By Paul Bradley
Adolescence
Netflix
It’s early in the year yet, and I haven’t (as I write) watched it all yet, but Netflix’s Adolescence will certainly be up there at the end of the year as one of the most significant and best dramas of the year; the first episode alone might even turn out to be the most involving hour of the year. And none of it is ever easy, but once you start you’ll want to watch it all.
It opens in dramatic fashion, with police making an early-morning raid on the home of 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), whom they suspect of murdering his classmate Katie just hours before. Jamie denies any involvement, but is soon being put through the grim routine of the police’s investigative procedures – the searches, cell beds, and questioning that would wear anyone down, never mind a bright young teen. Because he is a teen, he chooses his father Eddie (the mighty Stephen Graham) as his appropriate adult, and the pair must try to endure the pressure and surprises together, while detectives Bascome and Frank (played by Ashley Walters and Faye Marsay) continue to piece together the events of the night and the things that may have led to it.
It’s heavy drama delivered with a calm gravity, dealing in subjects like incel culture (if that’s not too grand a word), knife crime, online abuse, teenage anger, the communication gap between them and the adults around them. Technically it’s astonishing, each episode filmed in one continuous shot, the camera following it all in real time, zigzagging between immaculately choreographed storylines, sometimes moving in ways that leave you agog: in one episode it weaves inside and around the local school, which is impressive enough on its own, and then at the end it takes flight.
The thing is, though, it’s not just a technical stunt: it makes for something unusually immersive, so that you feel as if you are actually in the thick of the action. And the acting is up to it too: Graham as the flailing, grieving father, Walters as the calm but jaded detective, Cooper as the boy at the centre of it all, holding his own against established actors in his first big role. Only one or two scenes – the “do you like me” scene in episode three, for example – feel a little overdone, and otherwise it’s powerful drama, troubling and messy, and an early high-water mark for 2025.
Catherine Fulvio’s St. Patrick’s Way
RTE1, Thursday, 8pm
Surely it’s fair, isn’t it, to expect that when a celebrity undertakes a pilgrimage for telly, we’ll get their thoughts, their personal experience of the route and its history? At least that’s what I was anticipating when I went to have a look at Catherine Fulvio’s St Patrick’s Way last week: you know, reflections, historical significance, the sense of walking the same roads St Patrick himself might have walked. In this case, the route is the 132 kilometre walk between Armagh and Downpatrick, now marketed as an historical walking route to entice the pilgrims fed up with more famous continental routes.
In reality the show is as bland as it gets: an overstretched tourism advert, with Fulvio apparently only involved as a recognisable name to attract viewers. There are some castles to be sure, and some pleasant scenery, but neither we nor Fulvio get to do much more than skim lightly by them. There’s not even much sense of the time or effort involved in the walking itself (and I like that kind of simple, thoughtful walking show), nor any real engagement with the history or folklore around the saint in that area, nor even – and this seems like an obvious point of discussion – much thought given to potential differences in feelings on either side of the border. What could have, based on its title, been an interesting personal take, is instead just the kind of thing you might see in a Powerpoint presentation in a tourist office somewhere: “ten fun things to do on your weekend away.”
Great Continental Railway Journeys
BBC2, Weeknights, 6.30pm
Michael Portillo, though, reliably gives better travelogue, and he’s back with another series of Great Continental Railway Journeys after a five-year gap. It’s a slightly different format this time, BBC choosing to strip it across weeknight teatimes in half-hour episodes, but otherwise it still has all the information and, yes, colour, of a Portillo train trip.
This trip took him across Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where, in his usual booming voice, he tells us about the history of the places and buildings he passes, then stops to meet the locals and try the food and drink. He was actually in this area a lot during troubled times when he was an MP, so he has some personal connection to it, which adds a little flavour too. Of course there are moments when it gets a bit embarrassing – a stint as a gladiator in an old Roman amphitheatre in Pula, for example – but it’s all part of the package with Portillo, and he knows as well as anyone how daft it looks. Mostly it’s interesting to listen to and beautiful to look at, a slower, more sophisticated kind of travel show that is both more professional and more personal than most.
Chess Masters: The Endgame
BBC2, Monday, 8pm
Well, let’s never accuse telly of not squeezing every last drop out of a format idea. Continuing the whole dubious transformation of personal hobbies into TV shows – we’ve already had it with, among other things, sewing, baking and pottery – BBC are now giving us something called Chess Masters: The Endgame. It’s presented by Sue Perkins – a glib old hand at these kinds of shows – and, yes, it’s about chess, taking a group of good-but-unknown players and pitting them against each other in some kind of artfully aged, unnecessarily huge hall.
Your first reaction might be that it’s good to see a cerebral pursuit like chess getting its moment on the telly…but then you remember it doesn’t easily make for great television.
The previous TV shows I mentioned had less than exciting subjects too, though (sewing?), and they attempted to get around this with some tried and trusted TV tricks: everyone, spare us, has a story, “dead air” has become a method for generating faux tension, and there’ll be several presenters, one of whom will specialise in double-entendres (step forward Miss Perkins).
All that might – I emphasise, might – have worked for a while in those other shows, but it’s not only a tired old schtick now, it feels even less appropriate for chess. Come on now, are we supposed to engage just because the players are given cheesy nicknames like The Unrelenting Warrior or The Unruly Knight? Or because they follow up their scripted trash talks with games, over which an unbearably overacting Anthony from The Traitors hyperventilates, while we get little “secret camera” shots of three or four other contestants standing together like alarmed meerkats – exactly as we see the contestants in “those other shows” we’re all a bit tired of already?
With a bit of bravery or actual human warmth this really could have done wonders for chess; but this cold, contrived old rehash just makes it seem even less televisual than you thought already.
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