Nicola Walker: another fine actor playing strong women's roles

Every now and then an actor, sometimes one who’s been around a while without quite becoming a household name, seems to be everywhere and in everything.

It happens in Hollywood. There was a time when directors seemed to be queuing up to have Meryl Streep in any film they made – and, indeed, any actor of note wanted to play opposite her.

The Meryl Streep case makes another point about this phenomenon: it tends to happen most often with female actors. And what’s true of Hollywood is even truer of the small screen in Britain.

Take Olivia Collman. She appeared in Peep Show in 2003, I suspect with no suspicion that the series would run on until 2015. She was good and she was spotted. She was given a steadily increasing number of parts. And then suddenly, from about 2010, she seemed to be in a string of outstanding productions, such as Rev, Mr Sloane and Broadchurch (well, let’s say outstanding for season 1 of Broadchurch and draw a discreet veil over season 2).

Now the same thing seems to be happening to Nicola Walker. She had a secondary part in Four Weddings and a Funeral way back in 1994, and a good but short run in Spooks, before becoming a TV fixture thanks to Last Tango in Halifax, hardly classic cinema, but nonetheless gently entertaining. And certainly her performance was excellent, as a woman who managed to combine both strength and fragility.

But just recently she’s come into her own in two fine series, Unforgotten and River.

In the first, she plays Detective Chief Inspector Cassie Stuart, leading a murder investigation triggered by the discovery of a skeleton in the basement floor of a demolished building. This seems to be a theme that’s doing the rounds at the moment: the device was also used in From Darkness which, despite having another excellent female lead actor, Anne-Marie Duff, is far less good than Unforgotten.

Nicola Walker as Cassie Stuart in Unforgotten
with Sanjeev Bhaskar who's excellent as her number 2

Walker perfectly creates Cassie Stuart’s character, who avoids any macho attempt to impose her will on her subordinates but, nonetheless, has enough confidence in her judgement to back it and insist on its being followed, without actually throwing her weight around. The interplay with the other police officers is beautifully handled: her unaggressive but resolute behaviour achieves results, if sometimes at the expense of irritation among her colleagues who don’t at first believe she’s right, and are irritated by the work she generates for them.

Most notably, for a while she’s alone in believing they are dealing with a murder and that they can solve it.

The series brings together a whole string of fine actors, playing well-defined and fascinating characters – some old, from the generation of the young man whose skeleton has been discovered, others in mid-career, including the police. It’s an engaging story, well structured and played out. And Nicola Walker puts in a great performance in another of those fine, strong female roles that are beginning to become more common – she’s strong, but can be deeply upset by some of the harrowing information he discovers. And that makes her all the more convincing.

As for River, its basic premise is brilliantly intriguing. Cleverly, given the attraction to British audiences of what’s come to be known as ‘Nordic Noir’ – the highly original thrillers that come this way from Scandinavia – the lead role of Detective Inspector John River is played by Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård. So we have a Swedish detective working for the Metropolitan Police – Nordic Noir in London.

The series uses the character of River for a strikingly ingenious play of sanity within insanity. River suffers from a psychiatric condition which leaves him seeing, and indeed conversing at some length and even physically interacting – he has a number of fights – with dead people who had some kind of relationship with him, such as murder victims. He remains an outstanding detective either despite this mental illness, or perhaps even because of it.

The series handles this theme with great intelligence. It ensures that he never learns anything from any of these ghosts that he didn’t already know. Indeed, there are some lovely moments when a ghost will say something like “well, what did you think?” when he discovers something that the ghost never told him. That way, the spectator can accept that the ghosts are creations of his own mind.

In River, Nicola Walker is Detective Sergeant Jackie ‘Stevie’ Stevenson, his dead former partner – a partner in the professional, police sense, though as the series progresses we begin to suspect that either or perhaps both of them might have been interested in a relationship that went further than that.

