Television Can Blow Me (10 page)

The attempt to recreate the 80s is not exactly painstaking. Some graffiti that says: THE SPECIALS is followed apologetically in smaller letters by THE BEAT. No Monsoon? Toto Coelo? It does look a little like they bashed it out in an afternoon.

They don't really get into how the New Romantics took the music of Bowie, Lou Reed and Kraftwerk and, with it, fashioned a sculpture of pure shite. There's an impressive cameo from Mark Gatiss playing that dead paedophile fuckpig Malcolm McLaren. Making airy fairy hand gestures and talking like a cunt passed for cultural credibility in those days.

The Camden nightclub Blitz was quite difficult to get in to but so is Miley Cyrus's snatch and I don't see you making a fucking film about that. Steve “Smackhead” Strange recently said “The best move I made was turning Mick Jagger away at the door.” Yeah, you wouldn't want anyone of cultural significance ruining your turd-fest would you?

Seriously - fuck the 80s but fuck the revivalism a lot harder. Bow Wow Wow, Spandau Ballet, Marilyn, Visage, Robert Elms and walking behind David Bowie on Southend beach, looking like a cunt, bulldozer in hot pursuit. That's your legacy. GTFO of here.

The verdict on Worried About the Boy:
Frankly, I think you lack insight.

Marks out of 10:
5

This is England '86

Three years after Shane Meadows convinced the world 1980s England consisted of friendly skinheads roaming the subways adopting waifs and strays and schools filled with children dressed like Boy George, his crew of East Midlands blockheads are back for more revisionist cultural history. Living hell on earth, in other words.

That means brain holocaust Woody is back, his wedding to the terminally dopey LOL! tragically curtailed when he forgets how the “I do” part goes. Joining him is Milky, apparently suffering no ill effects from getting his skull caved in that time by Combo (sounds like the shoeing may have actually added a couple of IQ points). Slow learner Our Shaun is still sniffing around girl gump Smell and you can only imagine the brood of incessantly chirpy 'tards that coupling may one day spawn.

Because everyone here is dumb but spirited, all pulling together for the common good. Lovable racists Banjo, Meggy and Gadge are here being lovable, presumably having put their paki bashing in the original film behind them. No explanation is sought or offered: flipping 'eck, calm down mate, have a brew!

It's hard to stomach these nodding unquestioning Stepford Proles. Nobody, not even Richturd Spurtis, uses sentimentality as brutally as Lame Credblows - the uncontested unimpeachable Duke of Mawk.

Be thick but essentially goodhearted and you're very welcome in Meadowsland. Show any ambition beyond marrying the local skank and working in the post office and Meadows is not interested. The This Is England franchise is a shrine to stupidity, accepting your lot and being exactly who you are expected to be. Its cultural legacy is an endorsement of the status quo, a denial of punk and an admission of defeat.

The poverty of aspiration of the characters is mirrored by Meadows' stunted vision. Happy to wallow in a career-long homage to the well-meaning but thick, he stays put. Say what you like about Paul Abbott's Shameless but he made sure it had the spirited Fiona, the brilliant Debbie and the boy genius Liam - kids who had magic in them, frustrated not defeated by their circumstances. Meadows just fetishises failure.

Of course, This Is England '86 will be critically acclaimed as gritty, authentic and honest - everything it is not. Every Meadows escapade ends up the same - time in the mire with the people who grinned themselves to death.

The verdict on This is England '86:
In its own way, as bad as the real 80s were.

Marks out of 10:
4

Luther

It’s funny how life works out. One minute you’re allowing a murdering paedophile to fall to what you hope is his death, the next you’re all suspended, tending your garden as police brass wait for him to come out of his coma and finger you as the reckless makes-his-own-rules paedo killer they always suspected you might be. DCI John Luther (Idris Elba) is the brilliant yet tortured cop and Henry Madsen (Anton Saunders) the cunty yet comatose serial killer whose survival looms over this show like Roman Polanski over a drugged teenage girl. In an entirely predictable twist, Luther is separated from his hot wife Zoe (Indira Varma) who is now shagging Mark North (Paul McGann), human rights lawyer, responsibly sourced borefriend and all-round pain-in-the-balls liberal piece of shit. A good cop show needs to be more than the sum of its clichés and you know what? This is a good cop show.

A brilliant policeman consumed by his work, perpetually going rogue, pining like a cuntstruck teen after his ex wife. We’ve been here before. And of course he’s Sherlock Holmes, Patrick Jane, Gregory House and every other gifted yet flawed detective you care to think of. He’s always right, except when he’s wrong and even then he’s on the right lines.

He’s backed up to the higgedy hilt by his pal DCI Ian Reed (Steven Mackintosh, weary from playing 400,000 indistinguishable cops and criminals on ITV prime-time clinkers) who loves him but is often exasperated by his methods. Further support comes from his guv’nor DSU Rose Teller (Saskia Reeves channelling Eastenders one-of-your-own Carol Jackson) who respects him but is often exasperated by his methods. His method gives them madness y’ken.

In the first episode Luther cottons on that newly orphaned braniac Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson) is the real murderer of her parents in the home invasion execution scenario she set up. But Morgan is good. Really good. Too smart for our hero, in fact, and you can’t afford to waste a character like that in just one episode so her role becomes crucial in the series.

