DEBORAH ROSS: The new Broadchurch? Sorry, not even close
The Bay
Wednesday, ITV
Harry’s Heroes: The Full English
Monday & Tuesday, ITV
The Bay is ITV’s second psychological thriller in as many weeks. First it was Cheat, which made you want to throw your shoe at the television (‘That could not happen!’), and now this one, which has been billed as ‘the new Broadchurch’. Probably because it’s set in a seaside community, as so many thrillers now are. (Do crimes even happen inland any more?)
The Bay is also shoe-worthy, but on this occasion it’s someone keeping something secret when it doesn’t have to be secret simply because the plot demands it. Sigh. If ITV were ever to bring me in as an adviser which, strangely, has yet to happen, the first thing I would say is: ‘Make your plot serve the characters, not vice versa, and then maybe you’ll have “the new Broadchurch”.’ It may be the only thing I say. Not sure there is even anything else to say once you have said that. Perhaps just the one addendum: we want to see drama, not plot mechanics.
![Jonas Armstrong and Morven Christie in The Bay. The Bay is ITV’s second psychological thriller in as many weeks](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/03/23/15/11364008-6834449-image-a-25_1553356251390.jpg)
Jonas Armstrong and Morven Christie in The Bay. The Bay is ITV’s second psychological thriller in as many weeks
Set in a blustery, overcast Morecambe, this opened with three women in skimpy dresses – ‘Put a jumper on, you’ll catch your death’ was my first thought; God, I’m so turning into my mother – enjoying a night in a club. One of the women catches the eye of a stranger at the bar and the evening concludes with her having sex with him out back. As we discover the next morning when she stumbles into work, this is Detective Sergeant Lisa Armstrong (Morven Christie), and today the detectives have a new case: missing teenage twins.
As the force’s family liaison officer (surprisingly – I think our cat, Claws, has more empathy), Lisa is dispatched to interview the family, where she discovers the man she had sex with is the twins’ father, Sean (Jonas Armstrong). She says nothing. And keeps saying nothing. Her boss instructs her to find out where Sean was the night before. At this point she could have come clean: ‘Listen, boss, I’m a grown woman. I can have sex with whomever I please, whenever I please, and last night I had sex with Sean. Take me off the case?’ You’re willing her and willing her and willing her to say it but, no, nothing.
You could argue this taps into the shame women are made to feel around casual sex, which is fair enough. Woman are so made to feel that shame. But I have a fear this is going to become a cautionary tale about a woman whose life will unravel because of a quickie in an alley. (Don’t do it! Unless you’re a man!) Obviously, if Lisa told the truth, the drama would collapse, but that is my point. You’re not seeing characters. You’re seeing plot. And then Lisa does worse than saying nothing and deletes the CCTV footage from the club showing she was with Sean. I don’t know. Are we meant to sympathise with her? Sympathise with someone who acts contrary to all human decency and imperils an investigation when the lives of two teenagers are at stake? One of whom is, in fact, later found murdered?
![](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/03/23/15/11362662-6834449-image-a-28_1553356274897.jpg)
There were further troubling tropes too – as a single working mum, Lisa’s own teenage children are naturally out of control – but, because I fear turning into my own mother completely, I won’t lecture. I will only say that by the end of the first episode I thought: this has to have been written by a man. And it was. (Daragh Carville.)
Harry’s Heroes didn’t exactly have my name written all over it, given I don’t care a jot about football, but it was surprisingly powerful and moving. The deal is: can Harry Redknapp get a team of football legends from the Nineties fit enough to take one last shot at their old foes, Germany? ‘When you stop playing,’ he said, ‘if you don’t change your lifestyle you turn into lard.’ Cue Neil ‘Razor’ Ruddock, who seems to be 92 per cent lard, attempting to fit though a turnstile. As for John Barnes, he looks like a man who is fond of fried chicken, and he is. So fond, in fact, that as his daughter related, last time he used her trampoline he broke the springs.
So there was the astonishing unfitness – ‘They’re a heart attack waiting to happen,’ said Harry – which they all joked about, but there was such sadness threaded through. This was as much about what happens to footballers once their glory days are over. For instance, when Matt Le Tissier realised he would have to retire, ‘I bawled my eyes out’. And it was as much about the mental health issues that were never discussed. Paul Merson recounted being addicted to drink, drugs and gambling. ‘I could lose £20,000 in one weekend… I had played for England and had all the money in the world and wanted to kill myself.’ ‘Back then,’ said David Seaman, albeit somewhat uncomfortably, ‘we weren’t getting it out into the open.’ They are moving beyond the bants into the realm of real talking. Don’t care about football, but I did end up caring about them.
![](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/03/23/15/11362664-6834449-image-a-26_1553356268861.jpg)