Bodily Harm

This is such a brilliant series. Timothy Spall reaches new heights of emotional performance here. Just about everything falls apart in a few short days. He's a man struggling with depression when his entire life falls apart. He had gone from a confident and happy man to one who questioned the point of his life.

I won't go into the journey and add spoilers but it's a must watch. Bring your Kleenex.

This blew me away. I stumbled onto it late at night on YoTube (!) and watched spellbound until the end. One of the very rare morsels of life-changing television. The five main actors played like their life depended on it, and by the end, I was crying and yet strangely uplifted. Highly recommended but be prepared to be deeply moved.

Sometimes great art hurts to watch, and Bodily Harm is an example. Timothy Spall, pouting like a dejected guppy as ever, is fired and cuckolded in rapid succession - and only then do things really start to go bad.

This is bleak, black humour, encompassing sneaky blowjobs, botched suicides and terminal cancer with the same laconic tenderness. I found myself inextricably bound to the fates of this posse of frayed losers, and by the end I was wailing like a baby.

This is the kind of TV they tell us never gets made any more. It does, but it's increasingly marginalised by celebreality prolefeed. Do yourself a favour - the next time Paris Hilton or some such parasitic cretin oozes into your frame of reference, swat her aside like the rancid cockroach that she is, and watch something like Bodily Harm instead.

Being shown as a late-night re-run on local TV, I just had to watch it again to remind myself of how good this mini-series is. And it is good. No, it's great! There's something in it for everyone - from a 40's husband-father who doesn't want to grow up, to a wife who gives head to the local sleaze-bag, to a 13-year-old girl who has to be the grown-up in the family, to the husband's parents who just want to die together, and the sooner the better. It's all just happy families, really.

If the script is excellent, then the casting is even better. Spall and Manville are blisteringly good, but then they both almost always are. In the company of clever and successful people, Spall and his teen-aged daughter feel like glaring misfits, and yet I couldn't help but believe that they are the normal ones.

This series reminds me of why it is I watch TV in the first place. If I have to watch 100 hours of dross to then find this gem, then it's worth the effort!!