CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: Secrets to a happy life? Don’t do drugs or star in Channel 5 dramas
Desperate Measures
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Panorama: Ukraine’s War Diaries
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Bank cashiers, remember them? They belong to a lost era when banks had branches in the real world instead of existing as online apps, and shops accepted actual banknotes.
Desperate Measures (Ch5), set 15 years ago, sees Amanda Abbington as a cashier behind a Perspex screen at a bank counter. Customers queue for their turn to pay in a cheque or transfer funds between accounts . . . really, who’d have thought the Noughties could seem as distant as the Victorian days?
When cashier Rowan doesn’t feel like serving somebody, she can simply turn her name-plaque around, to display the message, ‘Position closed’. That’s something I don’t miss. Her position is permanently closed when the bank announces it is ‘restructuring’ and ‘downsizing’. And for Rowan, deeply in debt, that is just the start of a very bad day.
Earlier this year, Jason Watkins played a fisherman in The Catch on Ch5, who was being simultaneously blackmailed, stalked, bankrupted and framed. But he was let off lightly, compared to Rowan.
Her teenage son, Finn, got mixed up in a £25,000 drugs deal on his way to college. He fled, chucking the money in a skip. That evening, as Finn and his mum shared a Chinese takeaway, local ganglord Kristof called round with a pistol and a final demand. When Rowan pleaded she didn’t have that kind of money, he ate her noodles.
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: Desperate Measures (Ch5), set 15 years ago, sees Amanda Abbington as a cashier behind a Perspex screen at a bank counter
Trying to raise some money by pawning her mum’s engagement ring, she stumbled into an armed robbery. She recognised one of the gunmen as her ex-boyfriend, but they nicked her ring anyway.
And when she tried to flee town, Kristof kidnapped Finn.
The moral of the story? Don’t do drugs, kids, and definitely don’t star in dramas on Channel 5.
All this melodrama calls for some extreme acting, and Abbington excels at high emotion. She sweats, she shrieks, she sobs, and she always stays convincing. Her Manchester accent is better, too, than the Scouse she’s been doing in that patchy sitcom Family Pile on ITV.
Also excellent is Gabor Nagypal as Kristof, in a polo neck and a double-breasted jacket that makes him look like a villain from the superb French crime drama Spiral. Now there’s something from the mid-2000s that does give me pangs of nostalgia.
Film of trench fighting in Ukraine also seems to belong to a different era — World War I. It’s difficult to grasp that the footage in Panorama: Ukraine’s War Diaries (BBC1), much of it shot with bodycams on the front line as shells exploded all around, documents a war happening in Europe right now.
Those caught up in it struggled to believe it could be happening, too. The sense of unreality was magnified by old-fashioned graphics of maps, with ink blots spreading where the fighting was most intense. We seem to have reverted to the visual language of warfare in the 20th century, as well as the tactics and the tanks.
Families huddled together in the Kyiv underground, like Londoners during the Blitz — with the difference that Ukraine’s Metro is equipped with steel blast doors, designed in the Cold War to withstand a nuclear blast.
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: It’s difficult to grasp that the footage in Panorama: Ukraine’s War Diaries (BBC1), much of it shot with bodycams on the front line as shells exploded all around, documents a war happening in Europe right now
For British viewers, the most telling contribution came from teenager Maksym, who abandoned his biology studies to join up. Armed only with a Kalashnikov rifle, he fought bravely but to little effect.
But when rocket launchers arrived from Britain, everything changed. Maksym ceased to look like a scared volunteer. He was a professional soldier — no longer fighting with 20th-century weaponry, and convinced he was on the winning side.
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