OUR household is now into week two without Sky-Plus. It’s only a temporary thing but it has allowed us to see an eyeful of TV ads we’d normally have tried to avoid.
None more so than in The Jury which went out at 9pm on ITV throughout the week and concluded last night (don’t worry no spoilers here)
Had it run on BBC1, it would probably have ended at about 9.40pm on Wednesday. You get the drift.
The Jury was tense courtroom drama at its best. Not only did it contain a very plausible retrial of a suspected triple sex killer, but also one or two totally implausible sub-plots involving the jurors themselves. Like the woman standing in for her lookalike boss who was too busy saving her business to waste time on frivolities like being a murder trial juror.
Or the apparently intelligent chap, living with his frail mother, who quite happily and knowingly chats with a manipulative woman who’d been a juror on the original trial and is convinced of his guilt.
OK, so he may have been smitten by her, but would he really have been quite so dim? And then there was the lad, barely 18, and with severe Asperger’s syndrome, who managed to find his way, somehow, on to a jury with none of his family attempting at any point to ask whether this was really a good idea.
More realistic was the touching development of a friendship between a pensioner (Ronald Pickup) and a Sudanese immigrant (Ivanno Jeremiah) desperate to join his brother in the US.
What it did have was a fabulous cast, including John Lynch as the defendant Alan Lane whose face gives so little away and a characteristically stunning performance by Julie Walters as his QC. Every time she stood up to say something you were on the edge of your seat rooting for her. She was funny, clever and capable of some wonderful put-downs to prosecution witnesses.
What made The Juror so captivating is what makes juries work in the first place (providing they don’t get up to the antics of some of this lot): They are a random bunch of people thrown together for a purpose. All individuals with their own strengths, weaknesses and foibles acting in a collective cause and all with separate storylines bubbling under the umbrella of the actual trial. Doing dramas like this over five nights are becoming more and more popular and it’s not hard to see why. Written by Peter (The Queen) Morgan, The Jury was last tried out in this format in 2002. Let’s hope we’re not waiting until 2020 for the next.
There was no respite from adverts either in the last episode of Downton Abbey. When you have a programme that’s laying golden eggs for ITV you can hardly blame them, but the last 90-minute episode of season two was neither 90 minutes (it was nearer 60) nor particularly golden.
This series has had many flaws. The war happened simply too quickly for my liking with officer class Matthew enjoying far too many celibate visits back from the front in my view. His sudden Lazarus act in the wheelchair was far-fetched and the beginning of the end of the credibility of this series. Still, at least they got rid of his servile fiancee Lavinia who was a bit wet, possibly from spending too much time in the company of the Earl who was wetness personified ind didn’t even have the gumption to get his way with a pretty maid from downstairs. Elsewhere, Bates looked doomed from the start and was one half of the least erotic love scene ever with his beau Anna. But at least plucky Lady Sybil walked off into the Irish sunset.
A third series has been commissioned. Let’s hope this one was the so-called “difficult second” series (Mad Men and The Wire - far superior dramas - spring to mind) and things pick up as the 1920s move on. Most of all can Maggie Smith’s Dowager Violet please live until she’s at least 127.
My Transsexual Summer was the unlikely hit of the week. Fewer adverts for starters, but a charming, breezy hour spent in the company of seven transgender men and women who all proved a perfect accompaniment to each other. At one end of the spectrum was 52-year-old ex-copper and trucker Karen, about to undergo the full sex change op through to Sarah, 29, who looked, by her own admission, like a “bad trannie”. She was one month into living as a woman and had yet to tell her parents.
In between there were some very confident ladies happy to spend hours a day getting themselves ready and some men happy they no longer needed to bother.
One of them summed it up thus: “There was no future for me as a guy. I dress up in a dress. It gives me hope for a better life for myself”.
Things may get tougher in the weeks to come when they leave the cloistered surroundings of their retreat and venture out into the wider world. Whatever the result, this was a terrific advert in itself for that small minority of people who simply are born in the wrong body.
The Slap told Harry’s tale this week. A revolting excuse for a human being, a monster waiting to burst out. This Aussie series is packed with ghastly people but it is absolutely riveting
Northhampton Chronicle
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