Thoughts on McMafia

The BBC’s production is not ground breaking, it is not the greatest thing you have ever seen – in fact we have seen something like it before The Night Manager starring Tom Hiddleston for one. Yet there is a magnetism and charisma about the entire production, not so much about being proud of itself but you know you are watching a programme that is top quality from acting to writing to care of location scouting to costume design.

Undoubtedly, the show rests on the still relatively young shoulders of James Norton, who gets the leading role as Alex Godman – the hedge fund manager who is a legitimate businessman, yet the son of a Russian family that had to leave the motherland following a turf war involving a rival gang.

The necessity of giving Alex an ambiguous surname is one that works into the hands of the viewer – is Alex a good man or merely a God amongst men – he must follow an unfamiliar path for BBC protagonists and one more familiar to American crime shows; like Walter White, he is a good or nice man to begin with, but our hero must endure some pain and suffering changing his natural persona of one from wholesomeness to one of malevolence.

Alex goes through traumas of becoming distant from his fiancée, forcing her to leave the house they share; he talks more Russian as the season progresses (Ep. 6) as he slowly morphs into the head of the household as his father becomes more frail and reliant on alcohol.  

While the production is in love with the cities it visits from the sub-continental warmth of India to the glamour of Israel; you also admire the coldness of Eastern Europe of Prague and Moscow; to the sheen of West London.  The show makes great pains to say this series is as much about the attachment to family as our attachment to money and power; money can come and go, yet family will remain and the ties that bind will be stronger than bonds in banks. 

Vadim (Merab Ninidze - brilliant) struggles with the daughter wanting to leave Russia for education, they are filmed joined at the hip on long walks mirroring Alex and Rebecca’s union – Benes (the Czech fixer) tells Alex they will attack the one you love most for Alex this is Rebecca and for Vadim it is his daughter; the loss of one will break the other.  Harm, though, still hits Rebecca despite Alex’s attempts to remove her from the frame.

The ending of the series, left this viewer, in a state of part confusion, part frustration as the series morphed from hopefully a standalone series of unique stature to one that is merely the beginning of another series with hallmarks of The Godfather coming to the fore; with Alex becoming a Michael Corleone surrogate and Rebecca very much the Kay Adams/Diane Keaton role; one that may or may not keep Alex grounded in reality as he becomes the head of a new Mafia organisation.

The series makes this succinct point; money makes the world go round - there will be human cost and tragedy throughout; but the old traditional way of doing 'mafia' business has changed in this new technological age, computers and business acumen hold the key to breaking new ground in new territories and regions.  Someone will die and someone will profit from such deaths.

McMafia is available on the BBC iPlayer now and on DVD for Home Entertainment to keep

Television in 2018

A new year brings the promise of new resolutions, promises and the belief that this year will be the better than the last. This belief extends to the arts from cinema to music, painting to sculpture. But never more so than in television, is the leap made clearer than in television where channels propel new stellar productions to the forefront of the schedules in the hope for recognition and ratings.

From the return of stalwart shows Silent Witness to the BBC One and Vera to ITV, to the return of actors in new shows like Kiri on Channel Four starring Sarah Lancashire in a post-Happy Valley world to the high concept Hard Sun on BBC One.

There are changes a plenty not just in terms of the shows structure but how we watch them.  Last year the water-cooler show was Doctor Foster, the five-part second series was must-see television for one night a week showing the demand for such shows to get people talking about it the next day or immediately on Twitter and social media.

Hard Sun is an interesting case; a thriller with dystopian tendencies predicting the sun to explode in five years causing the end of our planet and how dealing with this world-ending event puts things into perspective. Yet the show premiered on a Saturday night at 9.30pm, with all six episodes of the series available on BBC iPlayer at once in a box set to allow viewers to watch the next episode immediately if they so wished.  The BBC attempted this at the tail end of last year with Gunpowder with relative success. The Corporation looks to be changing its ways with that of the audience needs and wants in the current climate.

