DEBORAH ROSS: So worthy, but such a Tiananmen turn-off

Chimerica

Wednesday, Channel 4 

Rating:

Ghosts

Monday, BBC1

Rating:

My prediction, for what it’s worth, which may be very little, is that Chimerica will go the way of Collateral and Little Drummer Girl and McMafia and MotherFatherSon and other dramas of that kind. That is, it will attract a good audience for the first episode but then the viewing figures will fall off a cliff. These dramas are all big in scope, and often take us halfway around the world, but they’re often more interested in their own importance than they are in supplying drama. Where’s the hook? Where’s the incentive to return next week? Perhaps it would be helpful if, at the outset, we were told who or what we should care about – and why. One can admire these prestige productions, and can maybe hang on if they’re sufficiently cuckoo (see MotherFatherSon) but feel them? Very rarely. 

Alessandro Nivola in Chimerica. Where’s the hook? Where’s the incentive to return next week? Perhaps it would be helpful if we were told who or what we should care about – and why

Alessandro Nivola in Chimerica. Where’s the hook? Where’s the incentive to return next week? Perhaps it would be helpful if we were told who or what we should care about – and why

The first episode of this four-parter did, admittedly, open excitingly, with Lee, a young, wannabe photojournalist holed up in a room in Beijing in 1989, fearfully looking out of the window. Below him is Tiananmen Square, where a massacre is unfolding. Then, a single man appears, carrying two grocery bags, who stands in front of a procession of tanks. Snap. Lee takes the money shot but there’s a banging on his door. Chinese soldiers. Lee quickly strips down his camera and hides the film in the toilet cistern. The troops barge in, guns pointed. They do not find the film even though one of the solders avails himself of the facilities and then tries to flush, which seemed unlikely, I have to say. Wouldn’t you hold it in if you were a soldier mid-raid with gun pointed? But the main thing is that the photo survives and history is born. 

Adapted by Lucy Kirkwood from her own play, which won an Olivier Award, this combines true elements (that photo) with fiction and next spools forwards to 2016. Lee, now played by Alessandro Nivola (as a dish who is also strangely absent, as is the way with characters of this type), is a fêted photojournalist but, as we see, he is disgraced once it’s discovered that one of his photos was faked. He believes that ‘Tank Man’, whose identity has remained a mystery, is living in New York and that if he could find him, his career would be saved. ‘I need you to drop the story,’ says his editor (F Murray Abraham), somewhat predictably, before being talked round. You did have to wonder about Lee’s access to the editor of a major New York newspaper, particularly now he’s persona non grata, but there you are. I was also wondering if we were meant to relate to Lee or have him down as a bit of a tool? As well as strangely absent? I was veering towards the latter, definitely. 

Meanwhile, we are in China too, following Lee’s friend Zhang Lin (Terry Chen), who hallucinates that his wife, who was killed at Tiananmen, is living in his refrigerator. And there are further characters, like Mel (Cherry Jones), Lee’s gruff reporter sidekick, and Tess (Sophie Okonedo), who is a profiler for a credit card company and has a bunk-up with Lee in an aeroplane toilet and rips Mel off a strip when she is scornful of Tess’s job. (Tess’s monologue in this instance was very theatre-y.) Probably, this is building up to say something significant about wealth, fake news, Trump (he’s on every television in the background) and democracy, but where is the hook? Why aren’t I feeling anything? I might keep watching out of curiosity, but suspect it’ll just be me and the cat by the end. As it is, it’s just me and the cat who are still keeping up with MotherFatherSon and, during this week’s episode, the cat stretched, yawned, rose and left the room. So now it’s just me. 

I don’t know if it’s a sign of the times but so many comedies now seem to come with a bleak edge, whereas what we most need, possibly, is silliness and, I’m happy to report, Ghosts is very, very silly indeed. It’s made by the same team who make Horrible Histories and it’s Horrible Histories does ghosts, in effect, but nothing wrong with that, as we love Horrible Histories. Odd that it’s on after the watershed and not earlier in the evening as it is wonderfully childish, but I suppose one of the ghosts is a Tory MP from the Nineties who isn’t wearing trousers, caught forever with his pants down, which might take some explaining. 

This is set in a manor house filled with the ghosts of those who once lived there, including the Tory MP, a scoutmaster with an arrow though his neck, a ridiculous poet and a Tudor who keeps losing his head. They’ve had the run of the place but now a young couple plan to turn it into a hotel, so they push the wife out of the window, and her near-death experience means she can now see the ghosts, while her husband can’t… you don’t need to know the plot. Just that, if you are hankering after pure silliness, you’ve found your man.

 

 

 

 

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