The week in TV: Cobra; Catching a Killer and more

Cobra (Sky One)
Catching a Killer: A Diary from the Grave (C4) | All 4
The Outsider (Sky Atlantic)
Cold Feet (ITV) | ITV Hub

Cobra is one of those oddities, in a rather good way, in which what you’re promised in the opener veers wildly into an altogether different beast. What starts as knockabout action, with shades of every impending natural cataclysm movie ever, morphs quickly into a moreish exploration of low politics and high ambition, with subtle and timely nods to that squalid belt where extreme left and right meet.

This transition might have come about through necessity, the overall budget surely taking a pummelling by the first episode having an aircraft explode while crash landing on the A1. Nevertheless, even though everything moves swiftly indoors, there’s enough cash down the back of the sofa for handsome backdrops of Downing Street, Whitehall, an empty London – and, crucially, for a fine cast.

Robert Carlyle is a gentle, decent, modern Conservative prime minister. Enough of your sneery kneejerk cavilling! Aided by brightest button chief of staff Victoria Hamilton and a couple of heroic cops and civil emergency officers in the handsome shapes of Richard Dormer and Steven Cree, he must (briefly) save the country from sudden raging solar flares, which take out most power and bring down planes; but this is, if anything, a mere survivable subplot.

What it mainly does is leave the country open to chaos, chiefly focused on the north-east, the only, increasingly angry area not to get its power back. Cue strikes, infiltration by far-right activists, riots in a deportation centre, press-inspired lynchings and, chiefly, a wolfish grin around the chops of arch-bigot and home secretary David Haig, chewing up the scenery and loving it.

His splendidly viper-tongued Archie Glover-Morgan sees the solar storm as his chance to wrest power back from the damp snowflake wing of the party (and country) and he sets about his task with exuberantly unsubtle gusto. Written by Ben Richards (Spooks, Strike), this, at times, threatens to rival even the sainted West Wing in its empathetic portrayals of a politician fighting both national and deeply personal battles. Where it judders, I think, is in its insistence of a couple of ho-hum subplots, as the momentum lurches away from the crisis at hand, and on – while trying not to vouchsafe any spoilers – the insistence on a couple of handsome, workaday civil servants saving the day like Bruce Willis.

Where it succeeds, triumphs, even, and reminds me much more of 2019’s Years and Years, is in alerting us, with great nuance, to the ways in which every “disenfranchised” group with their own agenda – poor white racists, entitled, embittered poshos, chippy, smash-it-all anarchists, offence-taking gullibles, all the modern panoply of triggerables – might seek to use a crisis, any crisis, no matter how vital the repair work needed, to just bring down … something … and hugely enabled, of course, by social media, which irritatingly comes back on about a day after the gentle peace of temporary radio silence.

The six-parter is called series one so the door is open for Robert Carlyle’s re-emergence to Cabinet Office Briefing Room Assembly. Hurrah. He was tight-mouthed with magnificence as he played, utterly credibly, the role of a smart leader trying to see all sides, make impossible decisions and be in place purely for the good of the country – and a Tory at that. Begbie would have bottled him.

There wasn’t a harder watch last week than Catching a Killer. With truly remarkable access, Channel 4 recounted a tawdry true tale of exploitation. Ben Field befriended lovely older Peter Farquhar in idyllic Maids Moreton, Buckinghamshire, a few years ago, poisoned and gaslit him, fed him a bottle of whisky, made out suicide, inherited the house.

Farquhar, a gentle soul and beloved academic with a dry wit, remembered by all as the best teacher ever, had made the mistake of being both gay and deeply religious. In later years he managed to reconcile these parts of his life. Unfortunately, he also then met trainee vicar and professional psycho Field. It was heartbreaking to hear read out, often by the real police involved in that laudably dogged investigation, some of Farquhar’s journal entries – his absolute faith in Field’s unfailing goodness, the flowering of long-denied love. One late entry read, confusedly: “Tired and lethargic for a few weeks now, and occasionally lost my balance. Ben has been so kind and imaginative”: juxtapose that with Field’s angry scrawled plans for murder, and how he planned to tell Farquhar just before the end that he’d always loathed him.

Ben Field was that rare outrage – a sharp, entitled lad who could display huge emotional intelligence, just to trick his way in, yet zilch emotion under any circumstances. The fact that he must have eagerly agreed to being filmed in prison for this film, yawning his clever, bored way to a 36-year stretch, is the mark of a true sociopath. That is a face I hope I never meet.

Based on a Stephen King novel, The Outsider, it need hardly be said, is spooky, though so far only one jump-shock-per-episode spooky. It is also glacial in its slowness. I get why the makers want to do this; growing up (presumably) with too many runaround schlock-horrors, they’d like to let King’s undoubted talent for moods of masterly unsettlement hang dark and slow in the air and settle like a cowl. Quite whether it needed to be this bloody slow, or all the jails and strip joints and forests in Georgia seemingly filmed through that same cowl, is up for debate.

For all that, if you allow this to grab, it will. There’s just enough spooksomeness dropped like a soiled glove into the first two episodes (of 10) to hold and haul you in: a man getting a mysterious cut at a care home, a torn advert, a parka’d figure with features unseen. And, of course, that little thing of a dead child with his face eaten off; and King’s trademark mingling of joyous American 50s culture, Little League baseball and doughnuts and the rest, with babbling insanity and grave-filth.

Cold Feet is back, and I’m entirely unconvinced by the blossoming romance between Adam and Karen and its uugh-get-a-room-guys lasciviousness; even less so by the car park fights between David and Adam. Fortunately, we have a fine new strand, should they choose to further explore it, in Adam’s inability to grasp the nuances of 2020 workplace interaction; luckily, too, they’re all fine actors, and there are still many sparks to both performance and writing. But, come on, Adam’s HR “joke” was not in any way funny. If this emerges, through wit, to encapsulate redemptions, forgiveness between generations, any one of which is at least confused as the next, it’ll deserve to last. If it turns into a mockalong at older people, it’ll be turning up its tootsies.