A-list? Only The Crown crams as much top British talent on screen
Strange, the things we worry about. Politics, global climate, even next Saturday’s football results — they’re all things we can do practically nothing to alter.
But the possibility that anything could happen to the ones we love most is something we try never to contemplate. If we didn’t shut our minds to all the dangers, we’d soon go mad.
A Confession ( ItV) vividly depicted the mental power of denial. In the hours after Sian O’Callaghan disappeared after a night out in Swindon eight years ago, her family told each other repeatedly that she’d soon turn up. She was sleeping off a hangover, they said, or staying at a friend’s house.
even her little brother shrugged and insisted: ‘they’ll find her ... they will,’ when his anxious parents broke the news Sian was missing. Denial is an instinct, it seems. We couldn’t cope without it.
the only people ready to face the worst from the outset are the police — because their involvement in the case is professional, not emotional.
Jeff Pope’s drama treated these emotions with great sensitivity, because like his earlier docudrama about murder and family grief, Little Boy Blue, this is a true story. Pope has enjoyed an exceptional
year, with his Laurel and Hardy biopic Stan & Ollie in cinemas and the geriatric heist Hatton garden on tV winning terrific acclaim.
that must help attract star names to his shows, and the castlist of a Confession is phenomenal. You’d have to turn to the Crown on netflix to see as many top British actors crammed on to the screen.
Martin Freeman heads the bill as Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher, the man who led the hunt. Luvvies playing career coppers too often look as if they’re holding their noses, but Freeman has the stiffnecked mannerisms down to a t.
Siobhan Finneran, never less than superb in a crime drama (Happy Valley, the Loch, the Moorside, you name it), handled the most traumatic scenes throughout the first episode, as Sian’s mother — at first exasperated that her daughter was missing, then frantic, then filled with dread ... but always in denial that the girl might actually be dead.
It was Imelda Staunton as fussy, kind-hearted neighbour Karen who raised the instinct for denial to its highest pitch. Her own daughter Becky had been missing for months, yet she refused to accept the girl would not return for her birthday.
everywhere the camera turned there were first-rate actors, with John thomson from Cold Feet particularly good as the deputy chief constable on the rack.
Rise Of The Nazis ( BBC2) featured too many actors, standing around in broody reconstructions instead of period footage.
the documentary, tracing adolf Hitler’s swift transition from political outsider to Chancellor of the reichstag, too often looked like an am- dram version of Babylon Berlin, the german crime thriller set in the early thirties. the bloke playing President Paul von Hindenburg was particularly unlucky, called upon to stand in his garden looking rather befuddled as the political plots whirled around him.
He had no dialogue but his walrus moustache was bristling like radio antennae, trying to transmit his thoughts.
the Yesterday channel does these nazi shows much more slickly, by assembling half a dozen experts and intercutting between their explanations.
at the moment, the Beeb — which once had a monopoly on history with gravitas — is failing to compete with the Freeview minnows.