Tim Teeman
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It’s night-time, the city’s a horrible place, James Nesbitt’s stubble is bristling and he is rifling through bins looking grumpy. For one depressing second, it looked as if Midnight Man (ITV1) was going to be Murphy’s Law, the offcuts. This time Nesbitt is not a cynical, flawed, but fundamentally good policeman. He is a cynical, flawed, but fundamentally good journalist called Max. It’s strange to find journalist heroes on TV: we are rarely portrayed as seekers of truth, but rather scumbags.
Max only roots through rubbish because his glittering career in words is (temporarily) over. He revealed his source in a government scandal, who killed herself. Ever since, to keep the cash flowing, he sends scandalous (and very literal) rubbish to his editor, who is more the amoral journo scum-bag we’re familiar with – wouldn’t it be terrible if journalists were ever portrayed as human beings?
Because this is a Nesbitt drama, Max is also a cynical, flawed but fundamentally good father (he would probably be a cynical, flawed but fundamentally good buyer of Rolos if time allowed) with a physical flaw that throws all the other flaws into relief: he cannot stand daylight, a condition somebody called “finger-phobia”. Being a cynical, though fundamentally flawed journalist I laughed when I heard that, thought I’d make a cheap gag in print, then looked it up and discovered what I was meant to hear was “phengo-phobia” (it’s also called eosophobia, but where’s the lame gag potential in mishearing that?).
If only journalism was as exciting and easy as it was for Max. He was tailing a lap dancer who was meant to be having an affair with a Cabinet minister. They were conducting this affair, supposedly discreetly, in a mews house – except that the Cabinet minister opened the door and greeted his adulterous paramour with a hug and kiss in front of the cab driver. Implausibly, all the disparate stories and leads joined up to make one giant story. Why does television portray print journalism so lazily?
Max, in his floppy sunhat, asked people questions, got direct answers and great quotes. He bribed a lap dancer not with cash but a sandwich. No obfuscating police press officer for Max – the desk sergeant at the cop shop sung like a canary: “My inspector thinks it looks like one of those honour killings.”
But of course the death of a young man called Majid (was he Muslim?) wasn’t an honour killing; ITV wanted us to be educated, so we were treated to a worthy few minutes of a grieving family insisting that Majid wasn’t “a fanatic”. We hadn’t thought he was: he was a kid who was shot in the head after playing football. It’s odd having a drama imputing a kind of bigotry on to its audience, a bigotry it didn’t hold. If, as the drama insisted, so many people of a certain group and political persuasion had been killed, a newspaper – many newspapers – would be investigating it.
This was clearly another drama straining to say important, predictably crowd-pleasing things about our post 9/11 or 7/7 world: echoes of David Kelly’s suicide, Islamophobia and the encroachment of a police state were stirred in. There was a bizarre credence given to the conspiracy theories to which Max subscribed (and imparts to his daughter as bedtime stories): the State was killing people it sees as undesirable.
Max’s big lead (possibly in the bedroom too) is the lady who works for the shadowy defence policy organisation, who is having an affair with her married boss. “I’m in it for the sex, not the washing,” she trilled – such an egregious line confirmed that this was one of those dramas in which characters spoke and behaved in no way believably.
Still, if you accept its ridiculous plot Midnight Man is gripping (if only to see where the next credibility-stretching twist is going to come from) and no one does wry and tortured like the talented Nesbitt. The evil state assassins have ripped off the same technique as Javier Bardem’s lumbering killer in the Coen brothers’ brilliant movie No Country for Old Men, with guns that pump whooshingly quiet bullets into foreheads (as poor Max’s wife suffered at the end of part one). The denouement will surely see Nesbitt placed in danger in paralysing daylight. But I bet he’ll still file a first-class front page – and overcome his fingerphobia.
Out of the box
— Poor Out of the Blue, our newest addiction – and clearly an acquired taste. The Aussie daytime soap about the pretty and possibly murderous thirtysomethings is leaving BBC One and moving to BBC Two just three weeks after it began. From May 19 it will be shown at 1pm on BBC Two. Viewing figures have plummeted from 1.2 million to 654,000. A spokesman said that “by moving the show to BBC Two, we hope it will find a stronger home”. We shall remain loyal.
— Veteran documentary-maker Marilyn Gaunt has told Broadcast that her upcoming documentary Class of ’62 – From 16 to 60will be her last and that most commissioning editors for documentaries have lost the plot. “(They) see the film-makers as the hunter-gatherers who go out and collect the dead meat and serve it up to them to cut up as they want.”
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