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Hunted fails to follow in Homeland's footsteps, James Nesbitt returns as wisecracking surgeon Monroe, and uncomfortable truths surface about pop's past
Monroe (ITV1) | ITV Player
Arena: The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour (BBC2) | iPlayer
Best Possible Taste: the Kenny Everett Story (BBC4) | iPlayer
Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile (ITV1) | ITV Player
Welcome to India (BBC2) | iPlayer
The new BBC drama series Hunted is a kind of private-sector version of Spooks (they're made by the same production company). It's as if the secret services had undergone free-market reform. Instead of people being deceived and killed for the good of the state, we see them being deceived and killed for the good of business.
Like Spooks, Hunted sticks firmly to a "one facial expression per character" rule. In the case of the lead character, Sam Hunter (the toothsome Melissa George), who works as a homicidal honey trap for a shadowy corporate espionage outfit, her single expression is a fabulous bee-stung pout that makes Angelina Jolie's seem a bloodless study in chastity.
The possibility can't be ruled out that the pout is not in fact a pout but a look of total bafflement, for the plot moved with enough speed and jackknife turns to leave most actors, let alone viewers, biting their cheeks with the effort to keep up. But who cares what unknown forces shaped her mouth into its magnificent moue? Let's just rejoice that it has been put to such generous use.
She pouted with her lover, a Tunisian terrorist she set up in a sting, and pouted with her real lover, a colleague who may have set her up to be murdered, and pouted when she fought, when she killed and when she was nearly killed herself. Having survived a bullet to the stomach, and played dead for a year, she returned to work out of the blue, pouting.
By writ of generic convention the shadowy outfit was located on an upper floor of an anonymous office block, all the better for Hunter's boss to stand staring out of a full-storey window while saying things like: "Every second I open my eyes each morning I consider the infinite variables of chaos that can occur during a working day, as I like to be one step ahead."
At least the boss – played by the excellent Stephen Dillane – was filmed standing with his back to the camera when he uttered that line, presumably to avoid the cruelty of maintaining a straight face.
Self-awareness remains the implacable enemy of dramas like this. It's rare to see a smile, and laughter is strictly the preserve of megalomaniacs. The only human interaction that isn't plot exposition is a kind of insouciant banter, in which everyone reaffirms his or her indifference to death and danger.
That's the major difference between Hunted and, say, Homeland. Both have high production values, both are capable of creating fiendishly clever plots, but whereas Homeland seeks to foreground character, Hunted relies on shorthand caricature. Thus the three villains on display last week were a macho Arab, an inscrutable psychopath and a cockney gangster-turned-businessman, holding their faces in such ways as to convey, respectively, machismo, psychopathy, and tasty geezerness.
But at least they boasted one expression. Hunter's estranged lover, whom she suspects of soliciting her murder, had to do without any expression, or indeed personality. Unmemorably handsome, he spoke in a kind of robotic home counties accent reminiscent of Tim Henman explaining a third-round defeat against an unheard-of underdog.
How George managed to keep her lips so perfectly puckered while listening to his lifeless drone must go down as one of the great feats of acting, or facial contortion, this year on television. All I can say is that, as far as the pout goes, I'm glued.
The second series of Monroe already looks like a distinct improvement on the first, which was essentially a six-part celebration of James Nesbitt's wisecracking charisma. I bow to no man in my admiration of the Irishman's talents and charm, but a neurosurgeon's operating theatre didn't seem the appropriate venue for his full-blown shtick.
That was the point, of course, the juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy, levity and brain surgery, jolly life and bloody death. But the point, once made, became repetitive and annoying, until you just longed for extended sequences of endovascular surgery – anything to escape the torrent of clever one-liners.
The solution was more backup, and it's arrived with Neil Pearson playing the new head of clinical services. Like Sarah Parish before him, he's meant to be the pragmatist to Nesbitt's maverick, except as his character said: "I don't want to play the straight man so you can shine all the brighter." If Monroe can avoid falling back into that trap, and not rely on the weekly false suspense of whether his patients are going to live or die, then it might just mature into good-quality cerebral entertainment.
When it was first shown, the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour film must have seemed as if it was the product of some wayward brain operation. And in a way it was, in so far as it was inspired by LSD. That would have been fine if the film had been screened at some groovy 60s happening, but as Arena: Magical Mystery Tour Revisited reminded us, it was premiered on BBC television on Boxing Day 1967.
There was no real script, let alone a plot, just slightly hallucinatory scenes of the Fab Four with punters, avant-gardists and wrestling midgets. As Paul McCartney recalled, for many viewers it was if "they'd been cheated out of their Christmas Special". Poor them, you might think, but these audiences ought to have developed a keen appreciation of the surreal. After all, they'd been watching The Black and White Minstrel Show for years.
Briefly heard interviewing John Lennon in the Arena film, Kenny Everett was the subject of Best Possible Taste: The Kenny Everett Story, the latest in a long line of BBC4 biopics about oddball characters from British showbusiness. The DJ came across as spoilt, insecure, manic, closeted and attention-seeking. But despite Oliver Lansley's staunch efforts, whatever it was that made Everett a huge star in the 70s and 80s never made it into the film.
Leaving aside Everett's self-consciously "zany" style, which never did much for me, it now seems strange that radio DJs ever occupied such dominant positions in the culture. Yet as was evident in Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, they were so big they could get away with the most dispiriting of crimes.
The first BBC executive to employ Everett was Wilfred De'Ath. In Exposure, De'Ath recalled meeting Savile with a 12-year-old girl, whom, he said, Savile then took to bed. De'Ath said that he didn't want to talk to the girl because he didn't want to "demean" himself – although he had no problem talking to Savile.
According to several victims, Savile went on to sexually abuse girls in care, all the while being feted as a great charity worker. The BBC insists that it had no evidence of Savile's behaviour, but the shots of him grabbing and pawing 14-year-old Coleen Nolan on Top of the Pops back in the 1970s were enough to tell you that this was not a guy you'd leave alone with your teenage daughter. No one in power did anything because it was always someone else's teenage daughter.