A feast of red herrings as ITV serves up another crime classic

A feast of red herrings as ITV serves up another crime classic: Christopher Stevens reviews last night's TV
 
 
By Christopher Stevens
 
PUBLISHED: 23:55, 5 September 2013  | UPDATED: 00:18, 6 September 2013  

 
 
 
The Guilty *****
 
 The Big Reunion: On Tour *
 
All the greatest Sherlock Holmes stories begin in the same way. In the consulting room at 221b Baker Street, someone describes a mystery.
 
The client might be a damsel in distress or a distraught politician, the mystery might be a vanished lover or an inexplicable death, but one thing never changes: it all requires a great deal of explanation.
 
For Holmes fans, that formula is part of the pleasure. But for crimewriters during the century since the Great Detective hung up his deerstalker, it’s a blasted nuisance because more novel ways to lay out the puzzle must be employed.
 
 
The rule today is ‘show, don’t tell’. Instead of getting the client to recite the plot, the facts must be revealed slowly and subtly through everyday incidents in the lives of the characters. It’s an art.
 
In the opening minutes of The Guilty (ITV) there was a moment of scene-setting so clever that I wanted to stand up and applaud. After a short sequence in flashback where a little boy in red wellies trundled his scooter along a pavement, we cut to a cluttered office.  
 
 
Evil sheep, Cockney witches and a spy in stilettos - this is proper telly: Christopher Stevens reviews last night's TV
 
 
It looked for a moment like a police incident room, but then a phone rang and an answerphone message cut in: ‘Hi. You’ve reached the Find Callum campaign line,’ said a woman’s recorded voice.
 
We didn’t even need the camera pan to a ‘Missing’ poster pinned to a board, with photos of the missing boy. The whole plot was summed up in that eight-word message.
 
We haven’t had a good suburban sitcom since One Foot In The Grave. Pat And Cabbage (ITV), starring Cheri Lunghi and Barbara Flynn, promises to fill that gap. ‘I shall report you to the council,’ fumed a neighbour as they snaffled his wheelie bin. Lovely, gentle comedy.
.
This promised to be a masterful drama, and it didn’t disappoint. The characters and their secrets were revealed amid a blizzard of clues and false leads.
 
The first red herring appeared on that poster. Callum had been missing since May 3, 2008 — a year to the day since the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Would this story mirror that real-life tragedy?
 
But no — as the episode unfolded, Callum’s skeleton was discovered, buried in the communal gardens of this wealthy suburban avenue, with a blanket laid over him and another folded under his head. His ribs were cracked, perhaps a sign that his killer had tried to revive him.
 
Whoever murdered the four-year-old had treated the corpse with respect, almost tenderness. The policewoman in charge of the investigation, played by Tamsin Greig, found it deeply disturbing, partly because she had a four-year-old son of her own.
 
But there were hints that her little boy had problems of a different kind. He was abrupt and solitary, a boy who wore ear protectors in the bath and who could occupy himself for hours by digging all the sand out of his sandpit. Both his parents were concerned and didn’t dare put their fears into words — a typical reaction when a child’s special needs start to emerge.
 
The Guilty, a three-part series, has the potential to be another first-class ITV crime drama following the success of Broadchurch and Endeavour. Catch up if you missed it last night: it promises to be unmissable.
 
 
The Big Reunion, on the other hand, looks eminently missable. Even if you’d fancied this pop roadshow featuring 30-something boy bands from the Noughties and Spice Girl wannabe acts like Atomic Kitten and Honeyz, you’d change your mind after watching the rehearsals.
 
Never has there been such a bunch of bitchy, flouncy, teary drama queens. And that was just the boys.
 
Jason ‘J’ Brown, an ex-member of Five, spent a large chunk of The Big Reunion: On Tour (ITV2) explaining that he needed his privacy and that he could never ever court the limelight again. Why he had to say this, over and over, to a camera crew is one of life’s imponderable riddles.
 
It was a puzzle, too, why most of the 26 musicians on the tour had bothered to turn up to rehearsals, since they just stood around gossiping and taking photos of each other on their phones.
 
Their enthusiasm only surfaced when the tour bus arrived, thoughtfully stocked with fancy dress costumes, wine and lager. If you think Kerry Katona is an alarming prospect at the best of times, she’s completely terrifying when dressed as Elvis and sozzled on red wine.
 
