Legends: The War on Drugs

 "It's because of what happened to me that I know it hasn't happened to them."

For Guy, Kate and Bailey the stakes of the deadly game are getting higher and higher, with lots of guns, tension, and character moments, from the O'Connells being sprung from a prison van at the beginning to the shocking bloodshed at the end. And, this time, at the centre of it all is drug kingpin Carter, a man whose greed, ambition and need for control leads to horrific levels of violence, death... and, it's strongly hinted at, hubris. 

There's more, though. Thatcher is under threat by the men in the grey suits, Hezza is on the march, it's the Tory conference... and the safety of all three of our protagonists is potentially put at risk for the sake of party politics. Don is there to discuss with others (and us) the psychological well-being of Guy, Kate and Bailey... and he should know. Steve Coogan is, as ever, extraordinary.

Bailey slowly gains the trust of Eddie, who in turn, unsurprisingly, is losing faith in the volatile Carter. There is drama between different Turkish factions. And for Guy, in particular, life feels dangerous and precarious. And the legend is changing him, causing him to threaten his daughter's piano teacher. 

There's a lot going on, and it's all gripping stuff. And yet, with all good telly, character is at the heart of it all. 

Legends: This Is Liverpool

 "That's called importing drugs. It's sort of the opposite of what we do."

Things get even more dramatic and dangerous this week for our underpaid Customs officers working on a shoestring and risking our lives, showing the real costs. Yet we also see why they're doing it. A young Tommy, ironically the son of one of the kingpins himself, finds himself hooked on heroin through a perfectly ordinary and natural set of circumstances, and we slowly see his decline and death. it's harrowing, and it happens to the very father who... orchestrates the shocking ending.

Guy is getting deeper and deeper into his "legend"... and thereby connecting well with Don, who well knows the appeal and the costs. And he's under pressure to show what he can do by actually importing large quantities of heroin which, well, he can't do. But, in a delightful sequence, Don solves the problem in arranging a deliberately botched raid by armed police in Felixtowe. I also love the sequence in which he desperately gets some customs officers to back off. Steve Coogan absolutely steals every scene he's in.

Kate and Bailey also have some excitement, getting locked in while sneaking around but getting away with it through sheer desperate cleverness. But the moment of sheer drama is Shaun's cover being blown, and he and his family subsequently escaping a fiery death by the skin of their teeth. It's utterly gripping, and really sells the risks of undercover work... yet, earlier in the episode, Shaun confesses just how much he's loving it.

Still utterly gripping, even if much of the episode is necessarily setting things up. 

A Christmas Carol: Part One

“Bah humbug!”

It's quite a statement of intent to begin an adaptation of A Christmas Carol with a boy pissing on a bloke's grave, but that's what happens here. It's a very clear sign that the three hours of Dickensian drama that lie before us are going to be devoid of the normal schmaltz and sentimentality.

This is a grubby, harsh and, well, Dickensian London, just before Christmas 1843. It's a time of poverty, suffering, starvation and sickness, long before the Welfare State and, indeed, probably where we're headed in the next few years, unprotected by EU membership from Trump's rapacious designs on our food and our health system and where the Welfare State is becoming deeply unfashionable to those in power, much like such things as objective truth, the BBC, an independent Civil Service and, you know, institutions that one imagines a "Conservative" ought to want to preserve. But I digress. At least, in 1843, things were getting better. They had Sir Robert Peel, not "Sir" Iain bloody Duncan Smith.

None of that hope means much to poor Bob Cratchit, forced to work for an unusually lean Ebenezer Scrooge in the shape of Guy Pearce, a cynical smartarse who manages to be just likeable enough as an antihero. There's a long scene of dialogue between Cratchit and Scrooge, with Cratchit anxious to get home for Christmas Eve from his job as a human photocopier, or "clerk" in 1843 speak, which nicely gives us all the necessary exposition about his family's unfortunate situation and their respective situations. This side of thngs is almost traditional.

However, all this stuff with Jacob Marley and a very hellish Purgatory (it's all very Catholic but then it's a concept rather necessary to the idea of a ghost)- it's all very dark, scary, visual and not in the novella. Nor is this odd little sub-plot with Mrs Cratchit's cousin. And surely if, on Christmas Eve, Scrooge is told there will be three ghosts on successive midnights, this will take him long past Christmas morning?

This is brazen, bold, brave and different. Is it going to work? Well, the jury's out.