Dirty rotten scoundrels

TV REVIEW:
The StreetBBC1, Monday FreefallBBC1, Tuesday Property Snakes and LaddersChannel 4, Tuesday Coronation StreetTV3 and UTV, Monday, Wednesday and Friday

A DISMAL NIGHT in November seems like the proper time to watch a gritty, urban drama, but, what with the cloud of gloom hovering over the country and the rainlashing we got this Monday, it

felt

Novemberish and so Jimmy McGovern’s

The Street

fitted the bill.

McGovern is TV drama royalty. He wrote Cracker, The Lakesand Hillsborough, and the first two series of The Streetpicked up an embarrassment of Baftas and Emmys. It's that sort of pedigree that attracts big names to the small screen, so the first standalone drama in the new series starred Bob Hoskins (where has he been?) as Paddy, a recovering alcoholic, a family man, owner of local boozer The Greyhound and all round decent bloke. Their pub is "the hub of the community", he proudly tells his wife (a superbly nuanced performance by Frances Barber, all plucked eyebrows and thin lips), but the tightness of that North of England community is tested when Paddy bars the son of the local gangster and drug dealer Thomas Miller for smoking in the toilet.

As Miller, Liam Cunningham created a monster of a man, vicious, arrogant and terrifying who threatens to beat up the much older Paddy unless he lifts the ban on his son. “Well, let’s see what the community does to help,” says Paddy’s wife, knowing that fear will make them do absolutely nothing.

From the moment the threat is made, and it's made all the more menacing by Miller's reasonable tone and Paddy's growing acceptance that it has to happen or they both will lose face, the story plays out with High Noon-like drama complete with a noisy clock counting down to the moment of confrontation. The camera stays close to the characters all the time – this is the only world they know, no need to pull back to let a wider world in. The women stay in the background, trying to solve the problem in a way that their men won't lose front, and are otherwise mostly silent, though their eyes measure and judge.

“What”, asks Miller’s wife, sitting in her plush home with its plasma screen and modern wallpaper, different from the other houses on the street, “do you want?” Looking at his gawky, gormless son, Miller, his temples bugling and his face twisted in frustration roars, “I want him to be a man!” and from that moment McGovern signals who is going to ultimately win in this face-off. If you didn’t look away as Hoskins, soft-eyed, chubby everyman, was repeatedly kicked as he lay on the ground by Cunningham, the physically powerful hardman, then your stomach is stronger than mine.

On the surface, Freefallwas a far glossier piece of work (two superb dramas in mid-July, surely a record?) but the story it told was as mired in misery and filth. Just when we're all slightly punch-drunk by the phrases "subprime mortgage" and "credit crunch", writer and director Dominic Savage took the financial crisis and through the stories of three people made a sort of dramatic primer, explaining what the newsprint column inches might look like in real life.

They were familiar types, nearly clichés: Gus (Aidan Gillen), a hedge fund honcho in a swanky glass-walled office looking down over the city of London; Dave (Dominic Cooper), a slick subprime mortgage salesman who would sell his best friend into penury if it meant bagging the commission, and Jim (Joseph Mawle) as that friend, a decent, working-class father of two, happy in his “I don’t own anything, don’t owe anything” lot until lured into buying the dream house he ultimately can’t afford.

Only Dave and Jim’s lives intersect – or appear to – but Savage’s message is that it’s the antics of the bankers at the top of the financial greasy pole, the high-flying Gus’s, that trickle down to ultimately rule, and potentially ruin, all our lives.

You don’t have to be a Dave or Jim for that to sound familiar.

As Gus, an astonishingly good Gillen made the 1980s Wall StreetGordon Gecko with his "greed is good" mantra look like Mother Teresa, except this master of the universe spoke in a soft Dart accent, only lapsing into an American twang occasionally, a legacy perhaps of the Dublin actor's time as the mayor in the cult HBO series The Wire.

As a successful banker in the year before the financial meltdown, Gus is all barely contained adrenalin in a sharp suit, with a loose-hipped swagger that pumps out power, ambition and sex. “It’s all about the deal,” he says, and the language of banking, with its Triple As and Warehousing, is kept impenetrable.

But when an increasingly desperate Jim falls two months behind in his repayments, the language of the man on the phone from the mortgage company is painfully easy to understand: “we will begin repossession proceedings in 14 days.”

There was only one false, clunky piece of dialogue in an otherwise pitch-perfect feature length drama: the long speech when Gus’s colleague and sometime lover, who has grown disaffected with the dishonesty of the banking world, explains how a property bubble based on easy finance was always going to collapse. “The whole system is based on flawed logic,” she says, somewhat unnecessarily because, dramatic exposition aside, we all know that by now.

There’s a moment towards the end when the director teases us into thinking that stressed-out and broken Jim is going to kill himself, which would have been heartbreaking, only to later show that it’s Gus who jumps off the bridge, which isn’t heartbreaking at all.

After the financial meltdown, only slimy mortgage broker Dave emerges relatively unscathed, like a cockroach after a nuclear explosion. He reinvents himself as a salesman with a green conscience flogging solar panels to rich bored housewives.

THE PROPERTY COLLAPSE, according to Freefall, was caused by the banks' immoral lending practices, which must come as a bit of relief to Sarah Beeny, who for eight years presented Location, Location,the best house candy show on TV, because such programmes are regularly accused of fanning the flames of the property market inferno. Her current show, Property Snakes and Ladders, is about people who bought just as the market tanked and are now trying to make the best of a very expensive bad deal.

The one thing they all have in common, week in week out, is that they never listen to Beeny’s sound advice. Their blank disregard for her opinion always made for entertaining viewing because of the humble pie they had to hoover up at the end – that and the nightmare-for-continuity status of Beeny’s stomach which can go from enormously pregnant to skinny to pregnant again all in the same programme.

But even she’s losing heart. This week’s story of a couple in Tavistock renovating an old railway station – or money pit as it soon became – bored even her so that she was rarely on screen and, even when she was, she looked like she just couldn’t be bothered dealing with them and their mess. The droll tone of her voiceover sounded weary. The beginning of the end for the programme, surely.

Sex, lies and dodgy head gaskets: Kevin and Molly turn up the heat on ‘Corrie’

Who knew Tenerifeeey was such a safety valve? If Molly hadn’t been hustled off to the Canaries by Tyrone on Monday, she and Kevin were bound to explode like a dodgy head gasket.

It's been a bit hot and heavy in Coronation Streetlately, though even by soap standards it's an unlikely romance – fun-loving, young Molly and greasy old Kevin who, whether he's in the throes of passion or changing a set of spark plugs, has the half-tortured, half-bewildered face of a man with piles.

Up to this, reliable old Kevin, a Corrie veteran, hadn’t had a good plotline in ages – and that’s the trouble with things in Weatherfield of late: it’s way too much like a scriptwriters’ game of hokey cokey. For weeks a character is never off screen and then wham, they’re gone for ages. Where has Claire been hiding? Missing from the street for what feels like forever, and then there she was on Monday making a high-fibre breakfast for Ashley to keep him regular.

But before you could say “pulmonary embolism”, an ambulance was outside her door and by Friday she’d landed a massive new “will she live or die” plotline. She’s so dreary maybe no one will notice either way.

Hilary Fannin is on leave