TV REVIEW: Highlights of the week's television programmes reviewed. This week, Cutting Edge: Love C4, Tuesday Holby City ITV, TuesdayER C4, Wednesday Any Time Now RTÉ1, Monday Nice Guy Eddie BBC1, Sunday
The many trailers for Cutting Edge: Love promised tales of love "with a twist", which meant that before the people involved had so much as taken a breath to speak, you found yourself trying to guess what kind of mess these people had got themselves involved in. In the end, it was Ricki Lake, only with style.
There was Jon, an endearing chap with a sculpted goatee that twisted to one side of his chin like a yanked tie, and with a grin that revealed teeth from which you could fashion a piano. Jon grinned, of course, because he knew what the punchline to his story was. He had spotted Stephanie in a restaurant and pursued her for two years before she agreed to date him.
From there, he spent a further two years meeting her only over lunch, her excuse being a strict uncle waiting at home.
Jon was hopelessly in love. She was an enigma wrapped in a blue fur coat. I guessed that she was really a man. That she was actually a spectacularly wealthy Ghanaian princess and heir to the throne was a good substitute.
It did not please her parents. Stephanie had to choose between Jon and his impish grin and lop-sided beard, or a life of privilege as Queen. So, Jon and Stephanie married and lived happily ever after, although in a modest urban house, rather than a palace filled with servants and surrounded by loyal subjects, but you can't have everything.
Joanne's story was far less romantic, swept off her feet, as she was, by a man who turned out to be a pathological liar with a hero complex. Martin filled her with tales of his derring-do exploits in Northern Ireland, and promised a life of plenty in the Lake District. The suspense lay in seeing how far she would go before copping. She quit her job, packed her bags and moved to the Lake District to live with him, only to find that the cottage by the lake was actually a run-down house in a run-down council estate. Martin had it all figured out. He was an undercover drugs cop working where the problem was worst. Most people would have slapped their brows, shook their heads and turned straight back. Not Joanne. "Wow," she said, "this guy has guts!" Four months she spent there, until she finally worked it all out. The extent of his policing responsibilities began and ended with neighbourhood watch. They revoked his privileges after she walked out on him. Talk about kicking a man when he's down.
Channel 4 ruined the guessing game with Wendy's story, revealing in advance that her husband, David, had murderous intentions. He had asked a work colleague to run her down with a car. "Make sure she's f**king dead," David was recorded as saying. "I don't want to end up with a f**king vegetable." The flame of their marriage, though, still burns bright. Wendy remains unconvinced that he really meant it, clinging to her theory that David was involved in some complex ruse to avoid being blackmailed. Wendy, you may have guessed, is no Colombo. To be fair to the judge, he gave everybody a second chance to get things straightened out. After being charged, David was released on bail. Part of his bail conditions? That he remain in the matrimonial home.
If these people were dramatic characters they would be covered in plaster cast and shoved into the corridors of Holby City, where incredible storylines pupate, mature, wither and die like mayflies in a rush. In this hospital the mere touch of a scalpel leads to uncontrollable gushing of exposition. Melodrama avalanches upon melodrama. Come in with a teapot stuck to your head, and you leave having discovered that your sister is the real mother to your husband.
There is no time to tease out character, so it is shot out of a cannon. Take the writer of historical novels in this week's episode. "She's a writer of historical novels," explained her personal assistant to a doctor immediately, before adding in quick succession that he secretly loved the writer of historical novels, and was jealous of her toyboy lover. For good measure the writer of historical novels talked about nothing but her historical novels, and even wrote some of her historical novel between plot developments. She had red hair, an exotic scarf and was generally flagrant. Developing character in Holby City is about getting to the stereotype before it escapes and makes a dash for substance.
It is remorselessly predictable, but once you've guessed the eventual outcome you can at least relax and enjoy the sideline that is the acting. There are few gigs as big for the jobbing actor as an appearance in Holby City. It is on a par with being Burglar #1 in an episode of The Bill, or Coma Victim in Casualty. Its corridors are filled with actors to whose appearance you will respond, "What ad have I seen him in?" So they tend to act like they've never acted before. And should never act again. Bad news is met with outrageous grimacing. Deathbed confessions throttle every emotion. You have time to bake a cake during the dramatic pauses. It is a terrible, terrible programme. But it is impossible to take your eyes off it.
COMPARED to ER, of course, both Holby City and its parent drama Casualty are clumsy, half-witted, loudmouth brothers to the swaggering hunk of the US series. It has always developed the long-term characters with great patience, and the cameos fuse seamlessly. Channel 4 is months behind RTÉ in airing this most recent series, but there is much that is worth watching again. ER succeeds because it has created a world into which the viewer can invest complete belief, so that a single event brings with it a shockwave that carries you through the emotions of every character it affects. This week saw the departure from the hospital of Dr Greene (Anthony Edwards) and his brain tumour, and the next few episodes are his last. It is a story that has been expertly and sensitively constructed over the past two series, and it all pays off over the coming episodes. If you haven't already seen the season's finale on either RTÉ or E4, you may want to stock up on mansize tissues and keep a few gallons of water handy to ward off dehydration.
Any Time Now has hardly revelled in the complexity of its characters - everybody in it arrived fully-formed and has run on train tracks ever since. But for a programme that pitched itself on soggy land between Sex in the City and Cold Feet, it has at least been consistently bright and often charming. It is still lifted by Susan Lynch, as hippy-dippy Stevie, and in comparison to her the rest of the cast often labour a little. Also, the balance between drama and comedy has tottered with far less confidence than Angeline Ball in her high heels. However, the whole thing has been played out gamely and while the sleekness of the production possibly betrays the BBC's involvement, it's competent summer froth of the sort that RTÉ has rarely produced before.
Nice Guy Eddie shouldn't have gone to all that trouble to spell it out that Eddie's a Nice Guy. He's played by Ricky Tomlinson. Even writing down his name makes me stop, stare into the middle distance and sigh. In Jim Royle, Caroline Ahern didn't so much create a character for Tomlinson to inhabit, but allowed him to slide his own personality into fiction. It turned out that Ricky Tomlinson is one of the great comedy characters of all time. So, from here on, TV executives will not be writing series in which he will get a chance to stretch his acting muscles. For the rest of his career they'll want him as Jim Royle. Jim Royle as a comedy copper with a forgiving wife. Jim Royle as an unlikely judge with a way with words. Jim Royle as a private detective with an eccentric family and heart of gold.
Which brings us back to Nice Guy Eddie.
Here, he plays a private dick who doesn't quite roam the demi-monde of the Chandler novel, but a world where every criminal comes with comedy sidekick, and where tense encounters are won with a well-aimed quip. Tomlinson has been responsible for further embedding the dramatic conviction that Liverpudlians don't really converse, but rather communicate purely through the medium of the wisecrack. Luckily it has spark, glimmers of wit and Tomlinson's full repertoire of ticks, wait-till-I-get-you-home glances, and pratfalls.
This week, Eddie wandered into crime's seedy underbelly of porn and mobile phone fraud, while gathering a collection of bruises and a busted nose. The seedy underbelly, though, was there to be tickled for laughs. The boss of a sex chat line Hot Housewives ("If the trades description people ever raided that place . . .") was using stolen mobile phones to call his own lines and rack up the profits. Eddie tracked down the phones, saved the girl, put away the baddie and tossed in a couple of quips for good measure.
He wrapped things up by heading back home. There he pronounces the house rules without living up to them himself, and lives with his downtrodden wife, interfering mam and troublesome daughter.
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