Dead Hiding to Nothing

I had to struggle not to hoot with derisive laughter upon seeing Mandy Antoinette reunited with his long-lost doppelgänger - the green slime (actually green custard) which Plane Stupid campaigner Leila Deen threw over him. There's a particularly choice slo-mo at about 30s in. My heroine!*****Red Riding, which began a three-part run on Channel 4 last night, was like a cross between Heartbeat and George Gently meets Our Friends In The North directed by Blue Velvet-era David Lynch. That, by the way, is not really a good thing.Briefly, it concerns itself with life in Yorkshire during the 1970s - specifically (in this episode), life on the political and policing front line in 1974. There were dollops of grisly murders, police brutality and brown envelope corruption. Eddie Dunford (well played by Andrew Garfield) plays a young (startlingly young, actually) crime reporter on the Yorkshire Post, who has ballsed-up his career in London (so soon? He must have gone straight from sixth form) and has returned, with his tail slightly between his legs, to make his way in the provinces.I've scanned the reviews this morning and most papers seem to regard it as a success. It was almost a success - like Paula Radcliffe in the Olympic Marathon in Athens - in that it was tantalising, incredibly well cast and acted and authentically smoky. The trouble was that after about twenty minutes I didn't believe a word of it.There may be any number of reasons for this. Maybe it was all too long ago for me to remember what that period was like. Maybe you had to live in Yorkshire to get the full flavour of such casual police brutality. The cutting and direction, as suggested above, was wacky, to put it mildly. I think the director was trying to stop it all being boringly linear, and in that he succeeded, but only at the cost of sense and verisimilitude. The story - the co-mingling of one thread concerning a crooked property developer using the Yorkshire Police to drive out a gypsy encampment with another thread surrounding the abduction of a series of young schoolgirls was standard TV fare, as was the subsequent sexual involvement of the investigative reporter with the mother of one of the disparu. But we were asked to accept far too many elisions as givens - Eddie Dunford's investigative colleague Barry Gannon's dossier on various shady characters was produced out of a hat like one of Mrs McGuffin's pies. The Mr Big at the heart of it - Sean Bean as a fleshy and very unlikeable Johnny Dawson - was able to call on the services of the Constabulary at will, but since he was shot and killed in the final act, it seems unlikely that the extent of his tentacles will be later exhumed and examined. The ending, as well, was horribly rushed.Given that I'm prepared to waste my time watching Trial And Retribution (see Rot passim) I'm almost certain that I'll give the next two episodes of Red Riding a chance. The problem, for me, is that it clashes with Skins, and Skins is picking up a bit after a slow start.The format of the programme is that each week we focus on one of the characters; this week it was the turn of JJ. JJ has so far shown himself to be little more than a cypher on the show - a foil for the on-going spat between Freddie and Cook, who are vying for the affections of Effy. I've met Effy (well, not the real Effy, obviously, but her type) and I can tell you that she's not going off with either of them. She'll allow Cook to enjoy sexual congress because she knows (or she thinks she knows) that he's not interested in anything that smacks of commitment, but she can see Freddie's need a mile away, like the Goodwin Sands lighthouse on a moonless summer night. Effy, poor dear, is terrified of love, particularly of falling in it, and will deny herself any chance of it happening no matter who suffers (including herself).Enter JJ (also hopelessly smitten by Effy) whose unfolding backstory gives us a possibly autistic boy, certainly one with ... ahem ... "mental health issues", whose medication regimen would floor an elephant. In the end, he gives some of his new pills to Cook, under the influence of which certain secrets come out (that Effy really loves Freddie, but can't admit it; that Cook's been "popping Panda" ("Panda" being Effy's crackers mate Pandora) - all of which is spilt with exactly the wrong audience) and so things are then set up nicely for next week. In the end JJ finally loses his cherry to Emily, the show's now (thanks to JJ's big mouth) openly-gay twin She stresses that this is a one-time favour to a friend.The final scene was extremely touching: JJ comes down to breakfast with Emily and sits down opposite his mother, whose face tells us in a most affecting way that she at last sees the beginning of her son's transition from semi-outsider to normal young man. However fragile or illusory this phase is, you can see from her expression (and from the foregoing hour) that this is what she has for so long so devoutly wanted.It all sounds confusing, and messy, and it is. Even I can remember my teenage years (which were not spent in the hotbed of an inner-city sixth form college) resembling this inchoate circling for position, trying to work out who the hell you were and what you wanted, though I'm pretty sure that there weren't quite as many accommodating lesbians in my day. For the most part, as a middle-aged man, I feel that Skins makes a pretty good fist of capturing the essence of what it is to be an adultchild.