That chap J from Five made the right decision to bail out.
 
 
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2412732/The-Guilty-The-Big-Reunion-Christopher-Stevens-reviews-nights-TV.html#ixzz2e5duk2sc
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I watched this last night and apart from it being a very good drama on its own merits with a very good cast, it will no doubt generate a lot of talk imo on the Madeleine online discussion areas due to the parallels with the case. Of course there were differences, but there were striking similarities.
 2 May 2008 highlighted on screen, the date shortly before the bbq in the communal area when the little boy was to disappear. He had left home alone early morning with his scooter, through a door with a faulty lock, was found soon afterwards hiding under a large tree. Before going out we saw him climb onto a kitchen worktop to get to the biscuit tin which he knew was in a wall cupboard.

 There is a sub plot unfolding with the au pair and her boyfriend. She got the blame for not keeping an eye on the child and was upset later when her boyfriend did not show at the bbq. She was tasked with putting the 2 boys to bed after Dad had brought them home, told by an annoyed Mum that he could f******g do it after she was ordered to do so by her rather charmless husband. She was quite miffed after the bbq had run into the night, all kids there, music and dancing and there was a fight between one of their male pals and another when the latter was dancing too closely with the wife/ girlfriend/ partner of the first guy.
  The Dad of the child who would soon afterwards vanish waded in to make sure the woman did not get caught up in it and the Mum of soon to be missing child was very puzzled by her husband's rather needless gallantry and reaction to this other female.
 Last shot of Dad after taking boys home was him standing in the hallway after telling au pair to get the kids to bed. We don't know if he stayed or returned to bbq, or went elsewhere.

 Also striking, the focus in opening scenes of the PR chat re campaign with the mother, her saying her son must at this 5 yr anniversary remain in the public eye and that when his scooter was found 5 years ago, they knew he had been taken.
 There were the photos of his parents, campaign photos STILL MISSING. All happened in the merry month of May.
  We also learnt during episode 1 of this 3 parter shown over consecutive weeks, that Mum was step mum to the older son, whose Mum died when he was a toddler[ pls correct if necessary, I had to attend to 2 barking dogs who saw a cat in my garden, at this point !]

The discussions  between detectives of how stranger abduction usually pans out were interesting.

 The content of this drama and the timing of its going to air are rather fascinating.

Catch up on the first episode here on ITV player ............



9:00pm, Thursday 5 September 2013
Duration: 
1 hour
Series
1
• Episode
1
Three-part drama which opens in 2008, when a four-year-old boy goes missing during a neighbourhood barbecue. Five years later his body is found buried near his own front door.
 
 
https://www.itv.com/itvplayer/the-guilty

I was struck immediately by the date of the disappearance being 3rd May 2008 and a "Find Callum" website being set up.
 
The McCann website was as we know set up at a ridiculous claimed cost by a teenager called Calum.
 
I shall keep watching to see how the storyline progresses!

P.S. Sorry, Russian Doll, I've just seen that you have commented on this as well.

Don't apologise, the more comments the better !

 This is from the Telegraph :


