The Light in the Hall
Channel 4
★★★☆☆
Ukraine: The People’s Fight
BBC2
★★★★☆
Joanna Scanlan is a fabulous actress, but even she couldn’t make The Light in the Hall shine. It’s not that it had a bad script (OK, it was bad sometimes), it’s that I felt I had seen it all before and a decent cast couldn’t lift its tired legs. The premise was fertile, but familiar: Scanlan played Sharon, whose daughter Ela was presumed murdered 18 years ago, her body never found. Now she was tortured by the prospect of the killer, Joe (Iwan Rheon), from the same town, being released from prison.
In execution it was often clunky and slowed down by TV clichés such as Sharon dusting down a photo of Ela (tick), then opening a letter from the probation service telling her of Joe’s hearing (tick), then gesturing pointedly to the tape over the light switch in the hall. Ela’s sister, Greta (Annes Elwy), pulled out a bottom drawer under which she seemed to be hiding — surprise! — Ela’s diary.
It felt like a mash-up of previous dead child dramas in which you already know all is not quite as it seems and the guilty person is probably innocent (I may be proved wrong on this, but we’ll see). That said, Scanlan bringing nuance and punch to the lead role, and a strong performance from Elwy, made up for the lame bits featuring the journalists. It’s one of my pet hates how TV dramas always get journalists wrong and this lot were predictably two-dimensional despite the efforts of Alexandra Roach (Scanlan’s co-star from the quality No Offence).
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However, I liked the way that it features realistic people in authentic, ordinary houses and it’s not all kitchen islands and rainfall showers. There are good threads, especially the jealousy of Greta feeling that she can’t compete with a dead sister for her mother’s attention and Sharon deciding to stalk and stare out Joe in his halfway hostel. So enough to not switch off just yet.
● How Joanna Scanlan became Britain’s hottest actress
Ukraine: The People’s Fight was, meanwhile, dazzling, intimate documentary-making. Olly Lambert spent two months with the Ukrainian volunteers helping to fight Putin’s soldiers and he made it feel as if we were there with them, feeling the mortar shells shake the ground.
There are potential movies in the human stories he told: the architect turned super-soldier, the rug seller, the politician, the young female schoolteacher who said fighting this war had changed her and that she had now joined the army. She said that she never thought she would be sufficiently “cruel” to want people dead, but now when she hears 20 Russian soldiers have been killed she thinks, “It’s not enough.” That told us a lot about what war does to human empathy.
The long sequence in which two men argued, the stress understandably getting to them, felt so immersive it was almost voyeuristic. We also saw how war brings out the best in people, such as Alexei the architect using his cartography and computer technology skills to help to pinpoint enemies, and Roman the MP, with his Churchillian cigar, saying that he felt as if he had been preparing for this his whole life.
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Would Brits respond so magnificently? It’s hard to say until we are put in the situation, but I think we probably would. Patriotism and a sense of justice are emboldening. Few could tell this story better than Lambert.
