the times | Saturday April 30 2022 saturday review 7
Groundhog Day-style time loop at a drunk-
en New York birthday party. It shouldn’t
have worked. But it got cleverer, and dark-
er, and funnier, and I ended up hooked.
This time Lyonne’s character, Nadia,
discovers on a subway train a wormhole in
time that lets her travel to 1982, where she
appears to have been transformed into her
pregnant mother, played by Chloë Sevi-
gny. Then stuff gets weirder. Eventually
the train starts going to 1960s Berlin. Less
important than all of that, though, is the
aesthetic of it all, which is moody, wild and
wonderful. Even Lyonne, who is not un-
annoying at first, becomes a chuntering
presence you yearn to be around.By episode
three, with
Dominic
West, some
new light
seems to
have been
switched on
also the video he released after the investi-
gative outfit Bellingcat tracked down
members of the Russian secret service
unit that tried to kill him. Watching it
again in full context, it was little short of
jaw-dropping.
Pretending to be an aide to a senior
Russian security figure, Navalny allows
the agent to talk him through how the op-
eration worked. His team look on, and
smirk, and are all but punching the air as
the agent explains that the intention was
murder, foiled by an emergency landing. It
is at once shocking and preposterous.
“As I became a more and more famous
guy,” Navalny said, “I was sure my life
would become safer because it would be
too problematic for them just to kill me.”
“And, boy, were you wrong,” his unseen
interviewer said. “Yes, I was very wrong,”
Navalny said and laughed. There was a lot
of laughter in this, and it was extraordina-
ry. His daughter, Daria, told how she had
begun wondering how she would cope if he
were killed when she was 13. She’s 19 now.
He hasn’t been killed, but he is in prison,
having been arrested in Russia after he
went back in the sure knowledge that this
or worse was likely to happen. He could
easily serve 20 years.Russian Doll is not about Russia. Don’t
get confused. Perhaps you remember the
last series, in which Natasha Lyonne kept
dying and coming back, caught in a sort ofI
t’s the unabashed Frenchness
that always delighted me with
Call My Agent! — and by “una-
bashed Frenchness” I suppose I
mean “noses”. They are fascinat-
ing things, protruding in bold
and unexpected directions
before often changing their minds and
concluding in quite different ones. Noses
that you can carry about only when
blessed with Gallic confidence and in
some cases quite impressive neck muscles.
They are there, these noses, for a reason.
As I’m sure you know, Call My Agent! is a
French comedy about actors and their
agents. It is a brilliant concept, as evi-
denced by the way it is being remade
around the world — including here, give
me a minute — but it comes with great
challenges, and one of those is casting. For
a show needs actors, and actors need to be
people that audiences want to watch on a
screen. Yet in this show, by definition, the
actors playing people who are not actors
need to be people of a recognisably differ-
ent type to the actors playing actors, not
least because the latter are usually playing
themselves. How to solve this? For the
French, it is easy. Noses.
Ten Percent — which I think is a direct
translation of the French title Dix pour
cent, although I should probably google it
— is the British remake of this show. On
every level it has a slightly harder task
because unabashed Britishness isn’t nearly
so glamorous as unabashed Frenchness.
Also, we don’t have the noses. Which, at
least for British audiences, is more of a
problem than you might think.
With a few notable exceptions, most of
us didn’t recognise the French actors play-
ing cameos as themselves in the original.
In our remake we obviously should recog-
nise their counterparts. The trouble is,
what with this being a hit show that’s able
to attract a big-name cast, we’re also liable
to recognise everybody else.
With the people playing agents, such as
Jack Davenport, Maggie Steed and Lydia
Leonard, this is a small hurdle, swiftly
leapt. Where it gets more conceptually
confusing is when you have actors playing
actors who are themselves — Kelly Mac-
donald, Helena Bonham Carter, Dominic
West — alongside other actors playing ac-
tors who aren’t. It’s weird. And that’s before
you start imagining all the conversations
that real actors had with their agents about
whether or not they were going to appear
on the British Call My Agent! playing
agents. With my point being, I suppose,
that it all makes it a bit hard to settle in.
Ten Percent is good, and I was really wor-
ried it wasn’t going to be. Right the way
through the first couple of episodes, in fact,
I was thinking to myself, “Eeek” and al-
most embarrassed on our behalf. Partly it
was all that. Partly, it was the way the show
has lost its Parisian Frenchness, but not
picked up London Britishness to match it.
The series has been adapted, at least in
part, by the brilliant John Morton, of W1A
fame, and in earlier episodes you can
sometimes hear his quite different comedy
— quick-fire, responsive, lots of “well, yes”
— rubbing awkwardly against scripted
sequences that don’t want to play along.
By episode three, though, where you
have West playing Hamlet, some new light
seems to have been switched on. That, I
think, is not a direct lift from the French,
and it’s all the better for it. Perhaps because
it’s him, or perhaps because it’s theatre
rather than film, but I suddenly felt as if I
was in a London that was true.
All the cast are good, but Steed (as the
veteran agent Stella) and Harry Trevald-
wyn (as the assistant Ollie) deserve
special mentions. Leonard also owns
the role lifted quite directly from that
played by Camille Cottin over the Chan-
nel, even though her nose is nothing
interesting at all. If Ten Percent has the
courage to be itself, I reckon it’s going to be
pretty good.Navalny on BBC2 was extraordinary.
You will remember the poisoning of the
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny on
board an aircraft in 2020 and probablysecond act Jack Davenport and Lydia Leonard as the talent agents in Ten PercentTen Percent
Amazon
Navalny
BBC2
Russian Doll
Netf lix
Hugo Rifkind on TV
Vive la différence: the British Call
My Agent is shaping up nicely
ROB YOUNGSON