Breathless

If you're a producer of TV Drama and you want me to watch your offering there are several ways open to you to encourage me to do so.

1 Adapt a good C19 novel. I will watch at least the first episode and if it's any good I'll stay with it to the end. Be aware that if you choose as your source material anything by Elizabeth Gaskell I will hold you to a higher standard than I do for anyone else (I am still not quite over the travesty of the BBC version of North and South)

 

2 Set it in a police station, somewhere in Europe and centre it on a murder, or linked series of murders. Knitwear is optional, but be aware that if what you serve up is not so much drama as a sit com set in an Italian police station (yes, that would be you, the ones who made Montalbano ) I won't stay with it.

 

3 Cast wisely. There are some actors I will watch in anything, however otherwise unappealing I find it.

 

4 Do not try and draw me in with any of the following: medical drama, a setting in that most over-rated decade the 1960s, cardboard cut out characters who might just as well be played by a puppet on a stick with a label for their one and only characteristic eg misogyny, greed, stupidity, ambition, shallowness etc.

 

Given 4 above, I find it astonishing that I am watching Breathless. This weak and formulaic pudding of a program, with weak and formulaic characters,  is a 1960s set medical drama, centred on a gynaecological ward. I saw this described somewhere (surely not in the Radio Times?) as a female gynaecological ward and several precious moments of my life were wasted while I wondered who on earth thought there was any other kind? So it really is amazing that I started watching, yes?

 

Well, no. The thing is that 3 trumps 4. Almost always. And as well as the astonishingly good Pippa Haywood, the makers of Breathless have drawn me in by casting Iain Glen. Albeit they have given him a shady demeanour, a shabby raincoat, a nasty 1950s hat, and an  even nastier 1950s moustache  It's a particularly bad look. He still acts everyone else off the screen and such is the beauty of his voice that my knees go weak every time he opens his mouth. Doesn't make me think any better of the program as a whole though.