When vexed Luther can’t pin anything on Alice, she walks and becomes a Hannibal Lecter style confidante for John as he wrestles with his conscience, his personal life and the bizarrely dark compelling murders that inevitably come his way. Yeah, fuck her parents - let’s have some Batman/Joker “I didn’t make you - you made me!” style psychodrama instead.

She’s a Nietzschean antihero and Wilson is terrific in the role. With her PhD in astrophysics, edumacation and tricknology she’s more than an intellectual match for the cerebral plod - constantly forcing Luther to question his conception of right and wrong and exactly how different he is from her.

She wants him to put his cock in her and there’s little doubt the feeling is mutual. But with her menacing Zoe, paying teenage girls to happy slap the shitsack borefriend and generally being a full-on menkle it’s likely this will be a very bad idea. So you just know he’s going to go there at some point.

Meanwhile, his attempts to win back Zoe involve him turning up to her home at unsocial hours, punching the walls then attacking Paul McGann who is starting to look a bit HIV these days, as if being bitch slapped by Vicky Pollards, cheated on by Zoe and roughed up by Luther isn’t enough.

It is a good show, though. Luther is an engaging character and Idris Elba is an ever-charismatic presence. It’s Mad Alice who really makes the mundane magic though. She’s yampy as they come and having her as a lover will be no less dangerous than having her as an enemy. She’s as cold as ice but is she willing to sac-ri-fice her love? Can a soulless beast like her even experience love? Luther better pray she can or he may well meet the same fate as Stringer Bell.

The verdict on Luther:
Cracker meets Monkfish.

Marks out of 10:
7.5

Luther Series One finale

OK, so where have we got to? Paedo in a coma woke up and shouted “Luttt-TTTTTHER!” Fred Flintstone style, apparently with enough brain activity to tell the Federales that Loofs had let him slip to his doom. This was always a bit of a red herring. No witnesses, no incriminating forensics, just the word of a serial killer baby rapist with a mashed brain against a distinguished if plainly nuts detective. In any case, Mad Alice killed Henry Madsen before he could start singing. She’s taken quite a shine to Loofs which came in handy in the finale as John “this doesn’t add up” Luther, framed for his wife’s murder and on the lam, seeks to clear his name and put a punching and a crunching on the real murderer, his former BFF, DCI Ian Reed who’s been balls-deep in diamonds and corruption for the longest time. Got time for another 60 minutes of pushing, shouting and Juliet Bravo clichés? DO I? Yeah, I do zappens.

Luther is mad vexed. You thought you’d seen him mad when he demolished the lounge room door when Zoe taped over Police, Camera, Action! or turned his office into powdered dust like Ben Grimm The Thing when the photocopier jammed but no. Now his wife’s been killed, he’s in the frame so yes - he’s proper miffed right now. As he cradled his murdered wife in his arms and the armed units closed in, he realised what a gwan. “Oh Ian, Ian, Ian - what have you done?” He’s framed you John, John, John - GTFO of there. So with the quickness he was dipping up the block like Biggie in Gimme the Loot. Scattoh!

First thing to do is steal the incriminating gun from Ripley by car-jacking him then punching him in the tits. He does this with the help of Mad “what’s her game?” Alice who then kidnaps Zoe’s borefriend Mark North (Paul McGann). Mark, when presented with Luther, does the shouty, pushy, kick and shove “MURDERER!” thing only to be placated when Loofs tells him he never done it. Now all he has to do is get Mark to commit grand larceny and pervert the course of justice by stealing the diamonds from Ian’s locker. Mark is all “OK boss” because he was putting his cock in Zoe as well and will now never get a chance to again thanks to “Ian” and his “locker”. By which I mean his “brutal killing of Zoe who Mark was fucking in his own depressing, inept, apologetic, Amnesty International way”

It all ends up with a stand-off between Ian and Loofs. “You want the Loof?” says John “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE LOOF!”
¹
while monologuing about how killing is just bad m’kay. Keen to live out the last scene of Se7en, Ian tries to goad the armed Luther into plugging him by talking about how he was putting his cock in Zoe along with the South African Rugby XV, Max “19, hits the road” Gogarty, Paul “Celebrity Love Island” Danan and Steve “former Brighton manager” Gritt. When Luther refuses Ian pulls out a knife and gut stabs him then starts kicking him up and down the platform screaming “Look what you made me do!” which is a bit rich all things considered. None of it ends well of course because cackling Mad “she’s crazy!” Alice rolls up in this piece and shoots Ian in the tits at point-blank with a 400,000 bore shotgun blowing his chest cavity open. Dervish with a smile. Diamond Shite is wormfood.

So with the Feds closing in, Luther has the dead body of his wife’s killer, his homicidal platonic Nietzschean mistress donned in a knitted beret holding a smoking gun and a grieving liberal piece of shit looking more “Withnail” than “I”. Fade to black.

It’s been an odd little series - hysterical, noisy, often formulaic. It’s the relationship between Luther and Mad Alice that saves it. That sexual frisson, that intellectual ping-pong, that Easy Silence between them, where both are safe in the knowledge they are exactly as brilliant and batshit crazy as each other.