The week in TV: To Walk Invisible; The Witness for the Prosecution; Delicious; Maigret’s Dead Man; Mrs Brown’s Boys – review (original) (raw)

Mark Twain had Jane Austen and all her mimsy fripperies nailed about right when he said: “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” The Brontës are, on the other hand, a phenomenal tale, often told, but never better than in this week’s offering from Sally Wainwright.

It still staggers me, their story. Quite how one chilly Yorkshire parsonage bred three sisters who would upend the world of books remains a transformative tale. Lynne Reid Banks, in her book Dark Quartet, told it ridiculously well, but in Wainwright’s version, To Walk Invisible, we get to see the cold red knees, the chilblains, the anger, the sorrow; we get to feel every icy gust of bitterness, every rare zephyr of hope.

The sorrow is reserved mainly, of course, for brother Branwell, historically branded the reprobate boozer-loser flop of the clan. Adam Nagaitis bravely played him as a whey ugly nightmare with a ginger rat’s-nest of hair and whiskers: he played him, in fact, like a man with a constant pendulous drip at the end of his nose, waiting throughout to plop. If Branwell has been miserably served by history, it’s quite possibly justified: his antics, his debts, even his death, held his vaultingly more talented sisters in cruel thrall for most of their too-short lives.

Chloe Pirrie as Emily bestrode the moors with seven-league boots and dominated every frame with her presence, her anger, her tenderness, as she did in the bittersweet 2013 movie Shell. Finn Atkins was Charlotte, all of a fiercely bespectacled five-foot-nought even in her Holly-Hobbie boots, but arguably the righteous steel and brains behind the outfit. The scenes at the London publishers, where she reluctantly reveals herself as Currer Bell, author of Jane Eyre, retain the ability to make one simultaneously laugh, cry and want to punch most men in the face.

Wisely, Wainwright doesn’t follow every single publication success. In lesser hands, we would have had obligatory acceptance letters for each sister – for Wuthering Heights, for Agnes Grey – to the backdrop of father Jonathan Pryce being all a-dither and Branwell spewing up drunken blood next door. Instead, and better, it is left to Charlotte to tremulously inform the father of the sisters’ financial independence, and reveal their noms de plume, by carrying through a few handsome bound volumes currently lionising literary London. Few of us surely get to see such quiet, shocked, heartbreaking pride in a father’s face. It’s a tale that cannot be told often enough, and the utter standout in a week not devoid of sharp writing and acting.

Toby Jones in The Witness for the Prosecution.

‘Sublime bathos’: Toby Jones in The Witness for the Prosecution.

Sarah Phelps managed the near-impossible, to have me nurture a flicker of interest in Agatha Christie again. Her adaptation of The Witness for the Prosecutionmade me grimace for all the lost chances, those dire Ustinov-heavy glitterball farts of the 1970s, and remember that Christie, for all her absurd toxic frog intricacies and devilled snobberies, remains one of the tautest plotters ever.

It was a dark and a nasty story, utterly watchable throughout if you could train your eyes to attain at least a modicum of movement inside one of the many fogs – but train them you should, not least for the quality of the acting. Andrea Riseborough, Kim Cattrall, David Haig – all sprinkled enigmatic magics. But Toby Jones’s final act had all the sublime bathos of the last 10 minutes of Death in Venice, and without Mahler’s help. Give that man a sainthood.

Delicious, a much-hyped Sky thing, had that grand Iain Glen, and that grand Emilia Fox, and Dawn French. Two were well cast.

Iain Glen and Emilia Fox in Delicious

Perfect casting: Iain Glen and Emilia Fox in Delicious. Shame about Dawn French.

Ostensibly a tale about a successful chef who’s having it all in gorgeous Cornish countryside and ruining it all with his penis, it was hampered somewhat by having Glen die at the end of the first episode, jumped from behind by his own cardiovascular system. Which sets the stage for a bonding between wife (Fox) and mistress (French, Glen’s ex-wife) to bravely reconcile each other to the tasks of a) forgiving each other, and b) making an even more glowing success of the restaurant. Those harsh first-world problems.

Fortunately they are aided by a couple of children who promise great interest, and it’s perfectly filmed, and features lovely food and sea and sun. I’ll forgive Fox anything pretty much, because of Silent Witness, but here she displays little of that coquetry, which is a shame. I should be able to forgive Dawn French more easily, but can’t, because of The Vicar of Dibley, and because I find her credibility stretched as a louche Italian genius chef. Louche Italian genius female chefs, I’ll tentatively warrant, don’t keep the duvet chin-high when in the throes of passion.

I wanted to like Maigret’s Dead Man, wanted very much so to do, if only because it was ITV’s one swipe at the Christmas piñata. It was fine. Plot was fine, Rowan straight-batted it glumly fine, France of old looked, as it ever will, yearningly sexy. Essentially, however, it was, as it was always destined to be, a 40-minute Simenon delight crammed into two hours.

Rowan Atkinson in Maigret’s Dead Man for ITV.

I decided not to lazily write off Mrs Brown’s Boys. It remains absurdly successful, despite critics having generally trashed Brendan O’Carroll’s creation as demeaning, cheap, grotesque, simplistic to the point of catalepsy, savagely lacking in wit. So I watched it, and was surprised. It’s all of these insults, yes, but the immersive experience is actually, shockingly, worse than expected. Sentimental to retching-point, homophobic, itch-lousy with single entendres, somehow managing to be both twee and vulgar, achingly unfunny, it made The Vicar of Dibley look like Father Ted.

I suspect those of us in our high ivory metropolitan-elite towers (translation: humans who paid even nugatory attention to at least one class in school) missed a trick in 2016: the popularity of this shameless excrescence (I can now write it off after due diligence), which was voted by Radio Times readers the best sitcom of the 21st century, should have given a huge clue to the Brexit vote.