Landscapers
Sky Atlantic/Now
★★★★☆
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Romantic Road Trip
Sky Arts/Now
★★★★☆
Landscapers is an odd cove. It is artfully directed by Will Sharpe, and for the most part beautifully acted, as you would expect when the lead characters are played by Olivia Colman and David Thewlis. But tonally? Well, slightly “off”, didn’t you think? A tad discomfiting?
It treated the real-life murders of an elderly couple, who were buried in their own back garden for 15 years, as a bit of lark, a comedy jape with sweary buffoon detectives from Nottinghamshire. As a viewer, I very much enjoyed it, but if I was related to Patricia and William Wycherley, I would be furious.
I suppose their daughter Susan Edwards and son-in-law Christopher are arguably past caring because they are serving 25 years in prison for the Wycherleys’ murders. Susan, who was painted as a childlike fantasist and movie obsessive, might even get off on the attention. In the opening credits it stated “This is a true story”, then faded out the word “true”, so from the outset we knew that artistic liberties had been taken. But the bodies were only discovered eight years ago, and some viewers might have been toying with the phrase “indecent haste”.
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There’s no denying that it was a treat to watch, with Colman capturing exquisitely the delusional naivety of Susan, an infantilised romantic scraping through life in a dingy flat in France while spending what little money the couple had on Gary Cooper and John Wayne memorabilia and pretending that Gérard Depardieu had sent them 100 francs.
Thewlis was also excellent as the less deluded but righteously self-pitying Christopher, who thinks that they have been misunderstood, even though they took his in-laws’ money and faked letters to relatives suggesting that they were still alive. The 1950s silver-screen and stage-play conceits were a fresh, imaginative way of dramatising true crime, and Ed Sinclair (Colman’s husband) has produced a fresh, zingy script.
So here’s my somewhat hypocritical take: I’m queasy about the memory of the murdered couple, but on the other hand it’s one of the most original dramas I’ve seen in years. Episode two is even better.
Frank Skinner became so emotional about Wordsworth’s poetry in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Romantic Road Trip that at one point I feared he was about to seduce a tree. As he leant his body against the magnificent 900-year-old oak, which he described as “like a cathedral” and under which Wordsworth and Coleridge were said to have recited their verse, he said: “You can smell the wisdom.” Steady on, Frank.
However, it was a lovely, illuminating hour in which Skinner and his co-presenter, the crime writer Denise Mina, proved that discussing poetry need not involve airy-fairy pretentiousness. Although the punters sitting in the pubs they visited, frequently whipping out their tomes to quote aloud from verse, felt differently.
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Skinner and Mina have a simple, unaffected way of reciting poetry, and it clearly had quite an impact on Skinner as he became teary over Wordsworth. “I love the way he talks about nature as if it was a religion,” the devout Catholic said. Could he get a stand-up tour out of it?
