Kiefer Sutherland’s post-24 return to TV, a drama about interconnectedness, suffered from a few faulty connections
Touch
Sky1
America’s Touch marks Kiefer Sutherland’s return to TV following the cancellation of 24 and show-runner Tim Kring’s return to baffling us with the higher nonsense after the cancellation of Heroes. Its theme, played at the pitch where maths hits metaphysics, is that everything is interconnected by, if you like, “invisible threads” (cue visible CGI threads) or, whether you like it or not, numbers. The latter are obsessively transcribed by Jake, an elective child mute on the Hollywood-end of the autistic spectrum, ie, genius. We might conclude Jake was traumatised by the loss of his mother on 9/11. Kring prefers to see him as a heroic precursor to a shift in human consciousness, and employs Danny Glover, playing a professor tellingly called Teller, to tell us so.
Advertisement
While Touch owes something to the also cancelled Numb3rs, its real job is to turn up E. M. Forster’s stricture that we must “only connect” to a rolling boil. Last night it wove a narrative link between an English couple mourning their dead daughter, a Dublin call centre worker, a Twin Towers fireman, the son of a Baghdad baker and the New York Lotto. The link was a smartphone that went on a plane trip round the world. The connection was found by Jake, who used his father, Sutherland, as his gofer and plot-expositor. The irony is that Jake himself cannot connect with his dad. Indeed, he cannot bear to be Touched (although guess what happened at the end of the episode).
In the series’ favour, it demands significant thinking from its audience to keep up. The problem is that the more you think about Touch the less it means and the greater the objections to terrorism, infant mortality and autism being carolled into one heck of a sentimental Kring ring. Sutherland as Martin, a former big-shot reporter reduced to blue-collar jobs, does his best to shed eight years of 24 but, of all the episode’s improbabilities, the moment Jack Bauer jammed his finger in a drawer remained the unlikeliest of all.
My Daughter, Deafness and Me
BBC One
Advertisement
It is not often that actors put themselves in the position of being exposed as child abusers. Good, then, for Rita Simons, Roxy in EastEnders, for not cutting the insult from her feisty, ear-opening documentary My Daughter, Deafness and Me. Simons had met a group of militantly pro-sign language deaf people, one of whom thought a cochlear implant for Simons’ deaf 5-year-old daughter abusive. The cochlear option is far from perfect (music sounds like dustbins being emptied) and irreversible, but it does give access to a world of sound. Celebrating deafnesss, mastering sign and immersing yourself in the deaf “community” is the other way to go, and has plenty to be said for it too, but in silence. Simons thought it her family’s decision to make and objected strongly to the child abuse taunt. “I do not go round deaf people screaming at them to put a hearing aid in,” she said. I wish the delightful Maiya huge success with her coming implant.
andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk