Lejink

If you heard a rumour that this 5-part Channel 5 production was a sharply-written, well-directed and brilliantly acted contemporary thriller, well, you didn't hear it from me. On the contrary, I found it to be so much sensationalist, far-fetched nonsense full of clichéd characters and situations, to the point that the only praise I could bestow on the cast was their not breaking out into laughter as the script lurched ever further into silliness.

If the programme was adapted from a recent novel as the credits indicate, I can only assume it's one of those books you pick up for free from the exchange-shelf at your local supermarket as I'd hate to have paid money for it, no matter how little.

The plot is the latest to derive from the awful Jamie Bulger case, where an innocent young toddler was brutally murdered by two eleven-year-old boys, who were later released back into society with new identities for their own protection. The offender for the purposes of this story, was a young girl called Sally McGowan who some 30 or 40 years ago, at around the same age as the Bulger murderers, barbarically stabbed an infant boy to death. The drama here kicks off when Rachel Shenton's young mother Joanna escapes her failing marriage by coming to the small town of Flitfield where her mother, Joanne Whalley has settled years before. Highly protective of her primary-school age son Alfie, Joanna has emotional baggage of her own, going back to a troubled childhood where she has a recurring nightmare of setting a doll on fire in her own bedroom as a little girl. Anyway, she gets a job at the local estate-agent, managed by the wimpiest, least-likely looking lothario you'll ever see, although you can at least understand his motivation to get out from under his scurrilous, domineering wife. Reading up the local news on-line to see what's happening, she picks up on a stray thread which claims that one of the townsfolk is the killer McGowan, now grown into middle-age and living in anonymity amongst them. Seeking to ingratiate herself into the clique of young mothers, she lightly passes on this titbit of gossip which naturally takes flight almost immediately and becomes the talk of the town.

It is, of course, particularly bad news for any middle-aged women-around-town who have ever harboured secrets in their past, (which is pretty much all of them!), especially when it seems someone is now trying to kill them off one-by-one. And so it goes, with Joanna playing the blundering amateur detective, handily identifying one new suspect after another for the killer who's obviously got links to McGowan's young victim years ago, before the two big reveals at the end of firstly the real McGowan, (who should really have been called McCoy!), which isn't too difficult to suss as she's the only untainted granny-type left standing and secondly the unhinged present-day relative out to revenge the young boy's death from years ago. Naturally, Joanna is in the thick of it at the climax, which of course has to involve a really big fire, the better to help her come out the other end duly purged with all her bad childhood memories literally burned away.

Honestly, I wish I had a match to set light to the script of this ridiculously contrived hogwash which had more connecting parts than a Meccano set. The acting too was routinely bad by all the participants, but especially by Shenton, in particular her big emotional scene with her mum, which will send you running behind the sofa more than any of the supposed cliff-hanging scenes elsewhere in the narrative.

The fact is, I'm afraid, that in the end, this latest Channel 5 drama just isn't worth talking about.

On some levels this Bogart vehicle is just that, incorporating a rehash of the character and situations he's played out before, most obviously in "To Have and Have Not" and "Casablanca" (indeed, the dialogue at one point requires him to almost repeat verbatim the latter's famous "Here's looking at you kid" line). Once again, he's a displaced adventurer, looking to rekindle an old romance while he gets himself sucked into a healthy dose of foreign intrigue, which you just know will end up compromising him to the extent that he'll be placed in a major moral dilemma requiring yet another self-sacrifice.

The slight differences this time are that a child features prominently in the plot, adding a further human dimension to his predicament and also that the setting is post-war Japan.

Bogart's character has returned to Japan at the war's end, to check in on the old "Tokyo Joe" bar he owned before the war but gets a shock when he learns that the girl he'd left behind, and believed had subsequently died in the interim is actually alive and well and married to a senior American diplomat played by.

His initial aim was to stay in town and establish his own private air charter service, but now he determines to reclaim his girl, who it seems still has feelings for him and besides whose is the little girl's father anyway? Plots criss-cross further as a Japanese crime boss seeks to blackmail Bogart into smuggling ex-Japanese war criminals out of the country using his plane to do so.

It all ends up in another late, late shot at redemption for our hero, the action culminating in a final shoot-out in the hotel basement next door to "Joe's".

Bogart, sure enough, plays it again, his familiar persona that is, but he's not greatly stretched by what he's given here, but I did appreciate the back-up playing by Florence Marly as the girl singer, now mother, torn between two lovers and Alexander Knox as her current husband.

I'd honestly never heard of this Bogie film before, and whilst it clearly isn't one of his absolute screen highlights, it nevertheles has just enough of those foolish things, ambiguity, thrills and romance to if not quite make my heart a dancer, then to at least keep it beating for its 90 minute duration.

Apropos of nothing, I thought to add a little postscript connecting this movie to the veteran British rock star Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music fame. Not only was his first solo album entitled "These Foolish Things", a song featured prominently in this movie, it features his own very distinctive and well-known version of it. Moreover, he also later wrote and recorded a song of his own called "Tokyo Joe" which was a UK hit single. Oh, and with Roxy, he'd earlier written and recorded another tune called "2HB" in which he clearly references Bogart throughout the lyric.

This exciting, if far-fetched four-part BBC thriller played out almost like a crazed version of "My Fair Lady'. Gabrielle Creevy is Ria, a poor, down-on-her-luck domestic cleaner with a deadbeat boyfriend. She's so low, she stoops to stealing from a supermarket charity bay but is caught in the act. When an obviously wealthy and perfectly coiffured female witness seems to take pity on her and offer her a well-paid job cleaning her country mansion, it seems as if the girl's luck has changed. Her new boss Fran, played by Eve Myles, takes to her, confiding in her and offering her new protegé advice in her love life, to the extent of encouraging her to ditch her live-in lover and right-swipe her way to an upgrade on a dating site.

Sure enough, a handsome hunk replies to her but when they meet up and he ritually bigs himself up, she feels obliged to do the same and so, conveniently adopts Fran's persona for the night. Encouraged by Fran, she arranges a follow-up date and when Fran has to go away for the night, Ria, who's coincidentally been asked to stay over to look after the property, invites her new lover boy to come over. But her dream date turns into a nightmare when the guy sees through her role-playing, his drink and cocaine-fuelled taunting leading to a frantic chase, up down and around the house, which it's fair to say, ends badly for him. And then, wouldn't you know it, Fran turns up unexpectedly on the scene of carnage but rather than call the cops, she instead helps to cover up for Ria.

From there, it escalates more than the elevator in the Burj Khalifa, Ria getting drawn into Fran's world to the extent of moving into the guest house on her estate and also becoming her PA. But how can she still be getting text messages from the man she saw fall to his death? What is the tie-in with Fran's estate manager - lover (Emun Elliott) especially when her slightly creepy, domineering husband (Julian Lewis Jones) returns home from abroad? And just who is or was Anna, another financially and emotionally dependent young girl who seems to have gone through the exact same process with Fran but has now mysteriously disappeared?

I'll be honest and say that there were quite a few things in this programme which just didn't add up, but it was certainly suspenseful and exciting all the way through regardless of how incredible it all seemed. No matter how fantastical and even ridiculous were all the plot twists and turns, especially when it was piling on the cliffhangers, it was held together by the taut direction and conviction acting of all the principals, with my wife and I cheering Ria's resourcefulness throughout, which eventually saw her handsomely rewarded right at the end. You shall go to the ball, Ria!

Escapist entertainment it may well have been, but sustained by its high production values, it certainly kept me on or near the edge of my sofa throughout.