McMafia is the stand-out show on offer though from British television. Reminiscent of The Night Manager, featuring a breakthrough role for a young British star to translate to the worldwide audience in a story with global reach wearing its expense on its sleeve. 

McMafia is an eight-part series which had a two-part show over New Year's Day holiday to entice the audience; it now sits at 9pm on Sunday for the water cooler effect.

Whilst it does not have the sheer wow factor of Tom Hiddleston's stab at a James Bond audition coupled with the telling adaptation of John Le Carre's source material, James Norton does embody the role of Alex Godman (has there ever been a more egotistical name) with relative ease sashaying from one suit to a tuxedo and jet to yacht as travel of choice; the supporting cast help with the reality of the world falling around him. The Night Manager had a glamorous cast of characters, whereas the Godman family and their rivals look more experienced at life and feel the pain and ache of having to leave their beloved Russia in exile.

As an audition for Bond, we have not yet seen Norton do necessarily atypical Bond things apart from fend off a choke-hold and wear a suit really well; whereas Daniel Craig has a ice-cold steeliness when he plays Bond, Norton has a somewhat laid back feel when he is smiling that would not translate to the iconic role of 007; but that does do a disservice to what he has done in three episodes of Alex - slowly he is getting warn down by the world he is step by step entering, becoming less and less of an investment banker and more an international money launderer to save his family's name and reputation, the hope being they can return to Russia.

Next of Kin began on ITV on Monday 8th January, a six-part global drama featuring a mixed-race marriage and the abduction of a British-Indian doctor in Pakistan against the backdrop of a terrorist attack in London.  Featuring a cast of talented actors, the series paints a multi-diverse London correctly but looks at well to do people in terms of class structure; both siblings are doctors, the female doctor's husband works with the government.

And that perhaps may be the one criticism of all these shows is that it focuses on middle-class individuals and not the problems that beset the working class population around the country. With all the series mentioned set predominantly in our capital city, London, there is a myopic window of the world being served to a licence-paying audience.

Kiri (Channel 4) is set around Bristol and deals with the sensitive issues of a mixed-race adoption and social services, written by Jack Thorne, it may well harken back to a gritty social realism more in common with Ken Loach and Alan Clarke than anything served up by the BBC in recent years; even Gunpowder is about upset middle class rebels wanting to blow up upper class people because they are against their policies.

It is indicative that the most socially political aware programme is based around characters outside of London; a city that is afraid to acknowledge people near the poverty line, whereas other cities do not have a problem with this awareness.

The Night Manager

The BBC have brought to the small screen in their 'Pure Drama' field an updated and altered John le Carre adaptation to fill up our Sunday evenings for the next six weeks.

The novel, The Night Manager, was released in 1993 and set in Cairo; the adaptation by David Farr (Spooks) has been updated to January 2011 in the same city during the now famous Arab Spring.  We encounter a white British man, Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston - all charm and confidence) walking through the battered backstreets of the Egyptian capital as revolution takes place.

At work, he is suave and debonair, breezily dealing with rocket attacks on his hotel as international guests attempt to flee the city.  That night he meets a mistress of a renowned family man, Freddie Hamid; she is Sophie, a middle Eastern jewel. They flirt and they inevitably sleep together, she imparts upon Pine some information relating to the Hamid family buying weapons and munitions from renowned wicked man, Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie). Sophie calls Roper, 'the worst man in the world'.

Pine fears for Sophie's wellbeing after giving this information to a delegate at the British embassy, Simon (Russell Tovey) who hands it on to a bitter worker of the International Enforcement Agency in Victoria, London; Angela Burr (Olivia Colman), who is seemingly at loggerheads with MI6 in how to capture Roper and his machavellian ways of trade and commerce.

Pine's fears are realised when Sophie is killed in her hotel room, this leads to a fast forward to four years later where Pine has relocated to Zermatt, Switzerland at the Meiseters Hotel in the Alps over the Christmas period. The hotel is expecting a late arrival of guests, namely Roper and his entourage including a fay Tom Hollander as Roper's dogsbody.

