Roadkill, BBC 2, Sunday
It’s fairly easy to guess the era of an action movie based on who the bad guys are.
In the 80s and 90s it was mostly the Russians, reflecting the Cold War.
More recently various Islamic terrorists and the Chinese have started to feature as the great threat to western civilisation.
Roadkill, a political drama being compared to House of Cards, adopts the default position of our times – the enemies are the Tories.
It stars Hugh Laurie as Peter Laurence, a populist chancer who is about to be appointed minister of justice in a Conservative government.
It opens with Laurence winning a libel action against a newspaper which claimed he used his position to profit himself by facilitating selling off bits of the NHS to American investors. He’s lying, of course. He’s somehow doctored his travel diary.
Although the prime minister doubts that he hasn’t other skeletons in the closet she gives him a minor promotion from transport secretary but fails to give him the job he really craves, foreign affairs.
Laurence has a whole closet of skeletons. He’s just paid a visit to a jail where he met a woman who claims her cell mate is his daughter from a relationship he can’t remember.
When his driver drops him off later, she asks plaintively where she should pick him up in the morning. He says he’ll message her with the look of a man who has no idea what the night will bring. It brought a trip to his mistress, who dutifully consoled him on the snub from the prime minister,
And the following day when he expresses frustration with his secretary, his special adviser warns him. “You can’t get rid of her, she knows what you did.”
While we’ve established Laurence is not a good guy, we also discover he has no real political conviction.
He tells a caller on his regular local radio slot that he’s a “relaxed conservative, who admires progress” and “conservatism is about loving the idea of the future.”
He confides to his adviser later that the people would “much rather be led by a character than a zombie.”
There are clear Boris Johnson references here, but I can’t get Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s famed press officer, out of my head.
Laurie is competent as Laurence but he looks and sounds just like Campbell. A coincidence no doubt, but Blair was a decade long prime minister who believed in everything and nothing.
The comparisons with House of Cards are trite.
Neither the writing nor acting bring anything of the devilment and odiousness of Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood or the Machiavellian original, Francis Urquhart.
Roadkill is as predictable and forgettable as a 1990s action movie.
****
You wait all pandemic for some sport and then it all comes along at the same time.
Mercifully the second great Covid lockdown appears to have missed out one of television’s mainstays.
At least this time if we are confined to our houses there'll be plenty of top class action to watch on the box.
The GAA championship begins this weekend, as does the completion of the rugby Six Nations, halted since March. The rescheduled Master Golf (which should have been played in April) is only a few weeks away and the last few days have seen a remarkable event in cycling.
Both La Vuelta (September) and the Giro D’Italia (May) have been on television at the same time. ITV4 v Eurosport for our coverage of choice.
Much of this action, unfortunately, is restricted to subscription channels but there's still lots of it freely available on terrestrial television.
