10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Don't let your preconceptions stop you, this is a fascinating TV drama
'What?'
'They're going to shut down the country.'
We learn Denmark is being evacuated because, like much of flatland northern Europe, it's about to go underwater.
But don't for a second assume that what follows is some Will Smith-scale, CGI-coated disaster movie sequence of events. Instead, this series, a massive hit in Europe, focuses instead on the events surrounding one extended family, who are tipped off about the government's decision to close the country and exit six million people.
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The effect of this is we're immediately gripped by the moral issues faced; if almost all of your money is invested in your home, and it's about to become worthless, should you try and sell before word gets out? Where will you live? How will you live? You may be a successful architect in Denmark, but will France let you in? Can you even think about bringing new life into the world when you don't know which country you will be living in?
The focal point of the series is Laura, (Amaryllis August), a happy 19-year-old at school who just before the announcement falls in love with the boy with the floppy hair and the huge grin. Can you stop this giant wave of passion any more than you can stop the ocean from flooding into your house? Laura's decisions, we learn, impact her entire family.
Yes, it could have been tempting to focus on the visual horror element but instead the director – aided by a quite brilliant cast – has chosen to home in on the detail of evacuation. The desperate-to-leave Danes find themselves drowning in red tape. They have to make immense sacrifices, such as the young mum whose nine-year-old soccer star son Lucas has been selected to join Liverpool FC. Yet UK immigration won't allow her in, and she's forced to flee to Romania.
And while it could have been easy to hammer home the existentialist crises we face from global warming, the fears held by many over immigration, this seven-parter is way too clever to throw buckets of freezing cold water in our face, instead the themes working through the characters. And it's all the more powerful to witness the white, middle class Scandinavians finding themselves being pinballed around Europe.
This is clever, engrossing, underplayed television in which devastation is played out via the emotional reactions, yet it's given scale and filmed in several countries. Most importantly, it's a powerfully stare into the soul of humanity, asking how we would act given similar circumstances. And it's a great reminder that not all the great TV these days is found on the major streamers.
Tom Hughes as Dr James Ford and Zoe Telford as Dr Kate McAllister (Image: free) Yet sometimes it is. As we know from John Hamm's Mad Men days, he does vulnerable better than a tiny tot wearing a thin baby-grow lying in a cold pram in the middle of a Scots winter. This time around he's starring in the wonderfully crafted Your Friends & Neighbours, (Apple TV, Fridays) as the Maserati-driving hedge-fund manager Coop, who's life smacks against the backboard when he discover wife Mel shooting hoops in the bedroom with his basketball-playing best friend. Just when things couldn't be any worse, Coop loses his job and believes he has no choice but to take up cat burgling the upstate New York homes of those whose parties he still attends.
This is a lovely satire on the shallowness of fatuous lifestyles, false smiles and faked friendships. But at its heart is the realisation that Andy Cooper really wants to put his ex-wife under pressure. This week Hamm's eyes were at their wistful best as Coop and Mel took a college -finding trip, which became a revealing walk in the garden of remembrance.
Still on the theme of choices and consequences, Malpractice (ITV1, Sunday and ITVX) is back doing for docs What Line of Duty did for cops. And here's the delicious dilemma faced by Dr James Ford (Tom Hughes). Who would you treat first – a woman with postpartum psychosis, or a pregnant crack addict about to be sectioned?
Written bv former NHS doctor Grace Ofori-Attah, the first episode allowed for a neat slow build up. We like Ford. We know he has to be in two places at once and he can't clone himself. The pressure mounts. He cuts corners. Or does he? He tells white lies. But what is the handsome young psychiatrist? An innocent man – or an arrogant, entitled, thick-skinned trickster?
It's up to Callahan and Adjei (Helen Behan and Jordan Kouamé) from the Medical Investigations Unit to find out, and we discover Torquemada wasn't nearly so tough as these two. But of course, also under scrutiny is the perilous state of the NHS, which sees Ford make his choices the first place.
There are consequences too for Ross Kemp's appearance in Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC1, Tuesday). And we're not just talking about the long-term impact of the opening scene in which the EastEnder is seen jogging while wearing a funny little hat with Shrek ears. (A nickname beckons). In fact, that was about the most entertaining part of this utterly dreary hour-long excuse for documentary.
Ross Kemp uncovered his family's history (Image: free) Kemp now spends much of his life peering into other people's lives via TV 'investigations' but he really wants to have a good talk with himself and investigate why he agreed to take part in this series at all. Okay, it's not every week that we can expect the participant to discover their great uncle Barney was once Blackbeard's best pirate friend, or great granny Ethel worked alongside Florence Nightingale in the Crimea. But the best/worst tale this hour came up with was that Kemp's great grandfather Pop (short for his nickname Popeye) was on a ship that was torpedoed during wartime. Who'd have thought that possible?
To make it all worse, when actors are on this show they feel compelled to act; excited/astonished/devasted – whatever the moment calls for, even when it doesn't. Ross Kemp, sadly, didn't hold back on the emoting, offering a little sprinkling of tears at the realisation that Pop, (who liked a good drink, another major revelation) spent some time in the drink before being rescued.
If the BBC continues to release episodes such as this, it could have a major impact. We may begin to believe that either subjects steer researchers away from the really interesting backstories (why focus only on the mother's side?) or that the format has simply become so lazy it's prepared to sell us the inane. Take action now, Auntie.
