Which brings me, rather circuitously, to The Last Weekend (Sunday 20 August ITV1), Mick Ford’s adaptation of Blake Morrison’s novel. I wanted this to work, as Blake Morrison is a fine writer, and by and large I thought it did, mainly because it kept the first person narration — done in flashback as well as flashforward — which was such an enjoyable feature of the novel. In some ways it was essential to the plot because the narrator was very much in the “unreliable” vain.
The two seemed unlikely friends, one rich and Southern, the other poor and Northern, but they had one thing in common, they were both competitive. Whenever they met up they had a tournament — golf, tennis, cycling — but the true reason for their rivalry was Ollie’s wife, who also happened to be Ian’s former girlfriend.
Now, the danger with having a character address the camera directly is that you associate the conceit with comedy, the most notable example of the genre being Michael Caine in Alfie. But The Last Weekend wanted it both ways: it wanted to be seen as a black comedy but it also wanted to be taken seriously as a suspenseful drama, and once the fourth wall was broken it was always going to be harder to suspend disbelief.
In consequence of this there were moments when it seemed to slip in to Jonathan Creek-style exposition: with Ian telling the viewer that “each piece of information matters”. The idea of him watching himself was better handled and appropriately creepy — a central character acting as his own chorus. But over all, the mood was uneven, as if it could never quite decide how dark it wanted to be. The novel was able to control the tension better, as well as build the unease more atmospherically.
I have yet to see the final episode of this three-parter, but I did watch the second one as a preview — the plot of which I won’t give away — and it was better, darker and more nuanced than the first, so stay with it.
And so to the kind of television they put on in the wee small hours for the benefit of insomniacs. I was curious to watch the new series of Great British Ghosts (Friday 24 August, Yesterday Channel) on two counts. The first is that I wanted to know how to make a programme about ghosts when ghosts don’t exist.
The second is that I was curious to know what the presenter Michaela Strachan looks like these days. She, you may recall, was the subject of Gary’s scrapbook in that episode of Men Behaving Badly from about 1995. And I had missed the programmes she’d featured in since then. Anyway, for the first episode she went to a supposedly haunted pub in Glastonbury and she talked to people — people whose development didn’t appear to be arrested — about their ghost sightings.
It proved to be unintentionally hilarious. The closest anyone came to citing evidence of ghostly activity — which wasn’t really very close at all — was the woman who claimed her TV had come on in the middle of the night. Strachan, bless her, managed to keep a straight face as she asked if there could be any other explanation for why the TV might have come on. No, the woman said, because it could only be turned on by the remote control. Well there you go. Proof. It seems when ghosts can’t sleep they like to put on TV just like the rest of us. In fact, it was probably a repeat of Great British Ghosts the ghost wanted to watch.Strachan hasn’t changed much, by the way.
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