TV REVIEW/Shane Hegarty: State Of Play, as thrillers tend to do, began with a chase. Correction: State Of Play, as Paul Abbott dramas tend to do, began with someone going somewhere.
State Of Play, BBC1, Sunday
True Lives: Hitler's Irish Orphans, RTÉ1, Tuesday
Tabloid Tales, BBC1, Tuesday
The bouncy theme tune of Clocking Off, his factory-based serial, is always matched with the choreography of his characters either sloping into work or skipping from it. It gets the blood pumping, clears the head for the story ahead. In Clocking Off, they move to the demands of a factory horn. In State of Play, it is to escape a man with a gun. Both prove that Abbott has moments when he is a very fine storyteller indeed. Genre is incidental.
Opening episode, opening credits. A teenager runs though the streets. For a minute, we are unsure whether he is running to some place or from someone. A man with a gun answers that, blowing the kid's brains against a wall the moment he stops and pops his head around a corner to see if the coast is clear.
At that moment, a motorcycle courier happens by, slows, looks from body to killer, and speeds on. The killer fires at him before disappearing down an alley, believing that he has eliminated the only witness.
Which, of course, he hasn't. But no time for that yet. Somewhere underground, rising political star Stephen Collins MP is stuck on a tube train that has been delayed by a body on the tracks. He tut-tuts with the rest of the passengers, unaware that the body on the line is that of his researcher, Sonia, with whom he has been having an affair. The police believe it is a suicide. Which, of course, it isn't. We are only two minutes into the piece.
The plot charges on, intolerant of lulls, explaining things as it goes along. Flung out by the wife and chased by the press, Collins has found sanctuary with old friend and journalist Cal McAffrey. McAffrey is played by John Simm. As is customary for those playing opposite Simm, other characters keep telling him how awful he looks. He is working on the story of the murdered kid, but finds that every time he turns on his mobile phone there is something else to link that death with that of Sonia. For reasons unknown, the two victims had spoken on the phone in the hours before their deaths. Worse, there are photos of Collins and Sonia, taken by long-lens and found inside a suitcase that the dead kid had stolen from his killer. As Simm shelters Collins, then, he is drawing ever closer to unmasking him.
Abbott piles the plot foundations deep, knowing that they will need to be solid or else things could get very wobbly over the remaining five episodes. Clocking Off, though, proved him a master of insinuation, of planting red herrings and twists with breathless dexterity. State Of Play may have opened with a big number, but there is an undercurrent of political conspiracy that has yet to surface fully. Collins is an MP in a Labour-like government. He is the youngest chairman yet of that government's energy select committee, which holds more promise for the plot than it sounds. He is being shadowed by a spin doctor, who has one arm around Collins's shoulder while the other possibly holds a knife to his back. In a plot in which nothing appears to be wasted, it is hard to imagine that the political observations are simply an interested glance on the way to the shoot-outs.
The series is directed by David Yates, with utter assurance. The opening episode's final setpiece - police evacuating the unconscious witness from a burning hospital, trapped between floors, lights out, a red laser dot creeping across the windowpane - was as tremendous as anything you will see on British television this year.
To recap then. There is a stolen suitcase, a witness in a coma and a suicide that isn't a suicide. Cliché seldom gets used to such electrifying effect.
True Lives continues to find some of its better stories from our forgotten war history. Hitler's Irish Orphans told of the German and French children brought here after the second World War. From 1946, hundreds of them spent three years in Irish foster homes. Fifty still live here, sometimes only the ghost of a German accent gives any outward hint of their extraordinary tales. They came from cities of rubble to a country largely untouched by war, an oasis on the edge of a devastated continent. Neutrality had meant that our hardships were slight in comparison, even when the newspapers announced to the nation "We Go Back To Slightly Dark Bread".
The children arrived here as the offspring of war. "Can't Get Used To Having Food", said a headline on their arrival. Full-fat milk was too strong for them. They had a habit of devouring a family-sized serving of dinner for fear that it would be the only meal they got. When two women greeted them at the port with bags of fruit, the children ate the oranges with the skins still on, unaware that they should eat this strange food any other way.
We have become used to television delving into Ireland's recent past and finding a country that was a dark place for children. Not this time. It was, as one French man put it, "my land of milk and honey". The refugees adapted to a place in which people drank far too much tea and where wine was found only on an altar. Half a century on, though, emotions are still close to the surface, for the German parents who gave their children to another country, for the foster-parents, and for the children themselves. When they arrived in Ireland, they had spoken no English; when they returned to Germany, they spoke no German. Many felt like strangers in their own country and in their own families. Some chose to return to Ireland.
It was instructive to learn oftheir subsequent paths. Of those who returned to Ireland, one became rooted in the native culture through the Gaelscoileanna, while another has spent a life working with voluntary groups. Among those who returned to Germany, one became a child psychiatrist and his sister became an aid worker with the International Red Cross.
Heather Mills McCartney was interviewed in Tabloid Tales on Tuesday night, but the TV screen didn't crack at the sight. Mills McCartney has become quite ubiquitous in the media over the past couple of years, though rarely portrayed in the most positive light. You will recognise her as the woman reputed to have lost a leg so that she could woo Paul McCartney and steal his millions.
When Mills McCartney lost her limb to a speeding motorbike, she invited the press into her hospital room, ranged them up against the wall and asked them how much they were willing to pay for her story. It was the beginning of a beautiful devil's pact that meant she was a tabloid darling for almost a decade. The press would get its story (typical headline: "I Lost A Leg But Sex Is Still As Incredible As Ever!") and her charity would get its publicity. In 1995, she wrote an autobiography called Out On A Limb. Even in a genre with a predilection towards bad puns, she should be brought to book for that one.
She told the Tabloid Tales presenter, Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, how the year of her wedding was, on a professional level, the worst of her life. She fell in love with a Beatle and the press turned on her. It called her a gold-digger and a manipulator. It said that Paul's daughter, Stella, hated her.
"She's always very, very civil when we're together," said Mills McCartney, trying to close the door on the rumour, but leaving things very draughty still. There was brief respite when Heather and Paul got married in Castle Leslie, Co Monaghan. They refused to reveal the date, so the press camped out and waited. Finally, jolly old Sir Jack Leslie popped out from the castle to buy the paper. When's the ceremony, Sir Jack?
"It's next Tuesday, but it's all secret," he confided. The wedding, said the journalists, was delightful. There were ugly guests and the bride didn't go down the aisle with a blanket over her head.
Morgan got to the core of the problem.
"If it wasn't you, then who on earth is Paul supposed to marry?" he askedher.
"Mother Theresa!" she huffed.
Or maybe Ringo Starr.