NEW drama series The Replacement (BBC1, Tuesday) is probably doing more for Glasgow’s image than the 1980s Glasgow’s Miles Better campaign.
It showcased the Merchant City’s clean, wide streets bordered with proud Victorian buildings but also rushed to offer some sleek, minimalist architecture. There were grand, fairylit city centre pubs, winding mews, and high-ceilinged homes in leafy West End streets. Glasgow looked great.
We all know dramas tend to be set in London. They might decamp to Manchester or Liverpool if they want to be gritty, or move to the Highlands for a rural and wild feel, but there was no need for this drama to be set in Glasgow other than that it looked quite beautiful and stylish and, at the same time, its older architecture gave hints at creaking secrets and layers of hidden history.
At least, I hope that’s why they chose Glasgow and that it wasn’t just some box-ticking exercise in prising the BBC out of London.
Whatever the reason, the result is pleasing, and gorgeous Glasgow offered a perfect backdrop to this drama about two feuding women. Like the architecture we keep seeing, one seems sleek, pristine and rather too glossy. The other is more messy, emotionally weathered and, it’s gradually hinted at, perhaps in some danger of falling apart.
Ellen (Morven Christie) is an architect at a fashionable firm and has just won them a £12 million contract to build a new library. This great creation will be her all her own work; it’ll be her baby. The champagne flows! But the next morning she’s boaking into the toilet and it’s not because of a hangover.
It’s maddening for ambitious Ellen to have to go off on maternity leave, to have to look after a real baby, leaving her other one, the library, in the care of some stranger – especially when that stranger is Paula (Vicky McClure), her maternity cover.
Everyone loves Paula. The staff welcome her, hardly believing their luck at finding someone so capable, charming and efficient. As Ellen packs up her desk, she watches Paula across the open-plan office, seeing her winning friends, hugs and handshakes, and she can’t help feeling insecure. The camera reinforces this, with a bit of a heavy hand, as our first glimpse of Paula is from behind, showing us her slim, stockinged-legs and tight skirt just as Ellen is starting to puff and swell with her baby (the pesky baby that isn’t the fame-inducing million pound library).
Ellen develops an intense dislike for Paula, but is her replacement really out to steal her job and friends, or is Ellen just paranoid, exhausted and ill with her pregnancy? The story is seen through Ellen’s eyes, so are we getting a warped perspective here? Could this drama be about mental illness provoked by pregnancy and stress, or is it a straightforward tale about a grasping, creepy woman who wants what you have?
Had the drama stuck to those themes it’d be brilliant but, sadly, there was a body. There’s always a body! Yes, on a late-night visit to the library building site, Ellen’s boss fell (or was she pushed?) through a skylight and, in one glass-shattering moment, the drama ceded a lot of its power, shrugged off the mantle of clever psychology, and said it might like to be a crime drama as well…
I WAS pleased and surprised, then, to see that the return of Broadchurch (STV, Monday) had no body. It’d have been implausible, surely, and a bit silly for such a wee town to have had two murders in quick succession, but then the entire second series was silly and implausible so why the hell not? But maybe severe lessons have been learned by the absolute scorching, merciless reviews poor old Series Two got, so the writer has taken a new tack here.
It’s not a murder case. There is no body. At least, there’s no dead body, but there is a terribly abused, scarred and battered body. Trish (Julie Hesmondhalgh) is found sitting on the steps of the police station at night. She has managed to phone and report that she’s been raped, but when we see her she’s silent and in deep shock.
Her acting here is brilliantly disturbing. When cheery Ellie and gruff Alec arrive on the scene they try to coax words from her and we feel the cops’ desperation for her to speak and start giving them leads and evidence but, as viewers, we don’t want her to talk as we know only appalling revelations will spill from her mouth.
For reasons unknown, the writer insisted on shoving the bereaved Latimer family into the story (my God, just let it go!) and the excuse for shoe-horning them into the third series is that Beth is now a counsellor and has been assigned to look after Trish. It seems odd that Trish is being assisted by the mother of a boy who was killed by the husband of the detective…did you get that? Yep, it’s confusing and it’s totally unnecessary. Dump the dreary Latimers and move on with this new series and new story.
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