I, Jack Hall is a riot of a show

New Statesman​

23-04-2025

Not another one! But yes – bang – five minutes into Chris Lang's new six-part drama, yet another big name gets it. One minute Trevor Eve, who plays a plain-speaking, Mancunian multi-millionaire called Jack Wright, is talking to his wife, Sally (Nikki Amuka-Bird), on the telephone from their stately pile in the Home Counties (she's in Paris, in an apartment with parquet floors that is straight out of one of my most painfully covetous fever dreams). The next, he's lying face down on the floor of a pigeon loft, with only some ancient guano and a few feathers for company.
Here, though, is where it all starts. Lang, best known as the writer of the brilliant Unforgotten, has gone for broke in I, Jack Wright (it's on U&Alibi now, but will eventually show up on BBC One). How daring to begin with the reading of a will. How very retro. And yet, it works. When the Wright family and various of Jack's employees – an estate manager, a long-suffering secretary – assemble in Marston Hall's panelled dining room the day after his funeral, they're at once stock figures from a Golden Age detective novel, and compelling character studies. Each one jostles for position. Each one has a secret, a grudge, or both. Wright moved dramatically upwards in life, from poverty to huge wealth, and around the table is the collateral damage, anxiously awaiting its compensation payment.
Lang is such a good writer. Plot, dialogue, juicy subtext: he can do them all. A particular treat here is the way he bookends each episode with flash-forwards from a documentary about Wright's death in which members of the clan speak straight to camera (here are clues, red herrings, black humour and a delicious reverse portentousness). He must know the danger of cliché is ever present, a cliff edge over which it would be easy to fall. But he and his producers have gathered a great cast, with the result that even the most (potentially) cartoony moments work: Daniel Rigby as John, the good son (he runs Wright's brick-making business in Savile Row shirts with contrast cuffs); John Simm as Gray, the bad son (a music-producer relic of the Haçienda who's neck-deep in debt and coke); Gemma Jones as Jack's first wife, who married him when he had nothing. Rigby and Simm especially are fabulous, the one awkward, uncertain and brooding, the other a seething perpetual victim.
And so much is going on, all the time. Two of the women are having illicit affairs. A daughter, from Wright's second marriage, is missing. John's wife, Georgia (Zoë Tapper), is like a character from a Jacobean tragedy, all deadly whispering ambition. ('You remember hard, don't you?' she spits, urging a fightback.) Above all, there's the mystery of the will, and why the man who wrote it was seemingly so determined to wreak havoc. If it makes no sense to its beneficiaries (and, er, non-beneficiaries), even better, suspense-wise, is that we can't understand its spite and whimsy either. I've gobbled up three episodes so far – it's so watchable – and I'm still as much in the dark as when it first began.
Is there a moral here somewhere? Has Lang something to say about money, and the relatively small impact it has on a person's innermost happiness? One thinks, inevitably, of another of his projects: The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe, in which Eddie Marsan played John Darwin, who faked his death at sea in order to collect £250,000 life insurance – a story that works as a parable of the misery born of avariciousness.
I'm happy to feast on the glorious, slightly camp set pieces in I, Jack Wright: the funeral, when Sally looks like she's modelling Dior's New Look; a later exhumation, which shamelessly (on Lang's part) takes place at night in pouring rain, and is attended by his widow. However, I also sense something scrupulous at work below: an instinct, perhaps, that the good are not always rewarded, and the bad rarely punished. Lang, I would suggest, knows that it's more important to be at ease in your skin than to have a throbbing great account at Coutts. But let's see. This riot of a show is written for our entertainment above all, and I'm not even the tiniest bit embarrassed to say that I love it.
I, Jack Wright
U&Alibi
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[See also: Pope Francis's divided house]
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