I was quite enjoying not going to the theatre for a few days but now I can’t wait to get back. The television’s to blame. First, I’ve been catching up with a boxed set DVD of The Wire, the American drug cop series set in West Baltimore, and it’s hugely disappointing, despite the presence in the cast of Dominic West and dear old Clarke Peters.

But The Wire is The Sopranos compared to Lynda La Plante’s latest two-parter, Above Suspicion, starring Kelly Reilly and Ciaran Hinds, two of my favourite actors, which aired on ITV earlier this week.

Ponderous, badly shot, implausibly plotted and hysterically acted, it made one yearn for an average night at the Finborough or the Old Red Lion.

Obviously aiming for a new Prime Suspect, the cop series that catapulted Helen Mirren to renewed film stardom, La Plante seemes to have gone badly off the boil this time, and Kelly Reilly as the rooky detective spent most of the two hours pouting like Lolita and pretending the men — notably Hinds — weren’t transfixed by her figure-hugging schoolgirl blouse. 

Hinds acted as though he’d been suddenly struck with neck cramp, peering wildly down his nose and speaking through the side of his lower jaw like a mad amalgam of Bruce Forsyth on Strictly Come Dancing and Marlon Brando in The Godfather. Give that man a BAFTA!

In contrast, Nicholas Le Prevost as the hapless defence lawyer of Jason Durr’s murderous rapist — who managed to slit his throat with a razor secreted in his shirt collar; how did that get through the security cordon? — went seriously blank, wondering where his next line might be coming from as his client went crazy enough to make Ciaran Hinds look as though he were under-acting.

And then, after hours of silence, Le Prevost had a line. And all it amounted to was an over-familair blasphemous expletive. Thank you and good night. Why can’t they just show re-runs of Dixon of Dock Green?

I’ve been arranging yet more tickets for friends to come to London and see La Cage aux Folles. I wanted to make sure the two that I’d had put by for me at the box office were still there for me to collect tomorrow.

I rang the Playhouse box office number listed in Time Out and was answered, eventually, by a central booking agency. The sweet Irish girl then gave me a box office number which really was for the theatre (why can’t this be listed in the first place?).

I rang it, and after yet more recorded bilge about group bookings and the possibility of being recorded and sent information I didn’t want, my call was passed on to a colleague.

More silence. I was being referred back to the central ticket agency again. There, someone else — not the sweet Irish girl — told me that the tickets were indeed at the box office awaiting collection. I asked what was the price of the tickets. She couldn’t tell me, as she wasn’t in the  box office herself. I was now appearing in my very own Kafkaesque monodrama. Could I buy tickets for that, perhaps? 

Now, you tell me why people aren’t booking tickets to go to the theatre. Whatever happened to class — and the personal touch? Maybe watching rubbish television isn’t such a bad idea after all.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.