The Guardian 7 June, 2006
TV programs worth watching
Sun June 11 — Sat June 17
I wrote up the new policier Jericho (ABC 8.30pm Sundays) in last week’s Guardian but the events in East Timor caused it to be postponed while the ABC ran something more topical. For those of you who don’t save your Guardians from week to week, I am repeating what I said about Jericho.
This series, set in Soho in the 1950s, is not only splendidly written (by Stewart Harcourt) but in fact is a class act in all departments.
England in the ’50s was changing rapidly: post-war austerity was giving way to what would in time become "swinging London". Black migrants from the West Indies were changing the culture and the look of the cities, the Cold War was affecting the mood of the people and the policies of the government, and smog regularly blanketed London.
The period atmosphere is splendidly captured, in both costumes and attitudes. The performances are first class, especially Robert Lindsay (the husband and father in the comedy series My Family) as DCI Michael Jericho of Scotland Yard.
The acting honours however narrowly go to David Troughton as Jericho’s assistant, DS Harvey. Troughton is a distinguished stage actor with a lot of TV experience (I still vividly recall his portrayal of the gauche love-struck neighbour in the 1978 comedy mini-series The Norman Conquests with Tom Conti and Penelope Keith).
The depth and fully-rounded nature of Troughton’s performance in Jericho shows once again the advantages of encouraging actors to divide their time between stage and screen.
Made by Granada for British commercial network ITV, the present series of Jericho has only four episodes, but I am sure there will be more. Although each episode is a self-contained mystery plot, the overall series is a serial involving the unsolved killing of Jericho’s policeman father when Jericho was a child.
Not all the detectives at Scotland Yard are all that honest and free of links to organised crime, either.
Unlike less well written cop-shows this one puts all the pieces together in a way that is fresh and eminently watchable. In many ways the writing reminds me of Foyle’s War (except for the lack of a clear political perspective in Jericho).
The first episode, A Pair of Ragged Claws, involves what appears to be a racially motivated murder in Nottinghill and the kidnapping of a well-connected toff from outside his Club.
At the same time, Jericho begins to make friends with the lady tenant of the flat on the next landing.
In 2001, Lucy, the 3.4-million-year-old female hominid whose remains had been found years before in east Africa’s Rift Valley, lost her place as the oldest known ancestor of mankind. In that year, a French team of palaeontologists under Professor Michel Brunet working in the Chad desert discovered the skull of a seven-million-year-old male biped — the oldest ever found.
This new ancestor, given the scientific name Sahelanthropus tchadensis, has been nicknamed Toumaï (meaning ‘Hope of Life’ in the local Chad dialect). Toumaï dates from the crucial yet little-known interval when human lineage was becoming distinct from that of chimpanzees.
The structure of the animal’s spine, skull and muscles reveals that it walked on its two hind legs, unlike the apes which came before it. It is thought to be the first bipedal hominid and hence the oldest ancestor of human beings.
Filmed over three years as a multi-national collaboration, Toumaï: The New Ancestor (SBS 8,30pm Sunday) follows the discovery of the skull and the subsequent four years of research involved in understanding Toumaï’s social behaviour, diet, habitat and, of course, appearance.
I have reported before on the way the formerly prestigious Frontline series from the US Public Broadcasting Service seems to see its role these days as presenting — and making credible — the official US State Department line on current affairs.
The Insurgency, the PBS Frontline documentary screening in the Cutting Edge slot this week (SBS 8.30pm Tuesday), is a typical mix of fact and propaganda, as it purports to "investigate" the competing armed groups that make up "the Resistance" in Iraq.
Despite the brutality of the US forces, the character of the Resistance to continued US presence in Iraq is obviously changing. The sadistic violence and terrorism of Saddam’s former Ba’athist soldiers who made up the backbone of the Resistance, is now condemned and repudiated by other groups.
Abu Mohammed, for example, a senior leader within the Iraqi nationalist branch of the insurgency, draws the line at killing innocents: "The national resistance does not accept these actions.
"We do not accept the killing of civilians or the Iraqi National Guard or the police. We do not accept the killing of any Iraqi."
The US still needs a terrorist group to justify its continued presence in Iraq. Enter the current bête noir of "global terrorism", Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Despite the fact that a number of Western commentators doubt that Zarqawi even exists, having been created by a US administration in need of a "terrorist figure", The Insurgency puts forward Zarqawi and al-Qaida as the prime part of the Resistance now.
However, the Iraqi people’s rejection of the terrorism campaign of the Resistance has forced political changes on to the Resistance. There is a realisation that, as one leader of the Resistance proclaimed from the pulpit of a mosque: "We cannot build a state by car bombs".
When Professor Sam Ryan was finally written out of the long-running series Silent Witness (ABC 8.30pm Fridays), the producers and the writers were left with a problem in group dynamics. Rather than put an outsider in charge of the forensic pathology team (which is what they did with the detective team in the last series of Taggart), they promoted one of the existing team to the top job (which is what they also did on an earlier series of Taggart).
In Silent Witness, they also added a young female archaeo-pathologist, Nikki (played by Emilia Fox), but they must have decided that the group dynamics still needed stirring up, and drastically.
So at the beginning of the latest season’s first episode, Ghosts (ABC 8.30pm Friday), they arbitrarily and sumarily kill off the wife and daughter of the recently-promoted Dr Leo Dalton (William Gaminara).
Logic says that after such a catastrophic blow Dr Dalton would be out of commission for months, but he actually launches himself into investigating his familiy’s deaths, to the irritation of the local coppers.
In fact, Dalton becomes a sort of distraught loose cannon, whose intrusion into the investigation would not be tolerated in real life. Here, everyone makes allowances because he’s just lost his family.
I won’t give any more of the plot away, suffice to say it involves murdered coppers, the suppression of evidence, stolen identities, and considerable danger to Leo himself.
I expect we will shortly have at least one new character to fill up the space that has been opened up in the program’s cast.