Stonehouse - 2023 ITV series - review

I remember the case of John Stonehouse vividly, even though the crime for which he became famous was committed when I was just starting student life and had plenty of other things happening to occupy my attention. He was a Labour MP and former cabinet minister who enjoyed quite a high profile during the Wilson era. A charismatic but extremely disreputable individual, he faked his own death in 'Reggie Perrin' style, but didn't cover his tracks very well and was arrested in Australia. He and his lover Sheila Buckley were tried and found guilty of various crimes, but she avoided prison. Stonehouse did not. 

The story is an extraordinary one, and spice is added by the widespread belief that Stonehouse spied for the Czechs during the Cold War. Today, surviving members of his family have varying perspectives on his character and the extent of his criminality. Stonehouse is a recent three-part TV series telling the story with a screenplay by John Preston. The director was Jon S. Baird, who was captain of one of the teams in Christmas University Challenge, although I didn't get the chance to meet him. 

The versatile and accomplished Matthew Macfadyen plays Stonehouse and his real life spouse Keeley Hawes plays the MP's long-suffering wife Barbara. It's fun to watch them working together in very, very different roles from those which they played in Spooks. Kevin McNally plays Harold Wilson and Dorothy Atkinson is cast as Betty Boothroyd (whose part in the story in real life may well have been much more peripheral than the screenplay suggests). Emer Heatley is a rather subdued Sheila Buckley, by no means the self-confident character I imagined from press reports at the time, and the low-key nature of their relationship takes a bit of energy away from the story.

Stonehouse is good entertainment, reminiscent of Canoe Man, the story of a comparable dodgy fantasist, John Darwin. Really, the story is presented as a light comedy. Macfadyen's Stonehouse is bumbling and ridiculous rather than malevolent. Whether that's a reasonable version of the truth I don't know, but I enjoyed watching the series.

Quiz - ITV review

Quiz, which ran for three episodes on consecutive nights last week, was perfect lockdown televiewing. A family entertainment show about family entertainment, with an ingenious crime and a bit of courtroom drama. Fittingly, for a show about quizzes, it posed a tricky question. Did Major Charles Ingram and his wife Diana conspire with Tecwen Whittock in 2001 in an attempt to cheat a million pounds out of the show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

I was a big fan of Millionaire in its early years. I've always enjoyed quizzes and the TV show I watch most regularly is University Challenge, where the contestants play for glory rather than cash. A lot of the popular quiz-type shows with big cash prizes leave me cold, but Millionaire fascinated me until it became too samey. Quiz showed how Millionaire began before showing how the Ingrams, and Diana's brother became obsessed with the possibility of winning a million. In short, the issue was whether strategic coughing by Whittock was what tipped Ingram off about the right answers.

Quiz boasted impeccable credentials, with a script by James Graham and direction by Stephen Frears. The Major was played by the always appealing Matthew Macfadyen and Diana by Sian Clifford, who was excellent in Fleabag. Especially brilliant - but when is he not? - was Michael Sheen, with an extraordinarily convincing performance as quiz master Chris Tarrant. The third episode was cunningly written so as to strike quite a good balance between the competing arguments - in effect, the allegation of fraudulent conspiracy versus the defence of innocence and eccentricity.

History relates that the Ingrams and Whittock were convicted of the crime. But they have always maintained that the conviction was unjust. I thought that Quiz was not only extremely watchable but also extremely fair to the accused. It didn't, for instance, highlight the fact that two years after they avoided prison in this case, Ingram was convicted of an unrelated insurance fraud.

Ripper Street - TV review

Ripper Street, the new BBC TV show which had its first episode on Sunday, is not conventional Sunday evening viewing fare in the Heartbeat or Downton Abbey tradition. It's a period piece, admittedly, set in theLondon of 1889, but written in a decidedly modern style, with a relentless focus on the dark underbelly of seemingly respectable Victorian life, "the worm in the bud."

As you would expect of a major new series, the cast is good, with Mathew Macfadyen in the lead role as Scotland Yard's Inspector Reid. His sidekick is played by Jerome Flynn, of Robson and Jerome fame, and Adam Rothenberg plays an American doctor and pathologist who seems to spend more time in a brothel than he does in the morgue.

A woman is found horribly murdered, and everyone assumes that Jack the Ripper is at work again. However,Reid has other ideas and his enquiiries lead him to a respectable house in the suburbs where the victim's husband narrowly escapes being hanged in an attempt at murder disguised as suicide. Clues that the husband reluctantly yields lead to the uncovering of a sinister and sadistic conspiracy.

Despite its gruesome and sadistic elements, and my feeling that writers who set crime stories in Victorian times too often feel the need to introduce a graphic sexual component, as if to compensate for the prudishness of Victorian crime fiction itself, I thought episode one represented a pretty good start for Ripper Street. One weakness was the limited characterisation of the bad guy - a mistake, I felt. Other than that, the story was soundly written, and the acting very good. But I hope that the Jack the Ripper references don't multiply in later episodes, since the original Whitechapel crimes, for all their undoubted massive significance, have to be the most over-referenced murders in the history of true crime.