Wild Bill Wednesday, ITV
And also
Rating: 
Killing Eve Saturday, BBC1
Rating: 
Wild Bill stars Hollywood A-lister Rob Lowe as a top American cop who relocates to Boston, Lincoln-shire, to head the police force there. It is one star and also five stars because it possesses the kind of one-star terribleness that, if properly embraced, can transport you to five-star levels of happiness.
It’s that gloriously bad. Also it’s a comedy drama, and I did laugh quite a lot. Mostly, I laughed when I wasn’t supposed to, but that still counts I think. It is certainly the funniest show I’ve seen for a good while.
The first episode opened with a non-exciting car chase though a cabbage field and then time-spooled back to a week earlier, for no good narrative reason whatsoever. Still, here is Bill Hixon, arriving in the UK with the 12-year-old daughter whom we know is smart because she wears big glasses.
Rob Lowe (above) and his Wild Bill co-star Susan Lynch are fine actors, but they’re entirely boxed in by the one-dimensionality of their characters and the tone that can turn on a sixpence
Always a sign. This is a fish-out-of-water scenario and the local cops, who are all weathered and old school, are not welcoming.
Bill gives them a pep talk. ‘I was America’s top metropolitan chief of police… I’m the best at what I do and you need what I do… My dad was a cop. He patrolled the same beat from 18 until he was 67. I watched it grind him down year after year, like trying to beat down a wildfire of social disintegration with a fly swatter.’
I once tried beating down the wildfire of social disintegration with a fly swatter, even though I did not understand what it meant, and it was extremely tiring, I agree.
The cops are not won over. One even writes Bill a speeding ticket for doing 37mph on his bicycle. However, as speed limits only apply to motor vehicles – there is no law relating to bikes – I would certainly urge Bill to appeal it.
I am kind of hoping that the writers (Jim Keeble, Dudi Appleton) will invent further transgressions for which you might receive a penalty notice. ‘Madam, your kettle is boiling too fast. The fine is £80 but £40 if you pay in the next seven days.’
That kind of thing.
Bill embarks on a meet and greet with the public, accompanied by Angela Griffin playing a journalist. ‘The Home Office directive of 2014 opened recruitment to citizens from foreign countries,’ she explains to one local resident, helpfully.
But what’s this? A crime! Satellite dishes are being stolen from an estate! The police stake out the estate and – this is where it goes truly bonkers – through a half-open door see a Rab C Nesbitt figure singing I Want To Know What Love Is and staring into his open fridge, which contains a decapitated head.
I had to check it wasn’t my head – I gave it a tap, still there – in case I’d laughed it off.
The head, it turned out, belonged to a girl who disappeared a decade earlier, but the pathologist said as it had been kept in the freezer it was still ‘as fresh as a daisy’. But the head was not kept in a freezer.
We saw it was in the fridge, along with a cucumber and a lettuce. If I were ever to meet the writers, I would take their heads and knock them together.
There are other characters. There’s Bill’s sidekick, Muriel, who is in fact nicely played by Bronwyn James, a sexy magistrate (Rachael Stirling), a Russian gangster (Aleksandar Jovanovic) and the dead girl’s mother (Susan Lynch).
She has to say lines like: ‘She weren’t no slag. That were me.’ Oh, Susan. She turns up at Bill’s house, as you do, and he allows her to babysit his daughter. Might Bill need a pep talk on boundaries, perhaps?
Lowe and Lynch are fine actors but here they’re entirely boxed in by the one-dimensionality of their characters and the tone that can turn on a sixpence.
It’s knockabout one minute and effing and jeffing the next. It’s also a show that wants to make a point about Brexit – you may glimpse a graffitied Union Jack scrawled with ‘Leave’ out of the corner of your eye – but doesn’t know what that point is.
Still, the scene on top of that wind turbine was thrilling. Only kidding. It was as daft as everything else and I laughed. Again. Heartily. So sheer heaven if you can embrace it. Really.
I greeted the return of Killing Eve with five stars but now I’m reducing it to three. I had anticipated bingeing on all episodes but I made it to four and then stalled. I have said, previously, that that the writing is so smart that the incoherence of the plot is irrelevant, but now that incoherency is properly getting on my nerves.
OK, Konstantin and Villanelle are now in Amsterdam, but how did they get there? How? Konstantin was being held by MI6 and escaped, but his passport worked as normal? Plus it’s also a bit, well, samey. What do you think? Seriously, I want to know.