Pine sees this as a chance to help the UK government entrap Roper and so contacts Burr who comes to Zermatt personally to meet up, and so begins their mission to get Roper.

If this all sounds so BBC, so British and so Bond; you would not be wrong with that assumption. The film (and it is a film, under the guise of a television series) is directed by Suzanne Bier and she does well to shoot a sense of place from the sweaty humidity of Cairo, to the juxtaposition of a freezing London office with no heating ending with the picture postcard beauty of the Alpine landscape.

This can be construed as one long James Bond audition for Hiddleston, who does well with his calm moments and allows Pine moments of sensitivity and naturalness, such as throwing up after checking Roper into his room.  Yet being an ex-soldier who served in Iraq, he knows how war works and how it affects you; Pine is self-effacing and ready for a challenge, the way he gets the sim cards from Roper's phones is both ingenious and smart.

This is event television the like of which the BBC has strained for a number of years, but it shows that to gain that event status of a high water mark series you need the perfect storm of three actors (Hiddleston, Colman, Laurie) at the apex of their careers, a stellar supporting unit of familiar BBC faces (Hollander and Tovey), a renowned internationally acclaimed director (Bier). And the story, it is always about the story. The combination of le Carre, the BBC and Hiddleston makes this a drama not to miss.

The Tunnel - DVD review

From the makers of Broadchurch, The Tunnel is a dual nation television production between French television and Sky TV, which was originally aired in this country on Sky Atlantic.  It is released on Blu-ray and DVD by Acorn Media.

The ten part series tells the story of a heinous murder committed in the Eurotunnel where two bodies are left astride the dividing line of the French and British sides.  The top half of the body is a French Member of Parliament and the legs belong to an English prostitute.  The criminal states, that there is no equality in the law when it comes to murder and both people have been lost even though one is not worried about.

The first detective we see is Elise Wassermann (Clemence Posey) closely followed by Karl Roebuck (Stephen Dillane).  They are a partnership due to the nationalities of the murder victims and they are distinct opposites with their juxtaposition apparent from the off; British versus French, male versus female, skeptic versus serious and old versus young.  There first interaction marks out the difficulty of their partnership at first, Elise wants the body as the head is on French territory, Karl happy to not bother with the case says, 'Don't worry Joan, not wanting to start a war over this.' 'My name is not Joan.' The humour of the line is lost in translation, a familiar problem between British people and mainland Europeans.

In the tradition of recent European dramas especially those from Scandanavia (Borgen, The Bridge), this series is similar in terms of slow burn but not afraid to show its hand early in proceedings such as video footage of the bodies being found and then being broadcast online - is the killer making a statement about hidden truths or stating everything should be in the open, where secrets carry so much weight.

The series draws its intensity from the drawn out dramatic sub-plots involving ministers, policeman and sinister subjects.  There is a clear design to hide details from the audience such as when a Frenchman falls in front of an oncoming train, the suspected persuers are out of focus (a technique seen in that other Gallic hit series The Returned) whilst the fear is clearly etched on his weary face.

The series is shot in this cold greyness with hues of blue deriding tension but also indicative of a continent under pressure with its moral objectivity being put into question by a mysterious invisible enemy. Not to be outdone, the two lead detectives also have personal demons in their collective closets dans la maison; Elise is a timid soul devoid of social skills and intimacy issues, whilst Roebuck is suffering from the scars of a vasectomy and the tension between him and his eldest son. Nothing is simple for a television character especially when a member of the police force.

The Tunnel is tremendously gripping and suspenseful and helped by some excellent acting from the leads especially Dillane as the experienced old hand who runs the gamut of emotions.

This stunning 10-part drama stars an impressive support cast including Keeley Hawes (Upstairs Downstairs) and Joseph Mawle (Game of Thrones) and comes to Blu-ray and DVD with some fantastic special features on 13 January 2014 from Acorn Media.