Devils Sky Atlantic
Storyville: Whirlybird: Live Above LA (BBC Four) | iPlayer
Behind Her Eyes Netflix
Torn (Channel 4) | All 4
Celebrity Best Home Cook (BBC One) | iPlayer
Interior Design Masters With Alan Carr (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Devils is just the latest gleeful attempt to rub our noses in the banking venality that led to so many woes of the past decade. The BBC got there last year with Industry, which was a surprise hit and which I personally loathed. Sky Atlantic is doing it with even greater helpings of pizzazz, jeu d’esprit and other such terms perhaps not best suited to our weather, psyche or language.
Based on the novel by financier Guido Maria Brera, it’s got Alessandro Borghi as Massimo, ruthless head of trading at a London-based international bank, Patrick Dempsey as his mentor, and is undoubtedly a handsome 10-part production, with a second series mooted. More subtle than most similar tales too: the arcs of character development are, if you stick with it, well rounded.
Yet at times, with all the jet-setting international action, it can feel oddly like an ill-dubbed melange of accents, which makes the plot, such as it is, hard to follow. Main problem, though, is that it’s so hard to truly care about any of the characters: there’s no one to root for, as can befall any drama where two of the main players are Greed and Revenge. And what is it with these supposed money geniuses when they seem to play the same card with monotonous regularity, that card being to “short” the market? Even financial numpties such as I started to see that one coming.
As a more than decent drama about bank balances of boggling excess, it probably couldn’t have been done much better. The question is whether it should have been done at all. Did we need to have our little noses, shivering and broke and locked down and fraught, rubbed in another strutting saga of suits with more cash than taste?
“It’s a great way to seduce a woman … you get her heart rate over 100, it’s a done deal.” At first sight, Bob Tur could have been just one of those suits: a thrusting, risk-it-all, heart-in-mouth alpha male; it was mere happenstance that made him a news cameraman with a helicopter licence, who strutted and flew over Los Angeles for a couple of decades. As a simple tale of adrenaline, Whirlybird: Live Above LA made a fascinating enough Storyville: breaking news in its infancy, with fast-to-screen video a major new player, and he and wife Marika in the air, literally ambulance-chasing, and snatching exclusive footage of so much, including that OJ Simpson pursuit (80 million viewers: wow). Then came the twist.
Bob is now Zoey Tur, having transitioned in Thailand in 2014. She spoke ruefully, honestly, about her many regrets, not least her apparently near-constant bullying of Marika, in the air and on the air. The hair-trigger temper and perfectionism of old, which made Bob Tur charismatic, a little scary, and very, very good at his job and very bad at his marriage.
It was hard not to agree with Zoey’s conclusion: that the life lived as Bob had been a mask, which featured the default setting of toxic masculinity: because for so many formative years, the only man she had known was an abusive father. One empathised: still doesn’t quite excuse Bob’s treatment of the phenomenally forgiving Marika. It was truly unsettling to watch him screaming at her in such demeaning terms. An absorbing, endlessly surprising watch, well worth the catchup.
Netflix were screaming at me, in turn, not to reveal spoilers for Behind Her Eyes. It is, I think, safe to say that not since the ending of the book Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow – a superbly crafted Danish thriller suddenly became a supernatural, wibble-eyed nonsensefest – have I been so thoroughly moonboggled by later plot twists.
This adaptation of Sarah Pinborough’s bestseller is, for the bulk of its six episodes, a superior psychological thriller, intriguingly dark, rompingly sexy, and mystifying in the questions proffered, probably the least of which is why there was felt any plot-need to include a couple of the ropiest Scottish accents since Brigadoon. But that’s not the main point: Louise (Simona Brown) has an ill-judged snog with a married chap one night, and the next day it turns out he’s her boss. Ulp! And then bumps into his wife, the beautiful fragile Adele (Eve Hewson, pale and fascinating) and begins a guilty friendship.
It constantly twists, rather successfully, between apportioning blame: Dr David Ferguson (Tom Bateman) can be seen as spitefully controlling; Adele as weird and needy and too-perfect; single-mum Louise as a little too free with her affections and friendships. And the contrast between her flat – a patchwork Camden homeliness, a sense of humour – and Adele’s Islington pad, all austerity and grey silks and perfectly gleaming knife racks, is a little trite, but nicely done and ever watchable.
As indeed is the whole gripping thing, even the lucid-dreaming guff – oops, plot point. Watch four episodes, which you will, and you’ll want to get to the infamous end: the canny 2017 publishers even introduced a hashtag (#WTFthatending), which says much. Above all you’ll want to watch Simona Brown, who’s in practically every scene and holds it all together, fun and funny and superbly nuanced even until the WTF end.
I’ve been hugely enjoying, possibly for a few of the wrong reasons, the Walter Presents offering Torn (in the original French Soupçon, or Suspicion – surely a little better?). It’s got one of the actors out of Spiral, and a fairly bounce-along plot, and darkish shifting motives. But mainly I’m enjoying because it’s set in Provence, amid sunshine and sexy (open) restaurants, and constantly seems to be 3pm, with warm wind rustling the poplars and eucalyptus, and a bottle open on the sprawling oak table, and everyone is bed-hopping as if “marriage” was not really a word but more of a … shrug. Very French.
You’d have thought they’d have learned by now. Not the French: the contestants on both Celebrity Best Home Cook (BBC One) and Interior Design Masters With Alan Carr (BBC Two). If a judge – Mary Berry, say, or the dauntingly awesome Michelle Ogundehin – has the grace to draw the parameters of a brief for your task, might it be an idea to make a vague stab at sticking to it? Thus the purely egotistical – those who run off at an “I’m mad, me!” tangent – are being whittled away.
These might seem like just cooking and wallpapering shows, but they are also life lessons, great for home-schooling, and along the way we get to ooh and to aah at just-so cochineal valances or pirate ships built from Curly Wurlys. Talking of which: Ed Balls! How did such a lovable man ever become chancellor?