McMafia
New Year’s Day & Tuesday, BBC1
Hard Sun
Saturday, BBC1
Rating: 
Sue Perkins And The Chimp Sanctuary
New Year’s Day, BBC2
Rating: 
McMafia is the eight-part ‘groundbreaking international crime drama’ that has thus far taken us to London, Prague, Dubai, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Paris, Moscow, Mumbai and the Negev Desert but has been a little bit McDull in all of them.
It stars James Norton as Alex Godman, the English-educated scion of a Russian mafia family exiled to London. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, he wants nothing to do with ‘the family business’ but gets sucked in anyhow. He’s an emerging-markets fund manager, and therefore ideally positioned to launder money. (If only he’d opted for a different career; a vicar in Grantchester, say?)
McMafia stars James Norton as Alex Godman, the English-educated scion of a Russian mafia family exiled to London
He refuses – ‘I’m a banker not a gangster’ – but ultimately must co-operate to protect his father from a rival. Given his father is a self-pitying, sentimental, lachrymose, annoying drunk, I’d have simply handed him over, gladly, but Alex is deeply attached. He calls his father ‘Papa’, and every time he said it I expected Papa to come back with ‘Nicole!’, but I accept that may be my limitation.
Based on the non-fiction book by journalist Misha Glenny about organised crime and corporate corruption, the first half of the opening episode was mostly men talking in rooms, but it did brilliantly liven up halfway through when Uncle Boris had his throat cut with a caviar knife and Alex had to run for his life – no turning back now, boy – while calling his Mama and telling her not to answer the insistent rings at her door and to press the panic button.
Mama (and Papa) are safe in this instance but then wander around freely without protection? Just saying. This has The Night Manager aspirations, but while Norton is excellent in the title role, his character is familiar – a sort of Clint Eastwood type who observes and never says too much – and there is no Hugh Laurie or Tom Hollander to charismatically back him up.
Also, The Night Manager’s narrative essentially focused on one man having to win another man’s trust to destroy him, whereas this involves much exposition as to how money is moved around and how organised crime works. At one point we were told that McDonald’s is more successful than Burger King simply by virtue of having more restaurants, although I did wonder: maybe it has more restaurants because people like it better?
Then there’s the woman question. I’d read an interview with Juliet Rylance, who plays Alex’s girlfriend Rebecca, saying she was attracted to the role because there are rarely any good parts for women in gangster set-ups, but are there any here? Has Rebecca, as of yet, done anything beyond look at Alex worriedly as she suspects he’s being corrupted?
And then, in episode two – oh, sweet Jesus – we had to deal with those sex-trafficked women being raped and shot in the desert. Still, it may be worth sticking with as Alex works out exactly what he’s got himself into – would he be so guileless, in the circumstances? – and how he might get out of it.
As for the rumour that this is Norton’s audition for James Bond, they said that about Tom Hiddleston and The Night Manager, and they say it every time Idris Elba steps out of his front door. So I don’t think we need get too worked up about that.
Hard Sun is a pre-apocalyptic crime thriller set in contemporary London that opened with the most horrific violence (I’ve yet to forgive it) and has the most terrible premise. Two detectives (Jim Sturgess, Agyness Deyn) investigate the death of a hacker and along the way discover that the Government has been sitting on the fact that the sun is due to burn out in five years.
With MI6 on their tail, they go on the run with the information, which is the terrible premise, as why would they wish to be responsible for such news? As we left the first episode, Deyn’s DI was about to tell all to a newspaper, which has to be plain stupid.
Yet she’s presented as a brave heroine. Mad.
Sue Perkins And The Chimp Sanctuary was a documentary about humankind and chimpanzees, and while the chimps came out of it well, humankind did not. Perkins visited Chimp Haven, a 200-acre site in Louisiana that takes in chimps who have spent their lives being used for medical research in laboratories.
Their back stories weren’t pretty and broke her heart, as well as ours. Bravely, Perkins even watched footage from the lab where her favourite chimp, Jill, had lived, and the conditions were shockingly appalling. ‘Is furthering the health of mankind and that of animals mutually exclusive?’ she asked.
The ethical debate – as it was noted, it’s easy to be against medical testing on animals until your child has cancer – never properly got going, but that was OK. It was just so pleasing to see shy, sweet-faced Jill make a friend (spitting Pierre) as Henry finally learned to socialise. That was McLovely.
