Deborah Ross on why she will miss Bodyguard

Bodyguard 

Rating:

Goodbye, then, Bodyguard, the most watched television drama for a decade (since Doctor Who, Christmas Day, 2008) and the most talked about. ‘Is Julia Montague really dead?’ everyone was asking, until that week’s Radio Times hit the newsstands with its cover of Keeley Hawes and the headline: ‘Why She Had to Die’. Obviously, it’s always a tightly fought contest, but the Radio Times is expected to clean up at this year’s Plot Spoiler Awards, as hosted by the previous year’s winner which, in this instance, is Prue Leith, who will bake a cake for the occasion. ‘I can’t tell you what it will be as I want it to be a surprise, but it’s a chocolate bundt,’ is all she will say, ‘with ganache icing.’ 

Richard Madden in Bodyguard. A drama can be simultaneously hokey and gripping. They are not mutually exclusive

Some did hate Bodyguard, it’s true. ‘Implausible!’ they cried. ‘Islamaphobic!’ they further cried. That Richard Madden. Would you call this acting or is he some kind of animatronic? Wasn’t the kompromat intended to expire? Is there anyone worse at playing Andrew Marr than Andrew Marr? How had the Prime Minister managed to hide his scandalous past until now? And so on and so on and so on and so on. 

There’s even a few I will add myself. Couldn’t Chanel have called an Uber rather than allow an infamous organised crime boss to pick her up right under Budd’s nose? When the police had Julia’s flat secured after her death, wouldn’t they have covered the back door? Had Luke Aitkens never heard of change.org? When you don’t like proposed legislation, wouldn’t that be easier than blowing up the Home Secretary? Luke, you just have to get a good number of signatures, you big chump! 

But a drama can be simultaneously hokey and gripping. They are not mutually exclusive and I did note that even those who were most keen to alert us to its deficiencies did not stop watching themselves. Some people must simply enjoy not enjoying. Or they must think pointing out it’s rubbish makes them smarter than everyone else, when the smartest thing to do, surely, would be to turn it off? Sticking with rubbish is dumb, is it not? Certainly, I was gripped, and am not afraid to say it. Or, to put it another way, over recent weeks I’ve lost track of Strangers and I’ve lost track of Trust and I’ve  lost track of Black Earth Rising and I’ve lost track of Press (Has The Herald succumbed to wraparound advertising yet? Has it?) but I did not lose track of Bodyguard. (Or Vanity Fair, which is terrific, and will hopefully now come out from behind Bodyguard’s skirts.) 

The extended finale had Budd beaten up by Luke Aitkens and his thugs and if there is one thing we should all come away with it’s this: never agree to meet Chanel then sit with your back to the door. When he came round, he found he was strapped into a suicide vest, with his thumb taped to a dead man’s switch. Talk yourself out of that one, we all thought, and he did, at length, in that City square. It was telling not showing but, to be fair, given there were three conspiracies at play, and given all we’d been asked to hold in our heads for the past six weeks, I rather welcomed it. And it was tense. He won’t be allowed to die, I thought, but then remembered it was Jed Mercurio, so maybe he would, and it would all end on an unresolved cliffhanger. (‘Oh God, anything but that,’ I was pleading.) 

Budd then had to walk from the City to Highgate in said vest. ‘As if!’ some have also said but, again to be fair, I have seen some pretty odd things on London’s streets in my time. (Most recently, it was someone walking along while eating condensed milk from a can with their fingers.) Most disappointingly, the two baddest apples – Luke Aitkens and Lorraine Craddock – weren’t people we’d ever been asked to invest in, hence the four stars rather than five, and why were they so happy to roll over with an ‘it’s a fair cop, guv’? That did feel anticlimactic and rushed. 

But I did not see the chilling Nadia twist coming, did not suspect the jihadi leader had been hiding in plain sight all along, and nor did I predict that Budd would get counselling without having to wait a year for an appointment, but who could have foreseen that? The series has also received flak for saying, in essence, that women can be bombers while men need to talk about their feelings although if it had been the other way round, it would only have received more flak, so you truly can’t win. I, for one, will miss it on Sunday nights but even as I was typing that I knew it wasn’t strictly true, as we do still have Vanity Fair. Which is also quite tense, in fact. That Dobbin. Will he ever learn to relax, or will he be forever wandering around as if he has a broom handle shoved up his bottom?