TV Review of the Week: The Fall, and Morgana Robinson’s The Agency

To many, it means cosy blankets, chilly evenings, Hallowe’en preparations, the “nights fair drawin’ in”, and idiots burbling about Christmas on Facebook.

But to me it means that, finally, there is a fine harvest of good TV, and it makes for a rich reward after enduring the terrible famine of the summer when the locusts of sport chewed through the TV schedules, leaving gaping holes everywhere.

But now, there are so many good things on TV that it’s becoming difficult to pick just two for my previews in the weekday paper.

Consider this coming Tuesday: we have the brilliant Robbie Coltrane drama National Treasure on Channel 4; Sky Atlantic are kicking off their new futuristic drama Westworld; and BBC2 are giving us the charming Neil Oliver in the American South where he’ll show the links between Scottish emigrants to the New World and the Ku Klux Klan.

I still haven’t decided which two deserve to be previewed.

All I know for sure is that one of those shows is guaranteed to annoy quite a few people.

Looking back to the past week, we had highly-anticipated return to the screen of The Fall (BBC2, Thursday), back for its third series. I can remember reviewing the cliffhanger episode at the end of the second and despairing that they had tagged that woodland shooting on just so they could drag it out into a another series.

It should have ended with Spector’s capture with no need for an encore. What if this tense, clipped, perfect thing falls victim to Broadchurch syndrome, just hanging round the screens to fulfil a contractual obligation rather than an artistic one?

So, once I got over my initial joy at seeing the episodes all queued up nicely for me on the BBC’s previewing site, wariness descended. Pride comes before The Fall, but what comes after?

A sense of anti-climax, that’s what.

While we can’t expect a good drama to remain stagnant, I barely recognised this. It seemed to have transformed into a Belfast hospital drama, complete with a handsome new doctor with tousled hair and some sardonic lines.

But in between his witty dialogue was reams of standard TV medical jargon, all of which persisted far, far beyond the point at which the writer had established the scene, the mood, and the necessary facts.

We just hung around in the hospital, feeling as useless and detached as Stella who drifted listlessly in the corridors and

side-rooms. All her zest and vigour had vanished, as had the show’s purpose. The hunt for the sadistic killer, and the titanic struggle between good and evil, between cool Gibson and violent Spector, had been replaced with a particularly slow episode of Belfast Casualty.

It was a disappointment and I could hardly believe it. How can it be that

I’m sitting here watching The Fall but am not gripped? How is it that I notice what time it is? Why do I want to make some tea? This is not The Fall we all loved so furiously.

Just as the Bake-Off poaching scandal has created some annoyance, so might The Fall unless it pulls its socks up.

Like the bakery show, it might become lost to us, or changed beyond recognition, because of greed.

I assume a third series was made, not because the plot and character demanded it, but because a juicy contract was waved around.

Big bucks and viewing figures probably demanded a third series and the show is being bent out of shape to fit that demand.

WHEN ITV announced a new satirical puppet show, Newzoids, I was delighted, as was everyone who likes to see those in power needled and mocked and pulled back down to earth.

Of course, you’ll know by now that Newzoids is very poor. It’s a kind of Punch and Judy for teenagers.

ITV should be embarrassed to put this show out when it once gave us the brilliant and merciless Spitting Image. I was so glad, then, to see BBC2 was launching a new impressionist show because it’s badly needed. So many powerful people are going around unmocked. It cannot be borne.

Morgana Robinson’s The Agency (BBC2, Monday) is funny. Her impersonations are often uncanny, particularly those of Natalie Cassidy and The Bake-Off’s Mel and Sue.

And her show isn’t a stand-up, Rory Bremner-style impressionism where she stands at a mic.

Instead, she weaves it into a loose story where the celebrities are represented by a talent agency, Mann Management, and she presents it as a documentary about the company.

But even though I laughed, particularly at the cruel Natalie Cassidy segments, I was left feeling slightly empty afterwards because isn’t it a bit of a waste

to use that huge talent for impressionism on such a flimsy figure as “Sonia from EastEnders”.

Of course, that was part of the joke: she’s only little old Sonia yet thinks she’s a great star, but I wanted to yell at Robinson to turn her firepower on bigger, more deserving, targets.

It must be harder these days to do political impersonations as politicians are so bland and “on-message”, and mavericks and colourful characters rarely slip through the antiseptic net.

You can’t do an impression of a bland person who’s been planed smooth by the party PR machine yet, in a world where politics has thrown up Trump, Brexit and the tortuous splitting of the Labour Party, aren’t things changing?

And where are the comedians and satirists ready to react to that change?