Homegrown drama gets a rude awakening

Hotter than my Daughter (BBC3 Thursdays) is a straightforward little show, its title tee-ing you up honestly for what follows. The singer Liz McClarnon, with the minimum of fussing, introduces you to a series of mothers, all single, in their forties and fifties, dressed like tarts and with daughters variously admiring, shocked and, mostly, embarrassed by the push-up bras, the boob jobs, the hot pants, the stilettos and by their snogging men who could be their sons (or sons-in-law).

This is the makeover-reality version of that relationship in Absolutely Fabulous, (BBC1 1992-96 and 2001-04) between daffy mother Eddy and steady daughter Saffy, who fumes impotently that the former should act her age. But the Hotter mothers know best: “it’ll go soon enough”, says one, of her formidable décolletage. Meanwhile, there’s silicone and Ann Summers lingerie and the boys – and for most of the mothers, the sight of a cringing daughter seems to give more of a spur than a pause.

At the end of last month, the Home Office published a report (“Sexualisation of Young People Review”), which pointed out that children are being exposed to sexual images at a younger and younger age and, in particular, that girls are being encouraged to be “hot”. The Hotter mothers are joyfully assisting in this.

Turning on the first episode of Hung (Channel 4 Thursdays), I caught the last minutes of Alan Carr: Chatty Man (C4 Thursdays), in which TV’s cleverest airhead was interviewing singer and songwriter Rihanna about her latest song, “Rude Boy”. She then went on to sing the song, which has the refrain: Come on, rude boy, boy, can you get it up?/Come on rude boy, boy, is you big enough?

Thus did the Home Office’s concern for the morals of the young become still more clear.

The channel then flowed, with a decorous break, into Hung. This, an HBO production, is one reason why it is a pity that the BBC has announced it will spend less on US imports (though this one had gone to a rival channel). With such fare as this, the only sensible thing to do is to spend more. For even more than The Sopranos or The Wire or Nurse Jackie or Mad Men (BBC2 Tuesdays), the series plays with pathos and wit, tragedy and comedy, the one contained within the other.

Thomas Jane

Ray Drecker (played by Thomas Jane), a former sports star who married a beauty queen, is now stuck coaching a failing school basketball team; his wife left for a richer man and took their twins with her, and he’s living in a tent. His voiceover in the opening scenes intones that “Everything is falling apart”. Detroit, where he lives, is at “the head waters of a river of failure”. His consolation? “Thank God my parents are gone.”

Seeking relief, Drecker attends a class on entrepreneurialism in which the teacher tells the class that all have one “tool” to make them rich. Ray realises his tool is his large penis: aided by a former one-night stand who volunteers to be his pimp, he launches himself into male whoredom. With his first payment, he gives his son enough money to go to a pop concert; he feels like a man again. Watch it: it unwinds captivatingly.

Recent films such as the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man and Tom Ford’s A Single Man have made both pathos and comedy from the travails of middle-aged malehood, but in both cases the minority status of the men – Jewish or gay – have accounted to a greater or lesser degree for their dilemmas. Ray is an all-American fellow suffering an American crisis in an America in crisis, but when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Ray has a thing – a common thing, but a big earner.

Five Days (BBC1 Monday-Friday) is what an all-British BBC production looks like, and it looked good. It created a tangle in the first episode, made up of an abandoned baby, a suicide, Islamist radicalism and Islamic opposition to it, mixed marriage, the onset of Alzheimer’s, the possibility of love, the wildness of young boys ... and skilfully unravelled it all, with most of the enmities healed, and that which could not be healed absolved by death. The five-night, one-hour episode format allows development of character and multiple plots, so that a strong cast headed by Coronation Street star Suranne Jones as a detective constable can have a good run at their parts.

With a corporation as well-endowed as the BBC capable of making such emotionally plangent material, why should we miss Hung and stuff like it? Because the latter comes out of a different dramatic sensibility: one that has left behind the diktats that all comedy must be “madcap”, that all action series must be tyre-squealers and that all “issue” drama must owe a visible debt to Arthur Miller. In its stead comes a postmodern complexity that picks and mixes elements of all of these and more.

Where the British series seeks characters who carry the morally approved weight of the piece, the US one allows moral behaviour to appear, in ambiguous fits and starts, where it might least be expected – often from within conventional immorality. Such pieces as Five Days risk a kind of correct piety, which may owe something to the BBC’s national mission. Hung, by contrast, made for a worldly slice of America big enough to sustain high-quality products, has a responsibility only to intrigue.

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john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd