Without wanting to stoke the Bunsen burner
flames of Chemistry students nationwide (hydrochloric acid doesn’t look so
great on me), I have to admit that I’m just a little bit over science. Only this week, the BBC published an article on its
website letting us know that “Brainless slime mould has an external memory.” Thank
heavens that one’s cleared up. With their arsenals of predictions, proposals
and probes to make you wince, physicists have left us with precious few
enigmas. Stonehenge, of course, remains inviolable, as do historical truths and
extraterrestrial life. And there’s another, unjustly overlooked conundrum that,
try as we might, can’t be explained away with a textbook in hand. Her name is
Kris Jenner.
A prodigiously sagacious momager who knows
how to play the telly game or a fame-frenzied old leech who’d trample on her
kids’ heads to get to the top? It’s an issue I’ve been grappling with since I
happened upon the Kardashian clan a little over a year ago; a first world
problem of the worst kind, and one that I’m about ready to give up to the lab
coats. This week, though, I had a 46-minute reprieve from my
how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-a-Jenner stumper, when I was given another
equally tough nut to crack.
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| Here come the girls...but what are they coming to, exactly? |
When it arrived on screens a few weeks ago,
reviews of ITV1’s Homefront were more
diverse than a Britain’s Got Talent
episode. The Guardian’s Isabel Mohan
branded it ‘pretty bold’ and The Stage
commended its ‘great ensemble cast’, but Radio
Times called it a ‘hoary old soap’ that ‘should never be entertainment.’
Having only watched the first installment earlier this week, my own headache
comes from not really knowing what the show is. I didn’t get it, or what ‘it’ even was. Was it wrangling to be a
top-British-drama-with-just-enough-grit or a slightly more up-itself EastEnders, à la Cutting It or Mistresses (God, that show was dire, was it not?) It seemed too deep
for a soap, too sensationalist for a decent drama and too pedestrian, somehow,
to stalk out a middle ground.
Soap-wise, the episode had all the boxes
ticked. The show follows the lives of military brides living in the same
British cul-de-sac, with the token wealthy major’s fiancé close enough to visit
where scripts dictate. Last week saw Claire Marshbrook (Claire Skinner), the show’s bit of la-di-da,
attempt to integrate herself within the community of soldiers’ wives after
young mum Tasha’s (Antonia Thomas') husband was killed in action. By the second half, Claire and
Louise (Nicola Stephenson), the feisty old hand at being betrothed to a man of war who’s
dead-ringer for Catherine Tate, were giggling over a bottle of pinot Tanya and
Jane-style, bad-mouthing the major’s late wife and gassing about their
respective blokes. There was also the stock soap church scene, Matt’s funeral,
which saw Tasha make a doof-doof worthy late entrance, give a teary run-down of
the night she met her husband and then play the song they first smooched to.
Chuck in Claire’s despair with step-daughter-to-be Millie, who’d been doing the
rounds of local lads and making the prospect of a blended family look more
appealing than the front line itself, plus a failsafe slapping to round things
off, and Homefront’s makers had
themselves a distinctly mediocre soap.
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| New girl: Claire could have picked a better time for a meet and greet |
Indeed, it was all too easy to forget that
ITV had been billing this series as a ‘gripping new drama’, though the hints were there if you could be bothered to
look for them (I couldn’t, either, until I opted to blog about it). The show
was a smidge more styled than your run-of-the-mill soap (but, as Rylan Clarke
will acquiesce, style does not always equate to taste). In the run-up to the
reveal of Matt’s death, both Tasha and Claire got somber knocks on their doors,
and each looked as likely as the other to get the bad news. While Tasha was
left reeling, Claire looked pretty chuffed with some big parcel the postman
needed a signature for. A classy plot device if ever there was one…
What the show did best on, and regrettably
skimped on, was subtlety. When Matt’s regiment returned for his wake, brother
Tom’s beef with Major Bartham was evident enough to scoop audience interest and
downplayed enough to hold it tight, and that lingering glare the men shared as
they prepared to return to Afghanistan emerged as one of episode two’s sparse
draws. So too, the rapport between Tasha and the policeman that gave her a
shoulder to cry on was engrossing only when it stayed as an uncomfortable and
unutterable attraction; when he donned the deceased Matt’s shirt and started
painting the room of Tasha’s toddler things took a shabby, obvious turn for the
worst.
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| Cheap, not cheerful: Soldier Matt's funeral didn't help the show's soapy undertones |
Taken one by one, the series’ characters
themselves weren’t to be put down. Military mumma Paula (Claire Higgins)
looked like the early frontrunner for a role as the quasi-soap’s super-bitch, organizing
the funeral of her son with less compassion than Simon Cowell and more
brusqueness than Alex Polizzi. Higgins was effective in stoking audience
enmity; when she did shed a tear for
Matt, it was unforeseen, affecting and gratifyingly complicated. And though her
place in what was, ostensibly, a drama could raise eyebrows, Claire’s
insecurities over matching up to her partner’s ex-wife were more than tenable,
her financial dependence on Major Bartham in spite of his chilly detachment
really quite suggestive. The only pity is that characters with this much
tenacity sprung up on a show so thoroughly nonplussed about its own format.
Here’s to hoping this hodge-podge-ing of characters and genres isn’t the way of
the future over on ITV; just what would
Carson say if he ended up sandwiched between Louis Walsh and Gary Barlow next
Saturday night?
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| Setting a trend? Homefront's putting characters where they don't belong might just set a precedent... |
