The Fall, featuring oversexed
detective Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson), was stretched to a marathon
90 minutes for its final episode
The Fall,
BBC2’s nauseating rape fantasy with its pseudo-intellectual sheen that
glamourises sexual violence, was stretched to a marathon 90 minutes for
its final episode. It needed that long, because the story moved at the
pace of a tortoise walking through treacle.
Spector
might be under arrest, but he still had the police under his power. And
it wasn’t just the women who went weak-kneed at his sexual magnetism:
‘There’s something fascinating about him,’ panted detective Tom Anderson
(Colin Morgan from Merlin), ‘some strange allure.’
Every
demand Spector made was met instantly. ‘I don’t think I have a choice,’
Stella gasped huskily when her prisoner announced he would speak to no
one but her. Pausing only to don her pullover with the most plunging
neckline, she rushed to the interview room.
What
followed wasn’t so much an interrogation as a hot and heavy flirtation,
with plenty of close-ups of parted lips and heaving chests.
That
was just farcical, but far more unpleasant was the underlying
philosophy of the show. It has urged us to be voyeurs from the
beginning, in scenes where Spector laid out the corpses of his victims,
and subjected his teenage girlfriend to bondage sessions.
Writer Allan Cubitt peppered the sickest scenes with pretentious quotes from Nietzsche, but this was just porno-philosophy.
Stella
spelled out the show’s obnoxious creed when she told her ex-lover,
police chief Jim Burns, that he was morally no different from Spector.
All men are rapists, she was saying, and all women fear the men they
love might kill them.
There
was no conclusive ending. We don’t know if Spector is supposed to be
alive or dead. It doesn’t really matter, so long as this noisome drama
is never recommissioned.
Stella gasped huskily when her
prisoner Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) announced he would speak to no one
but her. What followed wasn’t so much an interrogation as a hot and
heavy flirtation
A far better murder mystery turned up in the last part of Britain’s Bloodiest Dynasty (C5), with the unexplained death of Richard II.
After he was deposed by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, Richard was apparently executed, but there wasn’t a mark on his body.
According
to Shakespeare, the killing was committed by a zealous nobleman with a
stiletto, and Henry felt so guilty that he had to go off on crusade —
the standard medieval technique, before the invention of Prozac, for
making yourself feel better. But hipster historian Dan Jones’s theory
was that Richard died of thirst in a castle dungeon.
Most
of us know Richard I —mate of Robin Hood’s, nicknamed the Lionheart,
looked like Sean Connery. And we all have a fair idea about Richard III —
had a hump, was caught short without a horse, got buried under a car
park. But Richard II is a bit of a blank ... and a blank page, in fact,
is just what King Grumpy liked.
He
would force aristocrats to stamp their seals on empty sheets of
parchment, which he could then fill in at leisure with their
confessions, pledges and bequests. Richard II, it turns out, invented
the blank cheque.
The
best aspect of Dan’s lurid history show has been his ability to tell
familiar tales from unorthodox viewpoints. Last night, he started with
the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which has been celebrated by Leftie
teachers in British schools for half a century as an early highpoint of
people power.
Dan
gave us the royalist take instead. The peasants’ demands were wild and
deluded: ‘Seven centuries later you’d call it communism. In medieval
England it’s just bonkers.’
As
a boy king, Richard II, who ruled England in the 14th century, was so
foul-tempered that he ‘blew his top at even the slightest attempt to
curb his behaviour’. But Dan was overlooking a fundamental factor. King
Richard was not a tyrant. He was a teenager. They all behave like that.