Walker plays the role with the same skill and panache as she brought to Cassie Stuart in Unforgotten, but for the development of a completely different character. Stevie is a woman from an extended family in the criminal underworld, so by going into the police, she was something of a black sheep. That background makes her tough, self-reliant, funny, with a great love for popular music and fast food, and a strong streak of street wisdom.

Deeply hidden in that background there lies a secret that also gave her character a certain vulnerability. It came out in her last investigation, just before her death. The series has us following River through the process of investigation that leads to his discovering what lay behind her death, and does it  in a way that keep us interested, entertained and often amazed.

Two fine series. With great, strong female characters. Both played by Nicola Walker – and I promised last time I wrote on this subject that I’d talk about her.

My promise is kept. Now over to you to enjoy the series, if you haven’t already.

Israeli and British thrillers: the good and the bad

Did you watch Prisoners of War, or Hatufim if I can allow myself to use the Hebrew name without the Hebrew characters? This was the original on which the American series Homeland was based.

Yoram Toledano and Ishai Golan in Hatufim

The US series had some excellent actors, but they had to make up for a painful thinness of plot. A Marine sergeant returns from eight years in terrorist captivity and, seemingly within days, he’s in Congress and frontrunner to be the next Vice President? Really? In the Israeli series, the equivalent character is seen scanning Jobs Vacant columns, looking for something he can go for after seventeen years (not merely eight) out of the employment market – years in which his friends have built careers.

In addition, in Ishai Golan Hatufim offers one of those truly memorable characters, ambivalent, vulnerable, terrified, courageous. The series would be worth watching just for him.

The only original spark that Homeland was the equivalent character, played masterfully by Claire Danes as a brilliant spy struggling with mental illness. She's great, but is that enough to support four seasons? I found it couldn’t get me through two.

Hatufim, on the other hand, compels from beginning to end, through two fine seasons (and there were no more). Who’s up to what? Who’s on whose side? Who’s gone over to the enemy, who’s stayed loyal? We’re forced to reconsider our judgements again and again, and not by artificial devices, but in ways that remain completely coherent with the overall narrative. Nor is the enemy entirely bad, with plenty of sympathetic characters (to be fair, as in Homeland), as well as a completely dire one, introduced in powerfully horrific fashion at the beginning of season 2.

So good was Hatufim, that I turned to the next Israeli series broadcast on the BBC with high expectations. Hostages ( Bnei Aruba) sadly disappointed them.

Hostages: no way to spend a quiet evening at home

The acting, I should say, was excellent and the series had Hatufim’s strength in creating atmosphere. Those two factors were compelling enough to keep me watching to the end. But the plot! My dear. It was as weak as Homeland. The event that kicks off the action is the kidnapping, in their own home, of the whole family of a leading surgeon who is slated to carry out a minor operation on the Israeli Prime Minister. The aim of her abductors? That she kill her patient on the operating table.

Throughout the series, a central theme is that the would-be assassins are able to watch the surgeon wherever she goes, such is their skill and their support from inside the security services. With such power, it’s hard to understand why they don’t just bump off the Prime Minister themselves, instead of going for a risky abduction that can (and does) go wrong, and relying on a proxy to act for them.

The answer is that was what it took to generate material for ten episodes.

More tedious still, characters keep being left in positions where they could phone the police or otherwise call for help. And somehow they never do. “Why,” I wanted to ask the producers, “do you demand that viewers believe that people taken captive in their home, and presented with an excellent opportunity to contact the police, would fail to do so?”

Again the answer is that the series wouldn’t have lasted beyond two episodes, and they needed ten. But I have to say that “because we need to keep the series going” strikes me as a poor justification or implausible plot devices.

On the theme of strong and weak plot devices, did you see Broadchurch?

Season 1 was extraordinary television. It proved in a British-made series what the Scandinavians had shown before: you don’t need a string of bodies to generate real tension in a thriller – just one will do.

The study of the impact of a violent death on a small community made excellent viewing, especially the way suspicion, leading to persecution, can fall unjustly on individuals whose only offence is to be different from those around them. And a particular atmosphere was created by the decision not to let even the actors know at the outset who the perpetrator was: it seems that making the revelation a shock to the actors made it all the more shocking to the audience.

