defecate.’
Charming fare for a primetime Sunday evening.
Eighteen minutes in, the story stumbled so badly it landed face down in the mire. At the Lamb, the village taproom — less a pub than a backroom where alcohol was sold — the Methodist minister’s daughter Martha (Charlie Murphy) came to lecture the drinking classes on temperance.
They surrounded her aggressively and started to recite the Lord’s Prayer, bellowing it like a football chant.
These days, it’s commonplace to mock religion, but 100 years ago that sort of blasphemy was unimaginable. This was like a scene from a third-rate Seventies horror film, where all the villagers turn out to be devil-worshippers. That wasn’t Moffat’s intention, obviously. He seems to see his story as a morality tale, of how the peasantry were ground under the heel of the ruling classes in the days before Britain’s glorious socialist rebirth.

 

Not very genuine: ITV's Off Their Rockers featured candid-camera pranks and japes by feisty pensioners were crudely funny, especially the sweary nun on a high-speed Motability scooter

Pity he didn’t set it in Russia, really.
The new Scandi crime drama, Arne Dahl: The Blinded Man, is partly set in the former USSR, but wishes it was American. The plot is sheer Hollywood hokum, with lots of explosive action and violence.
Darkly brooding and introspective this is not. To a soundtrack of echoing guitars and pumping drums, maverick cops beat up slimy drug-pushers, and bank robbers are killed with crossbow darts.
At the end, a detective was crucified to the soaring soundtrack of Mozart’s Requiem. This was fast-moving and blood-drenched. I prefer my Nordics to be more noir.
In what was an otherwise miserable evening, something genuinely funny would have been welcome, but Off Their Rockers, more’s the pity, didn’t feel very genuine.
The candid-camera pranks and japes by feisty pensioners were crudely funny, especially the sweary nun on a high-speed Motability scooter. But the camera angles were suspiciously good — too well-placed and mobile to be convincing.
How could there be three hidden lenses trained on every victim? Once you’d started to suspect that these stooges were actually actors, all the laughs drained away. The producers need to start sharing some of their shooting secrets, to gain our confidence in their tricks.