You Don’t Know Me
BBC1
Landscapers
Sky Atlantic/Now
And Just Like That...
Sky Comedy/Now
Should you ever tire of reading me writing about telly, allow me to remind you that you can hear me talking about it quite a lot too, on my Times Radio show every Saturday. A few weeks ago I interviewed Samuel Adewunmi and Imran Mahmood, who are respectively the star of BBC1’s new Sunday night drama You Don’t Know Me and the author of the novel on which it was based.
Mahmood, a criminal barrister, wrote the book after noticing a pattern. Time and again, he told me, he’d be in court and see young men, usually black, who had been living lives that the judges and juries they were facing just didn’t understand. Sometimes, sure, they had made terrible decisions and done terrible things. At other times, though, the mere daily facts of their lives had forced them into situations devoid of good options. To them, this was obvious and paramount and surely had to matter, yet nobody else gave a hoot.
You Don’t Know Me is that sort of story. Adewunmi, who seems bang on the edge of proper stardom, plays Hero, who is just that sort of young man. He’s in court, at the end of being on trial for the murder of a boy called Jamil, and you sense it hasn’t gone well. Forgoing a defence barrister, he’s defending himself, which you rather suspect Mahmood would not advise. Structurally, his story is told via his closing speech, which is a somewhat clunky and unrealistic device because you expect a real-world judge wouldn’t have that much patience with ten whimsical minutes on how he snagged his girlfriend by stalking her with muffins on buses and cooking a really excellent carbonara. Although that, I suppose, is the whole point. It’s meant to be unrealistic. He’s doing what in the real world never gets to be done.
Without giving too much away, we learn that the girlfriend, Kyra (Sophie Wilde), eventually disappears and that this disappearance leads directly to Hero’s crime, if indeed there even is one. Roger Jean Nsengiyumva plays the victim, Jamil, a small-time drug dealer who turns into a much bigger-time one, even as we watch. We see him clash with Hero and hear threats hurled, we know the gun that killed Jamil was found in Hero’s house and we even eventually see him buy it. Altogether, though, maybe things are more complicated.
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YDKM is unafraid of being decidedly middlebrow. Until her disappearance Kyra’s main character trait is that she reads books, which kept making me think of that Bill Hicks routine about the redneck who sees him with a book in a waffle restaurant: “Looks like we got ourselves a reader . . .” There are expedient meltdowns and suspiciously well choreographed gun battles, and the south Londoner Hero seems frankly too old for such histrionic trepidation about heading into the dangerous mean streets of, um, Camden Town. (It’s only goths, mate. What are they going to do? Cry you to death?)
Step back, though, and you will see a youth-led story of urban black experience plunged not only firmly but also deservedly into the Sunday night family drama slot. Which would be no small thing, even if it were not incredibly difficult to stop watching too.
Landscapers, meanwhile, is an oddity. This is the real-life story of Susan and Christopher Edwards, who evaded justice for 15 years after murdering Susan’s parents and burying them in the rear flower bed of their Nottinghamshire home. Nobody knew or even suspected; the house was sold and their bank accounts drained. For a remarkably long time — 14 of those 15 years — the Edwardses covered up their crime by pretending the old folk had moved or were on holiday, and by sending Christmas cards purporting to be from them.
By 2012, though, the dead dad was about to turn 100, and government departments kept writing to him, and I suppose it must have suddenly struck his daughter and son-in-law that they had no way to kill him off because they already had. So in a panic they fled to France, with a plan for Christopher to get a job there. Alas, he couldn’t speak French. Also, they had no money left because they had pissed it all away by compulsively buying Hollywood memorabilia. So Christopher contacted a relative back home and sort of accidentally confessed, and she grassed him up. And then they went to jail.
Every bit of this story is as weird as hell. The trouble is that, on screen, weirdness itself doesn’t really give you very far to go. Olivia Colman plays Susan, and she’s brittle and sunny and horribly optimistic, while David Thewlis plays Christopher. Both, obviously, are brilliant, but the characters they play are at best half-comprehending of their crime or their circumstances. This makes it hard to care much whether they get their comeuppance or not, not least because you already know that they do.
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There are nice lines here, especially from the somewhat slapstick trio of police on their case (Kate O’Flynn, Samuel Anderson and Daniel Rigby) and from the neighbours, who saw a hole being dug and joked that precisely what actually had happened might have happened, without ever believing it. Although, in the end, for what? I’m only an episode in, but for me the only real way for it to go would be somewhere between Tubbs and Edward in The League of Gentlemen and Mickey and Mallory in Natural Born Killers: to turn the stilted, tangential morality of these pottering old lunatics into something properly inhuman and horrifying. So far it’s all a bit cute for that.
I never liked Samantha. I couldn’t figure out why she was there. In a show that I always found annoying (Sex and the City), yet seem to have spent an awful lot of time watching (I blame women) she was definitely the most annoying bit. Carrie, I suppose, I quite fancied. And Charlotte, hmm, I suppose I also quite fancied. And Miranda seemed to hate the damn show almost as much as I did, so was basically an ally. Kim Cattrall’s shag-monster, though, just made me cringe. So loud, so crass, so honkingly out of step with everything else. She was Donald Trump in a dress. When I heard she wasn’t coming back for the reboot, it seemed like a bonus. Maybe, I thought, I won’t actually hate it.
Ah, well. And Just Like That... starts at brunch with a conversation about sperm because of course it does. You think your life hasn’t worked out as you hoped? Dude, at least you haven’t been talking about sperm at brunch, literally since 1998.
Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) looks basically the same. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), looks much as you’d expect. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) looks like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. Eeesh. Samantha, they say, has moved to London. She never calls, she never texts, she was only in it for the money, they’re heartbroken. It’s brilliantly bitchy, all this, because they’re obviously talking about Cattrall, who refused to be part of this reboot because she hated all of them and, now I think of it, probably hated Samantha too.
Everything else, though, is much as you’d expect. Miranda still has the husband who can’t talk properly. Charlotte is still with the bald guy from Californication. Carrie is still with Big, but also still has her gay best friend who I’m sure I remember being called Stamford Brook, although that can’t be right because it’s a stop on the District Line.
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What this new series seems to be about is fear of the young. Fear that your world is slipping away, fear that nobody cares about your shoes any more, fear that it might not be enough, these days, to just talk about spunk at brunch. Charlotte has her own things going on, but as ever they’re a bit too boring to worry about. Miranda has gone back to college, where she’s so keen not to be racist that she keeps being racist; a recurring gag that is itself not unracist. Carrie, meanwhile, has swapped her column for a podcast with a non-binary host and a man in a vest who likes to talk about wanking in public, which is apparently cool now. And she doesn’t know how to play.
So, later that night (and big spoiler ahead for those yet to watch — look away now!), she gets to thinking and asks Big to have a go while she watches. He says no, but he’ll think about it. Alas, he then has a heart attack on his Peloton while she’s off at a concert, and dies on the bathroom floor. Tough break. If he’d corpsed while cracking one out, at least she’d have had something to say on her podcast.
Having seen episode two too, I can see how all of this might eventually move on to interesting terrain about grief and motherhood and stuff like that. I do find, though, that thoughts of Miranda’s further adventures in racism and Carrie’s further adventures in sex podcasting very nearly bring me physical pain.
You know who wouldn’t have these problems? Samantha, that’s who. She’d be turning up to college dressed like a Black Panther and shrieking on the podcast about that time a guy peed on her head, and she’d have kept on going even while all the millennials cringed themselves inside out. With her awfulness spreading out like a force field, providing cover for everybody else. Which, I suppose, was exactly what she always did. And just like that, maybe I got it.
