New Statesman: Spot the dullard. - Review - television program review

ANDREW BILLEN sizes up two new dramas for weekday evenings

What have we here? I do believe it is a fully functional Channel 4 drama series. Somehow, the best bits of the mindless flash of Lock, Stock and the dour belligerence of the lamented Psychos have come together in North Square (Wednesdays, 9pm), a tale of hip young lawyers out to make a buck for their new chambers in Leeds. It is fast, crowded and doesn't much explain itself as it goes along, but don't worry: with a batch of ten episodes made, we'll get the hang of this superior British drama before it disappears.

The cynicism with which these barristers attend to their business, against which their occasional eruptions of social conscience look like exceptions hired to prove the rule, has a dual function. One, it attests to the programme's unillusioned realism. Nobody expects the northern circuit to provide cockpits for truth and justice; indeed, the title sequence shows the words "North Square" spinning in a roulette-wheel configuration. Two, the lawyers' suppressed despair at their profession and its cupidity adds to their street cred. And this lot -- with the exception of the new junior, Morag from Mull, who scarcely believes that couples "down south" live together outside wedlock -- have nothing if not street cred. In the robing room, they undress to The Clash's "Bank Robber", revealing hair gel and Calvin Klein underpants.

You would not mistake North Square for a docusoap. The film stock is highly coloured, and so are the characters, who are young, beautiful and volatile. When Helen McCrory as the lawyer Rose has a baby, it slips free from her narrow loins with such ease that she is back in court the next week, her hormones dancing gracefully to a feminist jig. The apercus in Peter Moffat's dialogue beat back and forth as if they were on centre court: "It's not a jury at all. It's a coffee morning" -- "Bloody bastard custard-cream lickers." My favourite lines came in episode two, when Mr Ten Per Cent, Peter, the toothy, dodgy clerk who would still take a bullet for any of his young charges (a spectacular performance from Phil Davis), tells Morag, who has cocked things up: "Go home, eat, drink, watch Ally McBeal and go to sleep." Soon afterwards, Rose corners her: "Don't eat, don't drink, don't watch that woman."

North Square wants us to think it is much less fantastic than Ally McBeal (which follows, cunningly, at 10pm), but is fully aware that it isn't. The funny/soppy cases the lawyers take give it away: the washing-line thief waging an unapologetic war against Y-fronts (a joke about legal briefs enclosed somewhere herein); the pregnant shoplifter who aborts her baby for fear of a jail sentence; the criminal who inspires the defence - "my client is a really hopeless car thief". Outside the courtroom, the heroic rebel Billy (Kevin McKidd) punches out a rival for making a racist remark about a black member of his chambers. He is exonerated when a deaf lip-reader deduces fair cause from the CCTV tape: very Ally. But the mosaic of elements, from real to surreal, doesn't trip you up. I have heard rumours that inspiration flags later in the series. At the moment, it is just flattering to watch a programme that was not made for the slowest member of the class.

The same compliment is not paid by William Ivory's The Sins (Tuesdays, 9. 10pm, BBC1). This is the one about the recidivist getaway driver who is released from prison determined to go straight, a direction he appears to confuse with becoming middle class. At his welcome-home party, Len Green (Pete Postlethwaite) takes the mike and denounces his peers. "Some are born into a life of crime. Some achieve a life of crime. And others have it thrust upon them. [Pause] See, you missed that. That was a literary allusion. That's what I'm talking about: the dullard factor."

In fact, nothing could be more dullard than the scene itself as written by Ivory, the author of Common as Muck. There are some moments of grace in his dialogue - the next morning, Len warns his wife: "Misjudged's a very emotive word, Gloria" - and Postlethwaite and Geraldine James as the Greens turn in more than decent performances, but the thing is doomed by its schematic set-up (each of the seven episodes is named after a deadly sin) and by the curse of "comedy drama". How can you find pathos or dignity in Len's fight for respectability when, by the end of the episode, he has almost run down a nun on a zebra crossing, a refugee from some long-forgotten Marty Feldman sketch?

Finally, an apology, as Private Eye would say, for having given the impression the other week that the dotcom drama Attachments (Tuesdays, 9pm, BBC2) was another work of genius from the great Tony Garnett. Having seen further episodes, I am now persuaded that, for all the naturalism of the acting, it is built on the quicksand of cliches and sex scenes. When Garnett is good, he is very, very good. Attachments suggests that, when he is bad, he turns horrid.

Andrew Billen writes for the London Evening Standard