New Statesman: Northern gold rush: corruption comes before a fall in a gambling empire

Blackpool (BBC1)

This is all Tessa Jowell needs--a brilliant drama about corruption in the world of gambling. Peter Bowker's Blackpool hits BBC1 on Thursday nights (starting9pm, 11 November) and, as CBS's Dan Rather said of Ohio during that recent late night we prefer not to think about, it's hotter than a Times Square Rolex. Second to no one in the scepticism with which I regard the efforts of the BBC drama department, I must concede that this serial arrives bursting with self-confidence, wit and bravado. The fable of a corrupt Blackpool amusements entrepreneur about to build the city's first casino hotel when his luck changes and a body is found on his premises could do more to hinder the government's gambling "reforms" than even the Daily Mail.

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It is a comedy, of course, because we English are incapable of treating our seaside seriously, but it is not a Donald McGill postcard kind of comedy, or one of those drab, off-season numbers the British film industry once specialised in. This Blackpool is not rained upon. Its front is flash and smart, and there is no one with more front than our anti-hero, Ripley Holden, the magnate making his highly geared fortune out of AWP, "amusements with prizes". Although one thinks for a moment of Tony Soprano, Holden is not Mafia. He is as put out at the discovery of the punk "as dead as Southport" on his patch as anyone could be. But he is venal in the way of Dickens's entrepreneurs, and he is heading for a crash.

"It's gold rush time in Blackpool," he advises his guests at the opening-night party for his gambling den, "and guess who's shitting gold nuggets." Soon, he will be shitting himself, yet, as with Tony Soprano, it is hard to dislike him. I even wonder if David Morrissey's otherwise exemplary performance does not let this lying, adulterous bully off the hook a little too easily.

Holden knows his customers: the "Priest", who is praying to a higher power for luck; the "Ghost", palely loitering behind other players and judging when their machine is likely to pay out; "Pythagoras", calculating the odds. He thinks he knows everything about everyone. His daughter's ex-boyfriend is "special needs meets Special Brew". His son needs to do something more than wank in his bedroom. His wife, Natalie, who volunteers at the Samaritans, has become, he thinks, a sanctimonious do-gooder. The truth is that he understands his family less than he thinks: his boy is involved in dealing drugs; his daughter's new boyfriend is his own age; his wife's involvement with the Samaritans is how she sublimates her despair over their failing marriage.

There is something else he doesn't know, and this is that Natalie is getting involved with the detective investigating the murder. Morrissey is going to get most of the praise heaped upon Blackpool, but David Tennant, who played the vacillating vicar in He Knew He Was Right earlier this year, is every bit his equal as the down-at-heel copper Peter Carlisle, a younger version of Columbo, who uses the LA detective's trick of feigning incompetence, but talks in pop-culture one-liners ("And is that your final answer?" he asks a witness).

Carlisle has been parachuted into Blackpool presumably because the resident top cop is one of Holden's best friends and a secret investor in his business. "I'm like an emergency plumber, but less well paid," he explains to Holden at his amusement arcade. "It's a family entertainment centre," he corrects him. "Yes," says Carlisle, "and I'm a crime-citizen interface consultant." They are each other's equal in wit, and Holden is right to feel threatened by the newcomer. Meanwhile, as Carlisle's courtship of Natalie becomes more romantic, Carlisle's dislike of Holden develops into something personal.

It was Keith Waterhouse who said that Brighton looks like a town that is helping the police with their inquiries--but pretty soon all of Blackpool is helping Carlisle with his. The producer, Kate Lewis, has said the piece was inspired by Trollope's The Way We Live Now and that Holden is Blackpool's Melmotte. As in that novel, the plausible villain's fall will doubtless bring down a good many others. Given that these include the corrupt deputy chief inspector and Holden's inadequate backer, the B & B proprietor Terry, played by John Thomson, we can hardly wait. Terry, the prime butt of Holden's sarcasm and fists, should have deserted him years ago. When he admires an exotic dancer he claims to have seen "improve" over the years, Holden snaps: "What is this? Strip Idol? You're not a judge. You're a drooler like the rest of us."

The dialogue positively sings, which makes it all the weirder that Bowker and Lewis decided to make Blackpool a musical and have the characters periodically mime to pop songs in Dennis Potter fashion. It feels like a mistake. Potter believed that popular music expressed sentiments his working-class characters could not, but Blackpool's leads are hyper-articulate in the first place. Dramatically, the songs add nothing. What they do add is music, and good music. Once you have seen Carlisle perform "These Boots Are Made For Walking" at rather than with Holden, you would not wish the scene cut. Blackpool, in its aspirations and themes, is no Singing Detective. It is not an intellectual work. But it makes Moulin Rouge--not to mention most popular TV drama right now--look pretty dumb.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times