THE
CRITICSJEFF POTTER. ORIGINAL IMAGES: ITV, GETTY IMAGESTELEVISION
Benidorm
meets prison
drama
The Thief, His Wife and the
Canoe ITV, Sun-Wed
Anatomy of a Scandal Netflix
Chivalry Channel 4, Thu
Idris Elba’s Fight School
BBC2, Sun
There must be some
overworked gnome at ITV
towers going through past
copies of the Daily Mirror,
combing its pages for eccentric
criminals or semi-forgotten
murderers to be turned into
glossy, big-name shows to be
stripped through the week.
I don’t think it’s lazy, but
often you watch something
like The Thief, His Wife and
the Canoe, lifted entirely,
almost sentence by sentence,
from the pages of a tabloid
newspaper, and just think:
where is the original thought
or creativity here?
The title, for example, is
stolen, almost completely,
from a Peter Greenaway film.
It suggests the story is some
torrid, wild, tangled
revelatory plot, but the Darwin
canoe story never was that.
The music, a kind of jaunty,
plinky, creepy Third Man
rip-off, can be found in a
hundred other similar
suburban capers. The show’s
take on Anne and John
Darwin, the man who faked
his death by paddling out to
sea in a canoe before claiming
life insurance and turning up
in Panama five years later,
feels like something you’ve
been reading about or
watching for decades:
entitled, morality-free boomer
couple get carried away with
his mad money-making
schemes. It is the Marigold
Hotel meets Benidorm meets
HMP Low Newton.
What do we actually learn,
if anything? I suppose we
learn that Monica Dolan, who
plays Anne Darwin, is a terrific
actress — capable of almost
anything. She is one of those
unassuming creatures you
wouldn’t, ironically, be able
to pick out of a police line-up.
She disappears forensically
into the character, whether it
is Anne, a mousy, nibbling
little woman who was bullied
by her husband into lying not
only to the police but, horribly,
to their two children, or,
say, the spitting, angry,
frightening Rose West in
Appropriate Adult — her finest
performance.
I find it amazing that one
actress can play both roles so
brilliantly, but then you read
that Darwin ended up in the
same prison as West after she
was caught and sentenced to
six and a half years for fraud
and the connection becomes
more obvious.
Anne, we are told, didn’t
want to go along with her
husband’s mad schemes, but
he groomed her, much like a
paedophile or even a serial
killer (hmm). After telling her
he’d commit suicide if she
didn’t go along with his plan to
paddle out to sea, he decided
the camping lifestyle wasn’t
for him and returned to their
house in Hartlepool where
she hid him. The single most
hilarious thing about the
whole story is that after he
disappeared he more
or less resumed
his previous life,
even joining the
local library.
Eddie Marsan
plays Darwin as a
kind of semi-loveable,about him from a single credit
at the end of the show, telling
us that he now lived with his
second wife in the Philippines,
than almost anything that
went before it. For what it is
worth, I’m not sure Anne was
that cuddly either.
Anatomy of a Scandal,
the big new hit on Netflix, is
terrible — there is simply no
describing how badly acted,
poorly written, embarrassing,
trite, clichéd and crass this
utterly hilarious show is. It is
so cheap and tacky, in fact,
I found I couldn’t stop
watching it, logging on again
and again just, er, to see if it is
humanly possible to get any
more cringeworthy or fake.
Every last scene is milked
for maximum crappy drama:
lawyers don’t just win cases,
they fling themselves down
on sofas, groaning “f*** yes”
as rain gushes down the
windows and someone
suggestively whispers: “You
need a towel, Miss.”
Politicians aren’t just
politicians; they combine the
shagging schedule of PremierLeague footballers with the
lifestyle of a property
billionaire, while their
simpering, bored wives, one
such played by Sienna Miller,
explain how they’ve given up
everything to support them,
including a job as a children’s
book editor. As the show’s
main character, a fictional
Tory MP, James Whitehouse,
played by Rupert Friend, puts
it: “F*** Narnia.”
I looked at Whitehouse’s
house in Chelsea, filled with its
gopping £3,000-a-foot
wallpaper and old masters,
and wondered, why is this
man even bothering with the
“immigration brief ”? He’s
clearly got enough money
to slyly finger aides in lifts
full time if that is what he
really wanted, but somehow
he’s bothering with life as a
lowly MP, being accused by
his researcher of rape.
We are told this is the most
disgusting crime a man can
commit — so appalling that the
camera cannot resist coming
back to footage of several rapes
and assaults over many years.bumblingly ridiculous figure,
which I’m not sure Darwin
actually is. Why cast someone
so cosy and avuncular when
the real man was clearly way
nastier and more cynical —
a sociopath who caused
his own sons
immeasurable pain.
I never felt we
got to the bottom
of his character:
Darwin is, literally,
the show’s missing
link. We learnt moreHas ITV run out of ideas? It feels like
we’ve seen this type of story before
Why cast the
cosy Eddie
Marsan when
the real man
was clearly a
sociopath?
Staying afloat Eddie Marsan
and Monica DolanCAMILLA
LONG
16 24 April 2022