TV reviewDramaReviewAt times it’s hard to know exactly what is going on in Peter Moffat’s drama, but it is gripping nonetheless. And it is additionally remarkable for the milestone way it treats race. Plus: Sunday-night escapism with The Durrells
Highway 110, Louisiana. A car driving down a long, straight road laden with summer heat and doom. Or, as the local radio presenter brightly puts it, “a hot day for an execution”. In two hours’ time, Rudy Jones, who has been on death row for 20 years for a murder he did not commit, is about to be executed. The woman behind the wheel is his lawyer Maya (Sophie Okonedo), an impassioned and embattled London barrister on her way to make a last-ditch attempt to save him. This is how Undercover (BBC1, Sunday) begins. With a bang, or rather a botched lethal injection that I won’t be forgetting any time soon. And then, just when you think this is the story you’re getting, another one begins …
I came to Peter Moffat’s excellent drama knowing nothing and was instantly confused, though gripped nonetheless. Why was it called Undercover when it’s about a lawyer on the brink of becoming the first black director of public prosecutions? And a refreshingly reluctant one at that. “I defend people,” she says to her boss back in London. “I’ve spent my entire career taking on the state when it behaves badly.” Why join the establishment when she can continue to be its agitator disguised in chancery gown and wig? And yet Rudy’s parting words haunt her: “You can’t win trying to save people like me,” he urged before he was led to his death. “Go big.”
And go big is precisely what this very grown-up and emotional drama does. Turns out it’s called Undercover because of what awaits Maya at home. A happy family: her adoring husband Nick (Adrian Lester) and their three children, dog, big house, coastal bolthole for weekends away, the lot. A perfect life, in other words – which can only mean it is a lie. As well as being the ideal husband, Nick is an ex-undercover cop who has been deceiving his wife for 20 years. There are flashbacks to a rally in Hackney in 1996, when Maya was a civil rights activist. Hang on, Nick was there, too. So this is how they met. Or rather, why …
Extraordinary, but also true. Undercover draws on the real-life cases of women tricked into relationships, some lasting years, by undercover police officers, a story that prompted a Guardian investigation and led to the establishment of an ongoing inquiry. The web of deceit is vast, resulting in a drama in which one is easily tangled. Thankfully Moffat’s writing is so good and the direction so assured I didn’t mind not having a clue what was going on, even if at times it felt like at least three different dramas were playing out in tandem.
So many scenes will stay with me. The one in which the execution of an innocent man is botched while Maya, on the other side of the glass, appeals in horror to the assistant attorney general – at a bloodless party somewhere – to save him. Then her phone runs out of battery. Or afterwards, when she abandons her car, walks into a field, and has a seizure under giant unforgiving skies. Okonedo is a brilliant and criminally underused actor in Britain; warm, honest, fierce yet vulnerable. It’s wonderful to see her getting a role she deserves. It’s also a testament to Lester that his Nick is so likable, a compassionate family man mired in a hell of his own making. In a devastating scene in which he visits his dying father in a hospice, he changes his nappy, holds it together then bawls in his car in private. As he put his wedding ring back on and resumed the lie of his life, I felt so sorry for him.
Much less dramatic but unforgettable nonetheless is a scene in which Maya, her husband and children eat a meal in their home. Yep, that’s it. In 2016, it is an outrage that it’s a big deal to see a successful, affluent, complicated black family sit at a dinner table eating pasta. But the sad truth is, it’s a milestone. As is the way race is handled in Undercover: central to its plot and themes but not the sole defining feature of its characters. Just like real life.
The Durrells (ITV, Sunday), another six-part drama, is nothing like real life, but that’s cool. Based on Gerald Durrell’s classic trilogy of Corfu memoirs, it’s all 1930s resolve and best foot forward amid the Ionian olive groves. Keeley Hawes, always practically perfect and perfectly English, does her best to look old enough to play Mrs Durrell. That is, the indefatigable single mother of four children who on a whim decides to escape the family’s problems in Bournemouth – poverty, her gin dependency, an uncontrollable brood – by transporting them all to Corfu. Magically, with no money, they wind up in a beautiful but comically decrepit house which little Gerry fills with insects, a tortoise, pelican … and so on. The mellow between-the-wars world of The Durrells is a relentlessly charming and only ever mildly offensive place in which the locals are welcoming, the poverty character-building, angry monks can be placated with a cigarette, and the frustrations of a single mother alone in a foreign land with vile children (not Gerry, he’s adorable) are down to the fact that “mother needs sex”.
It is essentially like watching a mash-up of The Darling Buds of May and The Railway Children: gentle wish-you-were-here fare, the kind that makes tourist boards rub their hands together and the rest of us wonder why holidays never look remotely like it.
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