Prime Suspect has never been a barrel of laughs but the series seriously cranked up the misery quotient for DS Jane Tennison’s final case.
Tennison’s alcoholism is out of control, her father is terminally ill with cancer and the unknown horror of retirement is just a month away. At work the hunt for a missing teenager turns to a murder enquiry when her body is found on Hampstead Heath. A post mortem discovers that she was pregnant at the time of her death. The girl’s distraught father, falling under suspicion of her murder, tries to take his own life, washing down pills with drink in a mug bearing the legend The World’s Greatest Dad.
It’s very grim. But fortunately Prime Suspect is as brilliant as it is bleak. The acting, the dialogue, the locations and the storylines are totally convincing and utterly compelling. Most importantly, the drama is shot through with a humanity missing from most TV murder mysteries. Lesser shows find their horror in the sterile grisliness of the pathology lab. Prime Suspect does too. But it also demands that its viewers witness the unbearable tragedy of a family bereavement, typified by the scene in which the distraught, grieving mother is comforted by a total stranger in a waiting room. In Prime Suspect a murder has emotional consequences. For both the victim’s family and for those investigating the crime. Intelligent, thrilling and disturbing, Prime Suspect departed our screens a very hard act to follow.
Before Nigella, before Delia, before Fanny, there was Isabella. Beeton, that is.
The Secret Life of Mrs Beeton was narrated by Mrs Beeton herself, who wasted no time in cheerfully informing us of her death at the tender age of 28.
The doyenne of British household management was not, it transpires, the stuffy, middle-aged matron of popular imagination but a feisty, enterprising and ingenious businesswoman who created a persona that not only survived her death but became a posthumous publishing sensation.
With an arch to her eyebrow and a coquettish smile upon her lips, Mrs Beeton looked boldly into the camera and told her tale. The effect was sexy, intriguing and involving. Animated Victorian chapter headings added to the promise of fun and frolics to come. Unfortunately this flippant approach didn’t sit too comfortably with the relentlessly grim facts of Mrs Beeton’s life. Her first three children died in infancy, bankruptcy was never far from the family publishing business and Mr Beeton turned out to be - if you will excuse a solitary cooking analogy in a review which has scrupulously avoided using them - a very rotten egg indeed.
Whilst Mrs Beeton confidently instructed her sisters on every other aspect of domestic life, from correct use of cutlery to wedding etiquette, she died before she could write the chapter on How to Stop Your Drunken, Dissolute Husband from Consorting With Prostitutes and Infecting You With Terminal Syphilis.
This was an epic story about a truly remarkable woman. The Secret Life of Mrs Beeton told it entertainingly but it deserved to be told straight. No complaints about Anna Madeley in the title role, however. She was the icing on the cake.
OK, make that two cooking analogies.
Details
Prime Suspect, ITV1, Sunday October 22, 9pm
The Secret Life of Mrs Beeton, BBC4, Monday October 16, 9pm
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