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The week in TV: The Cure; Responsible Child; Sticks and Stones; Shrill – review

The Cure (Channel 4) | All 4
Responsible Child (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Sticks and Stones (ITV) | ITV Hub
Shrill (BBC Three) | iPlayer

Toxically lazy healthcare and pompous management putting profit before lives… bullying worthy of the Bullingdon Club… bad and stupid laws: it was almost as if the entire week’s dramas/docudramas were originally scheduled to land about three weeks before the election. What a difference it might have made. In Scotland, Labour might even have managed to have scraped a higher share of the polling than before women got the vote.

As such, I’m not sure how well agitprop theatre transfers to the screen. Ever. We saw it chiefly in The Cure, Channel 4’s retelling of the Staffs hospital crisis (for which read scandal) of the mid-00s. It contained, occasionally, wonderful acting, chiefly from Sian Brooke as doughty campaigner Julie Bailey, whose mother died because of neglect and who led a campaign that told a small and nasty and truthful story. But, oh, the trowelling on of morality, in which every campaigner was a salt-of-the-earth, laugh-a-minute pillar of society. Alex Macqueen was, for some reason, permitted to play the villain, the head of the fledgling private trust, with no subtlety whatsoever: had Alex had a Baron Richprick moustache he would have twirled it, cartoonishly. Even the Stafford people, who bridled somewhat at the threat of their A&E facilities being summarily closed, were portrayed as worthily, if donkey jacketedly, misguided, and this was about as subtle as it got.

Anyone who’s spent any time in an NHS ward over the past few years, and I’ve done my fair share of sudden weeks, knows that 90% of nurses are overworked, harried, beset by pointless protocol, yet, by and large, wonderful, and always go the extra mile. About 10% (if that) couldn’t care less, and trying to catch their eye, let alone hope that one’s drip might be changed through the night, despite the loud electronic beeping that must be such a distraction to their staff station texting, is a lost cause.

But Stafford, in those days and in the throes of demi-semi-privatisation, seemed a small sprawl of target-ticking before healthcare or even empathy: genuinely nasty, hence such a shame this wasn’t done with more nuance.

Billy Barratt in Responsible Child
Billy Barratt in Responsible Child. Photograph: Ed Miller/BBC/Kudos

Similarly, Responsible Child sought to highlight the mild madness of us having an extant law that allows children as young as 10 to be tried as adults when it comes to murder. As an argument, it works. As a drama, it didn’t.

There were grand performances in this drama based on a real-life case – Michelle Fairley, Stephen Campbell Moore, Billy Barratt – but way too much clunky expositioning. “You know if Ray was tried through the youth courts the decision would lie solely with the judge? Who’d make a decision based around all aspects of the child’s life? But this is murder. And he has to face a jury,” the barrister explains to the solicitor, who might reasonably have been expected to know all this already. How could this have been done more subtly? I racked my brains, but that was for six minutes in bed last night and I’m not yet being paid to be a TV dramatist. Someone was.

Most entertaining, if thunderously flawed, was Sticks and Stones, a tale of gaslighting/bullying at work, in which a team of unappealing property managers – as if there’s any other kind – turns on the weakest of their flock, nice guy Thomas, an increasingly good, if stressed (as in iron-band-round-head) Ken Nwosu.

After almost three full episodes of Thomas being increasingly cruelly humiliated by writer Mike Doctor Foster Bartlett, we got a denouement of sorts, when, after a spectacular third meltdown, he was left alone with Isobel, a minxish Susannah Fielding, who, it turns out (surprising only to those who had been watching with a lazy eye), had been Chief Bully all along.

After a lecture on survival of the fittest, she hissed: “It’s a game, Thomas. And the trick is to stay just within the lines. If I was to call you overweight, or boring, or be sarcastic, I might be crossing some sort of organisational guideline but there’s very little they can do… being mean isn’t actually against the law. But if I was to insult you according to race, or gender, or disability, that would be illegal. Isn’t it weird?”

I had wondered whether we might more interestingly explore this vein, why sustained nastiness, systematic abuse through nods, winks and muffled lampooning of his daughter’s deafness, say, should be so much less actionable than simply saying a forbidden or even an “unpreferred” word under a wholly imperfect law that seeks only to proscribe speech, not thoughts. But no. Isobel ended her spite-flecked tirade, Thomas bit back his anger and apparently went meekly home.

Obviously he got his quiet revenge. It turned out that, yes, his secretly taped use of the word “black” was what brought the company down, and how much more interesting would have been wider expositions on workplace cruelty. Also, so many mixed messages: when he finally encouraged his lovely deaf daughter to fight back against school bullying, she did and we let out a hurrah. And when she and he were scolded by the school, and he was scolded by his wife, for having dared to make a personal stand rather than fob off bullying as the school’s “responsibility”, we let out a collective what the f…

But, chiefly, this failed to hit home because all the characters were so damned unlikable. It was like the worst ever extended episode of The Apprentice, if you can shudder to imagine that. Even Thomas, outwardly appealing, displayed a needful and lying greed most steps of the way. We struggled to feel empathy when he pretended, wheedlingly, to his boss that, yes, he drank alcohol, flashed the credit cards for ruinous champers and raced drunkenly from one lie to the next, all in the service of keeping his job at a company that did cut-throat deals for corporate business spaces.

I thought I’d hate Shrill, a big hit in the US on Hulu, whose first series landed last week on iPlayer. It was nominally about “body positivity”, in Portland, Oregon, an overweight young journalist deciding to turn the tables on fat-shamers everywhere… and, having seen that fine documentary Who Are You Calling Fat? earlier this year, I have just zilch time for the intellectually fraudulent “positivity” movement.

But, it turns out, it’s about so, so much more than that. It’s basically about a lass learning to grow up, just loving life more than she’s hating being fat. And, as such, it’s zinging, fast, sweet and seriously funny, no characters drawn with anything less than depth. It features Aidy Bryant in surely a breakout role as Annie and our own Lolly Adefope as the spiky flatmate, and for this particular dinosaur is a slap of sea-fresh air. Still not convinced by the positivity self-deluders, but, hey, if you’re going to gorge your way to mental health then this week’s not a bad week to start. Happy Christmas.