CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews The Accident

Tragedy, grief and a horrifying twist you just won’t see coming: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews The Accident

The Accident

Rating:

Giri/Haji

Rating:

Over cigarettes and snuff at 221b Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes once recounted a case of domestic abuse to his friend Dr Watson.

A husband ‘had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife’.

Author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was making the point that the domestic lives of our neighbours are often, behind closed doors, stranger than we can imagine. 

Sarah Lancashire’s performance as strident Polly Bevan was summed up when she brushed aside doctors to barge into a hospital ward and buttonhole the hero who saved Leona’s life

I’ve sometimes wondered whether he based The Curious Case Of The Dentures At Dinner on a true-life story he heard as a GP.

Conan Doyle’s theory was brutally evoked at the climax of the first episode of The Accident (C4), an unrelenting drama by Jack Thorne about the tidal wave of grief and recriminations that swallows a town after a group of teenagers are killed in an explosion on a building site.

Sarah Lancashire plays the mother of the only survivor, and she has never been more forceful — marshalling her friends, chivvying her wet blanket of a husband and keeping her daughter Leona’s wild love-life in check.

Her performance as strident Polly Bevan was summed up when she brushed aside doctors to barge into a hospital ward and buttonhole the hero who saved Leona’s life. 

The emotional power of the story was undeniable. It ended with parents marching on the disaster zone by night, grim-faced and silent, like peasants in folklore confronting a mythical monster

The poor man didn’t know whether he was being thanked or scolded.

But as Polly was giving husband Iwan (Mark Lewis Jones) a piece of her mind in their kitchen, our picture of their marriage was turned upside-down.

Grabbing her by the jaw, Iwan pushed his wife against the wall, punching and kneeing her before pinning her to the floor.

Then he broke down and, in a moment that left me feeling sick, Polly clutched his head to her chest and comforted him, even as she was still fighting for breath.

All this was powerful and upsetting. Whether it was credible, I’m not sure. But still I can’t help thinking of those false teeth.

That moment of intimate violence overwhelmed the bigger tragedy, which saw a group of teenage friends trapped under rubble after an unexplained eruption at a half-built factory. 

They’d broken in to smoke drugs and spray-paint the walls while their parents took part in a local fun-run.

Kelly Macdonald as a friendless detective matches him for sheer suppressed anger, and Charlie Creed-Miles as a tattooed crime boss was so unhinged that he deserves a role in Peaky Blinders — even Tommy Shelby would think twice before crossing him

The depiction of the rescue operation was impressionistic and short on technical detail. I don’t believe that paramedics would be wielding blowtorches and sending sprays of sparks everywhere just minutes after some sort of gas blast. 

And I’m certain that ambulance crews would never sling body-bags around in full view of parents.

But the emotional power of the story was undeniable. It ended with parents marching on the disaster zone by night, grim-faced and silent, like peasants in folklore confronting a mythical monster.

It’s been another great week for drama and, though all eight episodes of the Japanese gangland thriller Giri/Haji (BBC2) are already available as a box-set on iPlayer, I have to highlight the exceptional acting in the second episode, aired yesterday.

Will Sharpe’s bitter, savage turn as a male prostitute, filled in equal measure with defiance and self-loathing, is venomously good.

Kelly Macdonald as a friendless detective matches him for sheer suppressed anger, and Charlie Creed-Miles as a tattooed crime boss was so unhinged that he deserves a role in Peaky Blinders — even Tommy Shelby would think twice before crossing him.

Still and watchful at the eye of this hurricane is Takehiro Hira as the implacable detective. If you love gangster thrillers, Giri/Haji is unbeatable.

Regal limit of the week: After Meghan’s African documentary and TV allegations about Prince Andrew, there must be sympathy for Prince Charles if he felt this wasn’t the best week to broadcast his uplifting Inside The Duchy Of Cornwall (ITV).

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