WHERE would TV dramatists be without crime? Particularly crime against women? Yes, let’s sigh, grumble and moan; for Liar (STV, Monday) is yet another series about a pretty blonde rape victim, with more predictable scenes of a tipsy woman having a good time only to end up in a clinic having swabs taken. Sigh, grumble, moan.
Well, that’s what I was prepared for, but Liar was pleasantly surprising!
It’s a new drama from Harry and Jack Williams, the brothers who wrote The Missing, and it’s going up against BBC1’s new Monday night crime thriller, Rellik – which they also wrote.
So we can agree these bros know what they’re doing, and I was wrong to feel little ripples of disappointment when Liar set itself up as a standard, seen-it-all-before, drama about rape.
Joanne Frogatt plays Laura, a newly single woman who is set up on a date with Andrew (Ioan Gruffudd), a handsome heart surgeon. They have a wonderful candlelit dinner, a romantic walk home, and she invites him up to her flat.
Everything seems perfect. The only nagging issue is the title of the show: why is it called Liar? What is there to lie about when they’re both having such a lovely time? She’s a nice teacher. He’s a nice doctor. The wine is poured. All’s well – isn’t it?
Then comes the morning after: the candles are extinguished and the glow is gone. Laura awakes in the groggy, grey light and is horrified. She says Andrew raped her.
This is where my disappointment flared: she’ll get tearful and go to the police. He’ll act all bewildered and affronted at being arrested. There will be an unpleasant trial and many points will be made about the justice system’s treatment of rape cases. We’ve seen all this before.
But then the story sprouted some wickedly unexpected thorns. Laura seems to have a history of mental instability, and this could drive the story in any of several tantalising directions.
It could suggest she’s deluded and has imagined the rape, or that she’s malicious and has fabricated the attack. It could also mean that the rape was genuine but the lawyers will use her mental illness against her.
And what of Andrew, the noble heart surgeon? His character developed some darker shades, too, as we learned his wife had committed suicide and that Andrew might not be the solemn, decent widower we first assumed him to be.
So the image of our cosy couple on their first date fell apart like a shaken kaleidoscope, and we were now faced with two fragile people bristling with secrets, traumas, and slowly emerging back stories. He says he’s innocent.
She says he raped her. At this point there’s no way of predicting which direction the story will take. It was a shame, then, that the writers had to shove in some superfluous elements at the end of the first episode.
We have enough on our plates, thank you, and didn’t need the added plot line of Laura’s sister having an affair with her own ex-boyfriend. That just seemed like something out of EastEnders. Don’t the writers trust us to invest in the devious, shifting, evolving story they’ve given us in Laura and Andrew and their one night together? Are we toddlers who need other toys dangled before us?
THE Search For A New Earth (BBC2, Monday) has arrived at the perfect time. The news is filled with threats of nuclear weapons and the destructive effects of climate change, and the world’s population continues to climb. How sustainable is this?
Not very, says Stephen Hawking. In this two-part series, he argues we need to get the hell out of here. Earth has been “humanity’s safe haven” for thousands of years, but we’ve wrecked the place and the list of threats is growing. The rising population means space and resources are limited, and we face threats from asteroids, climate change, nuclear war, artificial intelligence, pandemics …
Hawking is “convinced that humans need to leave Earth … to stay risks annihilation”. He argues we need to start looking for a new home now, and be ready to go and find it within 100 years.
This entertaining series asks if that is possible, or merely science fiction? Incredibly, the answer is yes – we can do this. We meet “planet hunters” who are scanning the Milky Way looking for a new home in the “Goldilocks Zone” where conditions are “just right”. Proxima B seems the most likely candidate, but the trouble is that he’s 4.2 light years away. Laser propulsion could reduce the travelling time but, even then, who’s mentally and physically tough enough for such a journey? The programme was oddly upbeat and entertaining for a subject with such awful dread at its core. We’re being prodded to consider a space colony, not because of a spirit of discovery, but because of a growing list of horrors on Earth.
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