Close To Me
Worzel Gummidge: Guy Forks
Rating: 
Lumme, us men are a useless bunch, aren’t we? Can’t cook, can’t clean, can’t be trusted . . . It’s enough to make you wonder why women bother with us at all.
After watching Christopher Eccleston as the pathetic, feckless Rob in Close To Me (C4), I feel moved to issue an apology on behalf of all blokes.
Girls, we’re really sorry. For everything. Oh, blast it, my fault — I forgot, we’re not supposed to call you ‘girls’ now. I meant to say ‘ladies’. Or is that worse? Aargh, sorry. Ignore me.
Rob is a particularly hopeless specimen. At the start of this six-part domestic drama, he discovers wife Jo (Connie Nielsen) at the bottom of the stairs in their swish designer home, in a drunken heap.
Lumme, us men are a useless bunch, aren’t we? Can’t cook, can’t clean, can’t be trusted . . . It’s enough to make you wonder why women bother with us at all
He manages to get her to hospital, but by the time she emerges from a coma, Jo has forgotten all the events of the past year.
Can she rely on Rob to fill in the blanks? Obviously not — he’d struggle to fill in a colouring book.
Jo has to find out on her own that her dog is dead, she’s feuding with her best friend, her father has dementia and she appears to be having an affair with the sexy tattooed gardener . . . not that Rob would notice, unless he actually found them in bed together.
He hasn’t even bothered washing the blood off the stairs. While she was in hospital, he relied on her friends to keep him supplied with food. It’s plain that, if Jo had died, Rob would have to remarry immediately. He couldn’t survive unaided.
Hollywood star Connie, best known for blockbusters including Gladiator and Wonder Woman, is stridently convincing as a wife who has carried the entire weight of her marriage on her shoulders for too long.
That pressure has turned her into somebody she doesn’t much like. There’s a judgmental voice in her head that criticises everything she does. She was coping, until she lost her memory.
Now she doesn’t even know her own computer password.
There are ominous hints that she has forgotten, or is blotting out, much worse than that. Her adored son Finn has not come to visit her since the accident — Jo thinks he’s at university, but that might be something else Rob hasn’t got round to mentioning.
I especially enjoyed the way Worzel dismissed a hole in the story, when the children (India Brown and Thierry Wickens) complained that they didn’t understand why the Guy was so keen to be burned
And someone has carved the words ‘Help Me’ into the back of her fitted wardrobe.
That looks scary, but my guess is that Rob did it: he wandered inside during an uncharacteristic attempt to hang up some clothes, and couldn’t find his way out.
Bumbling scarecrow Worzel Gummidge (BBC1) relies on his lady friends to get him out of trouble, especially short-tempered Aunt Sally (Vicki Pepperdine).
As she sorted out some mischief with Guy Fawkes on Bonfire Night, she was hurling insults in all directions: ‘Frillypom nincomblouse! . . . Flouncing fluffadandy!’
The script, written by Mackenzie Crook, who also directs and stars as Worzel, is crammed with lively touches like that. Toby Jones had great fun as all six members of the village Bonfire Committee, sporting a wild variety of facial hair.
I especially enjoyed the way Worzel dismissed a hole in the story, when the children (India Brown and Thierry Wickens) complained that they didn’t understand why the Guy was so keen to be burned.
‘That don’t matter, do it?’ shrugged Worzel. ‘Lots of things I don’t understand!’
If only Doctor Who could be so brisk and witty. Instead, it got bogged down with a laboured analysis of why, this week, the time travellers were on a battlefield during the Crimean War. The more the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) explained, the less I cared.