Apple Tree Yard.

Did you see it? I mean, did you see it? If you saw it you don't need me to rant. You're probably ranting yourself. However , just because no-one needs me to rant doesn't mean that I won't.

 

Let's be clear, I probably shouldn't be doing this, because it's on the back of only seeing the first episde. There again, it was perfectly obvious from that first episode that watching the rest would be no good for my blood pressure or my brain - it would heighten the one and rot the other, so in self defence, I didn't watch any more.

 

As an aside, what was Emily Watson doing in this? She's a fantastic actress, can she really be so hard up for work that she needs to appear in this dross? (I have asked this sort of quesion before. Remember Anna Friel in Marcella? Iain Glen and Jack Davenport in that frighful 1960s set medical drama that was so awful I have blotted out its name? David Morrissey in The Walking Dead? The whole cast of the appalling Falcon?) My usual explanation for good actors appearing in rubbish is that they have had an unexpected tax bill, but I'm starting to think that maybe someone jsut has to say Big Audience and they ask 'Where do I sign?'

 

Now I am well aware that just because I wouldn't do something it doesn't mean that a character in a drama wouldn't do it. In fact, without characters behaving in ways that I would never dream of, there  would be no drama, because I live a very quiet and circumscribed life. Actually looking at what happens to characters in dramas who indulge in the sort of behaviour I would never indulge in, in itself acts as An Awful Warning and makes me very glad of my quiet life.

 

But here's the thing. If they do odd, impulsive, inexplicable things, then I want  to be able to believe that they would do them. And the more outlandish the things they do, then the more credible, the more rounded  they need to  be as characters. Otherwise all you do is read a book or watch TV and think 'Who would ever do that?'

 

And that's the test that Apple Tree Yard failed. There may be happily married middle aged and very successful women out there who would let themselves be picked up by a man with a dreadful Essex accent and let him have sex with her in a cleaner's cupboard in the bowels of the Houses of Parliament before they have exchanged more than half a dozen sentences, but I don't believe it in general and I wasn't persuaded to believe it by Apple Tree Yard. Ditto all the other stupidities; handled well, I could have believed them but they weren't handled well and I didn't. You have a lover and never ask his name? You never get suspicious or object when he demonstrates a proclivity for having sex in doorways and knows where all the CCTV cameas are so that you can always avoid being caught on them? This doesn't strike you as an odd sort of thing for an ordinary chap to know? You go out to dinner and because he asks you, you go to the loo  and take off your pants , and not IIRC, even in a stall but by the basins where anyone who comes in would see you?

 

Then of course there was the scene where she was raped by a work colleague who, as far as I could tell, was muttering that he had the right to do it, because she was a faithless wife. Leaving aside all the stuff around rape that I hope we can take for granted, chief of which is that no man has the right to rape a woman at all ever under any circumstances, how was he supposed to know she was having an affair?  It was a big secret so how come he was privy to it? Did he just smell it on her somehow? Think she looked a bit chirpier/more distracted/ jumpier than normal which led him to a correct conclusion? Or was it just because it was needed for the plot so the small matter of plausibility was allowed to slope off under the door.

 

Honestly it was such, such tosh. I found a plot summary on the web, and I understand she got the lover to murder the rapist, which surprised me because the way it was being played in Episode One was very much that the nameless lover was the one in control of the relationship. He got a buzz out of making her do things she didn't want to/ hadn't previously thought of doing and that was what the relationship was about for him, not doing things, like murder, for her.

 

It may be that it got better. It may be that it was a bad adaptation of a brilliant book. But I suspect that actually it was a faithful adaptation of a bad book, and the only consolation for wasting an hour of my time watching the first episode is that I won't  ever be suckered into buying the book at an airport and wasting even more time, and money, on purchasing and reading it.

 

Other opinions I'm sure are available. But this is mine.