TV REVIEW: Richard Hillman has finally owned up. "Everything I've done is for you, Gail. I killed for you," he told his wife on Monday night. Regular watchers of Coronation Street may have long felt that Gail was a woman likely to drive a man to murder, but not quite in the way it turned out, writes Shane Hegarty
Poor Gail Tilsley-Platt-Hillman née Potter (Helen Worth). For many years behind the counter of the local café she was the face that launched a thousand chips, hardening the arteries of the locals so that they could face the tribulations of the day ahead. The Gods seemed to take great pleasure in offering happiness with the right hand before decking her with the left. Once again, she had been tantalised, with Richard recently having bought her dream house. "It had one of those baths with a tap in the middle," she sobbed. "It couldn't have been more perfect." When it finally dawned on Gail that her husband is a serial killer, her face was first to figure it out but had to wait for her brain to catch up.
That she was destined for a night of revelation should have been obvious to her from the minute she and Richard decided to hold a small party in the Rovers Return. Small parties in the Rovers do not peter out in a haze of frothy ale and goodwill. The portents were obvious from the moment they entered the tavern. In the corner huddled the coven of her mother Audrey, undertaker Archie and shopkeeper Norris prophesying Richard's downfall. Double, double, gin and tonic.
Ashley, widowed by the murder, came over all Banquo by drifting into the pub and bringing Richard's speech to a juddering halt. Gail and Richard then adjourned to their house, to engage in a two-hander episode that proved, for all the hype, decidedly anti-climactic. Perhaps it was Richard's pantomime badness, or Gail's irritating oscillation between dimness and hysteria. Or perhaps it was that when the scriptwriters turned to high drama, they found that it had been eroded by low camp.
Whatever, Richard admitted that he had indeed murdered Maxine (crowbar), his ex-wife Patricia (spade to the face) and had been indirectly responsible for the death of cowboy builder Duggie Ferguson (shoddy banisters). He suggested they try and put the whole episode behind them and move on. "Could you live with the stigma?" he asked Gail, a woman born out of wedlock, cited in another couple's divorce case after losing her virginity in a storeroom, married four times to three husbands, caught having an affair with a cousin of one of those, who once hired a psychopathic nanny, whose daughter fell pregnant at 13 and who for many years wore her hair in the style of an erupting volcano. As the week wore on, however, she hadn't ruled out the possibility. "If you lived for 1,000 years, you wouldn't find a man who loved you as much as I do," Richard had warned her before stepping out onto the cobbles and into the shadows. A girl, after all, needs more than stigma to keep her warm at night.
Cold Feet returned for its final series, with the arrival of a baby having done nothing to improve Rachel's mood. Helen Baxendale's pinched facial features invest the character with an extra gloominess that really isn't necessary. Meanwhile, Adam (James Nesbitt) - with his eye sockets now hanging somewhere around his knees - has discovered that there are certain benefits to becoming a father. "The babe is a babe magnet." Rachel last smiled a couple of series back when the comedy/drama was weighted towards the former. It has gradually swung towards the latter, with the most affecting storyline being Karen and David's divorce, gathering pace under the firm guidance of rapacious lawyers. Its comedy, however, is increasingly clumsy, with Jo and Pete returning from their three-month honeymoon to become immediately embroiled in a ridiculous plot involving Pete's mother buying dope from a yardie gang. The twenty-something crises have transferred neatly into thirty-something crises, but its edge has been dulled, its spark dampened. It has reached its thirties and settled into its formula: safe but content, dull but comfortable.
You could have caught Coronation Street and Cold Feet on both TV3 and ITV. With The Royal sandwiched in between, it made for three straight hours of programmes running simultaneously on the two channels. Add the Champion's League football on Tuesday and Emmerdale every evening, and it made for nine hours of television aired concurrently on ITV and TV3. The Irish channel does appear to have mastered the trick of running its programmes a little earlier by way of bait to the viewers, but that doesn't hide its poverty.
The Michael Jackson Interview: The Footage You Were Never Meant To See consisted of all the bits a journalist normally edits out and presumes that no one will ever hear. Here, the ghost of Martin Bashir's sycophancy came back to haunt him.
It was presented by Maury Povich, a man who at any moment looked as if he would open up his blazer and offer to sell us some fake sincerity. It was as ripe with bias as Bashir's original programme. "We just want you to draw your own conclusions," said Maury, strolling through Neverland and introducing another interview with a Jackson acolyte, or another clip of Bashir yanking the pulley on the petard attached to his belt.
When Jackson's ex-wife, Debbie Rowe, spoke of how unfazed she was that the children have no contact with her, it was to a soundtrack of soothing elevator music. US current affairs love this sort of accompaniment: the music they'll be playing in hell just to fool you into thinking you've made it to heaven. It also went through several minutes of an interview with Michael's parents and his brother Jermaine without asking the obvious question of whether they had negotiated a family discount at the plastic surgeons. Ma Jackson, especially, looked as if she'd been freshly pulled from a trouser press.
Michael Jackson may have gone down, but he's made sure to take Bashir down with him. Since the original programme, the Englishman has appeared on US television to embellish his original conclusions with extra outrage. The original footage, however, showed him to be a man capable of raising obsequiousness to the level of art.
"Thank you. That was really, really special," he gasped after one interview. Being at Neverland was a "privilege". "I was here yesterday and I saw it and it was nothing short of a spiritually kind thing," he said of Jackson's relationship with children.
The pop star told him how journalists had a habit of twisting the truth. "It's disgusting," replied Bashir. "Disgusting. Well, that's not what we're doing here." The sound you could hear in the far distance was that of Martin Bashir's toes curling to breaking point.
"Your relationship with your children is spectacular," he told Jackson. "In fact, it almost makes me weep when I see you with them." What man uses the term "weep" these days? It's a word for romantic novels or the Bible. Only sores weep.
SOS stands for Seachtain Ón Spotsolas, or "A Week out of the Spotlight". Given that the eight celebrities involved are of a rather low grade, only a cynic could suggest that this is not a week out of the spotlight, but several weeks in it. Anyway, in SOS they have been thrown onto a survival course. If you want to know why you haven't been able to find a spare week at a survival centre, it's because television has them all block-booked. These programmes are strewn about the schedules like rope ladders and high walls. Last week, the celebrities' first task was to spend the night in a drifting raft. "I've spent nights in worse places," said Marcus Seóighe, an actor. "Tell us," urged the celebrities. "Athy," replied Seóighe.
At least Athy is still afloat. It wasn't long before the group of eight was evacuated after not using the on-board pump properly. This week they turned on presenter Tom Ó Brannagáin for being involved in a conspiracy to endanger their lives, leave them undernourished and keep their socks wet. Each time they moan about something, though, the producers introduce a new wheeze that will rile them even more. It's all becoming gratuitous and pointless. Tom Ó Brannagáin's a big man, though. A spot of cannibalism would perk the thing up no end.
Coronation Street
ITV & TV3, all week
Cold Feet
ITV & TV3, Sunday
The Michael Jackson Interview
Sky One, Monday
SOS
TG4, Tuesday