a Sin arrived complete with ready-made culture row, creator Russell T Davies having done a little stoking by saying heâd like gay men to be played by gay actors. Cue huffing in predictable quarters, chiefly along these lines: would Hannibal Lecter need to then be played by a convicted cannibal? An argument I normally like to consign to the category âtechnically valid, but you might want to grow up a bit and have a wee word with yourselvesâ. And to let this particular tower of babble overshadow any of the subsequent creation would indeed be a sin.
It is, on the evidence of the first episode (of five), mainly a joyous, gleeful, rambunctious watch, shot through with historical experience and period perfection, even if Manchesterâs Clampdown Records is, last time I looked, rather far from Savile Row. So Ritchie, Roscoe, Welsh Colin and Glaswegian Gloria, all, to a greater or far lesser extent, flamboyant and fleeing homes mired in stultifying early 80s orthodoxy and
Don t show me this message again✕
In what must be a world first,
Finding Alice (ITV) premieres in the same week as a programme called Losing Alice on Apple TV+. What a wind-up. Nobody likes to feel unoriginal. You spend all that time picking the perfectly original name for your child – possibly not Alice – then turn up at nursery to discover another parent has had the same idea.
Except it wasn’t an original title in the first place. IMDb tells us there was a bad 2018 indie of the same name. Before that there was
Still Alice, A Town Called Alice, Alice in Wonderland etc etc.
Rating:
We’ve been here before. Mum is a scatty mess, rarely without a coffee mug brimming with wine in her hand, clueless about money and unable to concentrate on one thing for more than a few seconds. Her teenage daughter is the sane, sensible one.
And then there’s fire-breathing Joanna Lumley, who will say anything to anyone because she simply doesn’t give two hoots.
Finding Alice (ITV) is Ab Fab, converted from a sitcom into a darkly witty thriller. There’s champagne, darling, and endless rows in the kitchen, and a queue of brilliant supporting stars.
Nobody smokes, because it isn’t 1993 any more, but everything else is perfectly in place.