Things with “heart” in the title are always awful. Where the Heart Is. Heartbeat. Other things I can’t think of right now but that were bad. This is because the heart, in television terms, is almost always the opposite of the brain — and, indeed, the groin. “Heart” shows eschew terror, enlightenment, hot ass, or anything remotely funny in favour of being “heartwarming” — telly served at lukewarm body temperature. All a bit like being widdled on by a dolphin.
And so to Wild at Heart, in which the Bristolian vet Stephen Tompkinson finds a poorly monkey locked in a basement, which his wife, Amanda Holden, decides they must rehabilitate into the wilds of Africa. Everyone assumes their usual roles: Holden plays an egg-faced lass who isn’t as shallow as she first appears, Tompkinson plays a man whose acting career is in freefall, and Africa plays the source of deep elemental wisdoms and rhinoceroses.
Tompkinson and Holden have children in tow, who all assume their usual roles, too: Child One, very shouty and scared, who gradually blooms thanks to Africa’s deep, elemental wisdoms; Child Two, a hardened urbanite, who gradually blooms thanks to Africa’s rhinoceroses, and Child Three, the good one, who doesn’t get any decent lines at all.
In the first episode, the whole family start what is destined to be a six-part bonding process when the children, at the mercy of the plot, stomp off into the savannah, only to be threatened by a rhinoceros. Tompkinson saves his children by standing between them and the rhino, and engaging in a Jedi-style mind-off. The power struggle is illustrated by cutting, very quickly, between a close-up of Tompkinson’s face, acting, and the rhino’s face, quite clearly in a zoo 15,000 miles away from Tompkinson.
In the shots of the rhino, it exhibits no murderous intent. It looks like it is thinking of lunch. Eventually, the rhino ambles off, supremely unbothered, to talk to the penguins in the next enclosure. We cut back to Tompkinson’s heartily acted relief, signified by forehead-wiping and multiple “phews!” As you can imagine, the dramatic impact is nugatory.
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The family, thankfully unventilated by rhino horn, subsequently befriend the local eccentric white man, who suggests that they move in with him, become business partners, and open up his huge ranch as one of those luxury hotels-cumveterinary surgeries you hear so much about. By the end of the episode, a great many unlikely things have befallen the family, but none more unlikely than the fact that they are in the middle of Africa, for an hour of prime-time, yet have still not spoken to a single black person. Presumably black Africans aren’t heart-warming.
It’s hard to quantify just how much tosh this all is — who could ever find enough time, or big enough scales? — but it’s safe to say that if surveyors ever do discover the Great Sea of Tosh, Wild at Heart will be one of its major tributaries.
There are similar poor standards of tosh-avoidance on Lewis, ITV1’s flagrant attempt to keep the lucrative Morse franchise going, despite Morse being dead, dead, dead, dead and not in Inspector Morse any more.
Instead, Inspector Morse is now Lewis, which surely isn’t the point at all. What’s Lewis going to do? Not listen to Puccini, not drive a Jag Mark II, not do crosswords, not drink ale, not solve crimes and not shout “Lewis!”? What’s the point of that, then?
In this pilot episode, Lewis returns from a five-year job attachment to the Virgin Islands — a move requested after the sudden, unexpected death of his wife in a hit-and-run accident in Covent Garden in London.
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“Why’d she want to go up to London?” Lewis agonises, fresh off the plane, straight into the plot, dull as ever. “There’s cracking shops in Oxford.”
Of course, within seconds the single and lonely Lewis is plunged into a murder inquiry. Equally obviously, he is aided, from beyond the grave, by Morse. Morse has thoughtfully left a load of relevant paperwork in the files — and all atmospherically stained with imprints of his beer glass, to boot.
Really, the whole “Morse’s paperwork ghost plot” is so lame that it could easily gain disabled parking privileges. Surely if they wanted to do Morse this badly — and who can blame them? That Morse box-set is £129 — they could have found a long-lost son of Morse’s. Some handsome, irascible 25-year-old, hung like a donkey, who inherited his dad’s car — and tankard — on his death, and who speeds in to Oxford to team up with Lewis and solve Morse’s murder. For it was murder! MURDER! Morse’s heart was stopped by electrical impulses, bounced off the dreaming spires of Brasenose and Christ Church, and Morse Jnr will not stop in his endeavours — geddit? — to track down his absent father’s killers. Along the way, he learns just who his father was, how extraordinary his talents were, and why he was so very important to the drama unit at ITV1. I tell you what — I’m ready to roll with this, even if everyone else isn’t.
The IT Crowd is the new Graham Father Ted, Black Books Linehan sit-com, and therefore of major importance to anyone who habitually throws themselves on the sofa and sighs, “Ah, I love telly”. The ludicrously talented Richard Ayoade finally gets a lead role, Chris Morris returns as a wholly satisfying parody of manhood, and the whole thing seems comfortably bedded in within 15 minutes. All in all, no reason to lose faith in humanity just yet.