Such was the success of season 1 that the producers had to make a season 2. Alas. It’s Homeland compared to Hatufim. Instead of gripping thriller we had meandering soap, at least as concerned with who bedded whom (and whether they still were) than with the central criminal concern – to which another one was added, presumably to give us more to get excited about, though the reality is that it just blurred the focus.

All this against the background of court proceedings which pit two allegedly outstanding lawyers against each other, one of whom conducts such a lamentable case that the eventual verdict becomes inevitable (note that I don’t mention which one: you’ll get no spoilers from me – the series spoils itself perfectly adequately on its own).

Broadchurch. Olivia Colman was superb as ever.
And whatshisname was OK

The only redeeming feature? The performance of Olivia Colman, incapable of taking on any part without investing it with a quality beyond most other actors.

If you haven’t seen Hatufim or season 1 of Broadchurch, then you could do a lot worse than to watch them. Hostages or season 2 of Broadchurch? Only watch them if the only alternative is re-runs of Jeremy Clarkson in Top Gear.

If you've let "The Escape Artist" escape, get him back in your clutches

It appals me how I can completely miss a film or series I really shouldn’t have. 

When I say “completely”, I really mean completely: I’d never even heard of The Escape Artist until Amazon decided to recommend it to me, and I thought I might give it a whirl, principally on the basis that I find David Tennant worth watching. Certainly, I liked him as the somewhat manic (desperately ill and, just to make sure we’ve missed none of the potential pathos, bereaved) detective inspector in Broadchurch, opposite a stunningly good Olivia Colman as his sergeant.

You didn’t see Broadchurch? One of the best British police thrillers for years – the first to have learned from the Scandinavians that you don’t need a string of bodies to make a murder drama dramatic, that just one can generate all the suspense you need (“one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic”, though I’m not sure many of us would quote Stalin as a movie critic). I strongly recommend you catch up quickly on season 1, especially since season 2 starts next week.

But then get hold of The Escape Artist. 

Tennant’s not a policeman in this one, but a lawyer, specifically a junior barrister. For those not familiar with the arcane ways of the English legal system, a junior barrister can be a senior lawyer – even an old one – but one who has never “taken silk”, as we quaintly refer to the moment he or she becomes a Queen’s Counsel (strictly speaking, “Queen’s Counsel learned in the law” – isn’t that great?) , thereby earning a silk gown (no, you don’t have to wait another ten years to get the high heels to go with it). 

David Tennant and still more junior colleague looking good at work

Some years ago I came across a barrister (the cousin of a colleague, if you must know – yes, it’s that kind of story: not quite “a chap in a pub told me” but not far off) who had suffered a nervous breakdown from having successfully defended a rapist who then went on to rape again. It’s clear, and a principle strongly stated in The Escape Artist, that everyone deserves a defence, but it must indeed be hard when someone like David Tennant’s character artfully builds the escape for a man who turns out to be – how shall I put this to avoid spoilers? – let’s just say, no better than he should be.

Incidentally, his turning out to be no better than he should be leads to the first episode ending with some of the tensest TV I’ve seen for years.

Careful: the one on the left may turn out not to be so nice after all

The result is excellent drama, in which we swing from rooting for the defence, to rooting for the prosecution, to ultimately, by a convoluted but gripping route, rooting for perpetration of a serious crime. Brilliant. It's a single–season series, with just three one-hour episodes, making it less long than two decent-length films. We watched it in one sitting: once into it, it’s hard to tear yourself away.

On the way, we even saw how the Scottish legal system differs from the English, not something many people know about. Ever heard of the verdict “not proven”, alongside “guilty” and “not guilty”? They have it in Scotland. No wonder the pressure for independence seems to grow unstoppably – why, they’re so much more subtle in their thinking.

Tennant’s Scots, as it happens. And gives a great performance in The Escape Artist. Not to be missed.