Keelin Shanley: Faraway, Still Close RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm
Viewers could have been forgiven for having less than high hopes for Hidden Assets, RTÉ One’s Sunday evening replacement for the underwhelming Kin. But it was, whisper it, really rather good.
It stars Angeline Ball as Detective Sergeant Emer Berry of the Criminal Assets Bureau, seen early on stubbing out a half-finished cigarette before throwing the rest of the pack away — recalling Lloyd Bridges’ famous running joke in Airplane: “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.”
Sure enough, she was soon raiding the home of a boorish drug dealer straight out of central casting, finding a stash of diamonds in the process, before heading to Antwerp to check out a plush warehouse-style apartment owned by said drug dealer, which turns out to have been used lately by a suicide bomber.
There she teams up with Belgian anti-terrorism cop Christian de Jong, played with a shambolic, Starsky-like charm by Wouter Hendrickx, to figure it all out.
It was that dreaded thing, an international co-production, this time from Ireland (naturally), Belgium (needless to say), and Canada (for reasons that may soon become clear). These projects can frequently end up being the awkward TV equivalent of camels, aka horses designed by a committee. So far, though, Hidden Assets looks promising.
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No one is impossibly glamorous; they’re just ordinary police officers doing their jobs, and the premise is intriguing. A subplot involving far-right, anti-immigrant politicians was a little worrying, because that’s something of a cliche in thrillers these days, but it’s early days yet.
On Channel 4, it was ‘dark psychological drama’ time again. You know what that means.
The central characters will live in an expensive, modernist detached house with a garden that makes the Phoenix Park look like an allotment. They’ll spend their time staring thoughtfully into space or exchanging significant glances, the meaning of which will remain obscure until the time comes to finally wrap everything up and head off to film the next slice of middle-brow, middle-class ‘suburban noir’.
The mystery in Close to Me was why Jo (Connie Nielsen) has fallen down the stairs drunk and banged her head, resulting in a dramatically convenient case of amnesia.
Jo can’t remember the last year of her life, and, frustratingly, no one, including her husband Rob (Christopher Eccleston), bothers to just, you know, fill in the blanks. Instead she has to rely on arty flashbacks and hallucinations of mermaids. Is it any wonder she’s paranoid?
It wasn’t terrible. Indeed, had it been a 90-minute film it could have piled on the tension, thrown in a few twists at the end, and sent everyone to bed satisfied.
Instead there are six hour-long episodes in which Jo drifts aimlessly through proceedings like a woman with all the time in the world, rather than one who’s desperate to recover her memory.
I mainly found myself wondering whether it was really necessary for us to see so much of Connie Nielsen’s bare bum. She was also the executive producer of the project, so it’s not as if she couldn’t have said no to those shower scenes.
I suspect there was some empowering message in there about fiftysomething women still being sexy, which is all very well, but sometimes an arse is just an arse.
The Tower was much better for being scheduled over three consecutive nights. That meant it was over before you really noticed the implausibility of it all, and by then you’d enjoyed it so much that you didn’t mind whether it had made much sense.
It began with police being called to a tower block, at the bottom of which lay the bodies of a 15 year-old-girl and a veteran police officer. What happened at the top of the building to make them fall?
The dead man’s rookie partner soon goes on the run rather than answer questions about the incident, and the shifty inspector (Kin’s Emmett Scanlan) seems to be deliberately sending investigators off down the wrong track.
It was described by one wag online as “the Aldi version of Line of Duty”, which was definitely funny but a bit unfair. It did delve into some of the same themes of institutional corruption, with a side order of casual racism to complicate things, but it had an admirable moral complexity of its own. No one here was entirely reprehensible. They did wrong, but all had understandable human reasons for doing as they did.
It was tightly written and genuinely gripping too. Which helps.
Faraway, Still Close was a profile of, and final recorded interview with, the late RTÉ broadcaster Keelin Shanley who died of cancer last February aged just 51.
Featuring contributions from her husband, colleagues, friends, even her oncologist, as well as hitherto unseen home videos, it was a touching, tender act of remembrance that showed Shanley in all her humour and humility as she battled Stage 4 cancer.
“Keelin was great at helping people tell their stories, but she didn’t think her own story was all that interesting,” we were told.
In a way, that’s what made it so moving. Shanley was clearly ambitious as a journalist, but it was her family and children to whom she was most obviously devoted. They appeared only briefly, their privacy rightly respected.
The film was probably not reviewable from any objective or dispassionate standpoint, but that’s fine too. Not everything needs to be critically analysed. Ultimately, it was just awfully sad.