For a while during the promotion of Cemetery Junction, Ricky Gervais was telling anyone who would listen that he would love to next turn his hand to drama, a particularly dark one plotted around the notion of revenge.
While he was talking, another actor-writer-director, Hugo Blick (Marion and Geoff, Sensitive Skin), actually went and did it.
BBC2’s latest drama, The Shadow Line, which you can watch on iPlayer, or pay for on DVD for under fifteen quid, is the most compelling British drama of its kind, to these eyes anyway, this century.
Some might suggest that bar is not particularly high - the triple threat of The Sopranos, The West Wing and The Wire is often used as a stick with which to beat British drama. As is the 1994 death of Dennis Potter, despite the emergence of talents such as Paul Abbott, Sally Wainwright, Peter Bowker and Steven Moffat.
Blick sculpted a drama, which stood out for its singular vision and originality – the way it was shot, written and acted. He gathered top-notch actors and gave them a script tauter than one of Mikhail Baryshnikov’s big toes, with a rhythm which built up a similar pace to the Barcelona midfield. More than that, he delivered a cliff-hanger for six of its seven episodes. The climax for the seventh was fairly jaw-dropping.
There was light and shade in every character – the everyman flower-seller husband negotiating a multi-million drugs deal, the forensic cop with the love child he endangered in a job, the seemingly meek girlfriend with cold-blooded intentions.
The acting talent on display (Christopher Eccleston, Stephen Rea, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tobias Menzies, Eve Best, Lesley Sharp, Sir Anthony Sher) was presumably not working for the usual rates available in Hollywood, or in more mainstream TV fare, or on stage in London’s West End or Broadway.
Ejiofor was last seen as tracking down Angelina Jolie in Salt and taking his chances against the Mayan calendar in Roland Emmerich’s 2012, Rea popped up the other night on telly in the Wachowski Brothers’ big-budget V for Vendetta. (V also stood for straight to video.) Eve Best, last seen as Wallis Simpson in The King’s Speech, played the Old Vic and Broadway opposite Kevin Spacey in Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten. And it’s not that long since Eccleston, with Russell T Davies, reinvented British telly’s most famous time-traveller.
Rafe Spall has divided viewers, and I’m not sure whether he’s cultivated an air of camp menace or has been channeling David Walliams’ “Bitty” character on Little Britain, but at least he proved he could do understated camp as the smarmy DC in Hot Fuzz.
It wasn’t perfect, particularly in its depiction of the press – the investigative crime reporter promoted to city editor? The press conference with more than 40 print journalists? – but its good points comfortably outweighed its bad.
Having recently reacquainted myself with the splendour of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Edge of Darkness, The Shadow Line was catering for a more demanding audience than the audience of that time. An audience which has been deluged with broadsheet articles about how much better American drama (and even Danish drama) is than that served up by the Brits.
Which makes the achievement of Hugo Blick, the BBC and The Shadow Line all the more remarkable.
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