It’s a bright spring morning and I’m standing in a picture-perfect square in suburban Surrey. Chocolate-box houses nestle behind pristine picket fences, and in the square’s central shared garden, paper lanterns bob cheerfully between cedar trees. But something isn’t right. There’s a sadness to the place, an eeriness. Then I spot them: tributes of flowers tied to the garden’s fence, a young magnolia tree planted as a memorial, and a broken child’s swing hanging limply from a tree.
Thankfully, nothing tragic has befallen the square’s residents. For the past fortnight their home has become the set of ITV’s new three-part drama, The Guilty, which centres on a community devastated by the disappearance of four-year-old Callum Reid and the discovery of his body five years later, only metres from his house. Overseeing the case is DCI Maggie Brand (Tamsin Grieg) who, like any modern detective worth her psychological salt, comes with her own casebook of personal problems.
The tragedy itself may not be real yet the unsettling atmosphere in the square certainly is, and producer Elaine Cameron - the creative mind behind Sherlock and Jekyll - puts much of that down to her lengthy search for the perfect location. “We wanted it to feel either European or North American, with all the houses looking the same and the white picket fences … slightly creepy. We’d been looking since before Christmas but this place just felt absolutely right.”
Four of the houses are also being used to film interior scenes and in the Reid’s kitchen, the mood is equally oppressive. Katherine Kelly (last seen in Eighties-based crime drama The Field of Blood) and Darren Boyd (Case Sensitive, Spy), who play Callum’s parents Daniel and Claire, are in the thick of an intensely emotional scene. Eyes hollow and brimming with tears, Kelly runs through possible suspects while a grey-faced Boyd distractedly washes and rewashes the same plate, pleading with his wife to stop the agonising rehashing of events. As the scene ends, with Kelly bleating an exhausted ‘why do I always feel like I’m on my own?’, there is a palpable moment of enthralled silence from the crew before preparations begin for the next take. Kelly and Boyd, their backs to one another, mutter lines to themselves, deep in thought.
This is fairly typical of the shoot so far, Boyd tells me later, as he sits with Kelly in their characters’ marital bedroom. “Mine and Kate’s characters are on the receiving end of this constant barrage of information and news and it is shattering them,” he says. “At times like [the scene in the kitchen] the energy is charged and buzzing with focus. It’s tiring and quite laden but, at the same time, you’re energised. You lean on each other. My first support has been Kate for a lot of it and we’ve had a lot of conversations about who these people were before any of this awful stuff happened.”



Although the pair allow themselves a chuckle during our chat, when Kelly nabs the bedroom’s only armchair and Boyd, who is 6’4”, is forced to perch on a pink plastic seat meant for a child, the gaiety is fleeting. For the most part they look as if they’ve been through the emotional wringer. What made them sign up?
“I did two series of a procedural drama [Case Sensitive],” says Boyd, and I was part of the procedural element. My character [DC Simon Waterhouse] was incredibly removed, so I thought the chance to play the other side of it, the emotional journey, would be interesting. I’m also always looking for things that stamp on any assumptions of what I may do next.”
Boyd says that he was drawn to The Guilty’s complex psychological issues. “I think it’s a study of what it is to be responsible for another human being, to try to possibly fail to create an environment that is safe,” he tells me earnestly. “What do you have to find in yourself to get it right and what happens when you don’t?”
For Kelly, the hook was Debbie O’Malley’s “irresistible script’. As she put it: ‘There are no goodies and baddies [in it], it’s just people trying to do the best they can. It has a sort of Scandinavian feel; you get to know what happened but it’s in a non-preaching, non-commenting way and it doesn’t really change anything. Every time I describe it, it sounds like something we’ve seen before, but to me it feels very new and fresh.”
_{Darren Boyd (as Daniel Reid) and Katherine Kelly (Claire Reid) star in a new three-part ITV drama The Guilty. PHOTO: ITV/HARTSWOOD FILMS}

Indeed, a gritty Scandi-style procedural drama that shatters a small community’s idyll certainly does sound familiar (Broadchurch? Southcliffe?). But for Greig, these TV forerunners only made her more keen to be involved.
“You could just say ‘there’s loads of these dramas out there’ but I think we are really good at them,” she tells me, tucking into a banana on the sofa of her trailer. “Broadchurch was brilliant, I loved it. I feel like ITV are really on a roll, supporting a lot of great writers, unpicking prejudices. [Procedural dramas] are a sort of fingers up to the whole age of immediacy. Everything in our lives is saying ‘go faster, be funnier, be more instant… get a quick soundbite that you can understand’ but these dramas say no, we want to go really deep.”
Greig’s casting may come as a surprise; to many she will always be the single-minded Debbie Aldridge in Radio 4’s The Archers. On TV, her most memorable roles (Green Wing, Black Books, Episodes, Friday Night Dinner) have established her in the public’s imagination as an adept comic actress, at once oddball and acerbic. But in person she is soft and serious – her words are chosen carefully and delivered quietly – and when I ask how it feels to be going straight, a shadow of frustration crosses her face.
“I’m always very bemused by being described as a comedic actress because I’ve also done a lot of straight stuff,” she says. “My approach to all work is about trying to find the truth of the character. With Green Wing, I met doctors and visited hospitals. To play Maggie, I met female DCIs. I do the same thing with a contained and inexpressive character [like Maggie] as I would with, you know, somebody who falls over.”
Unsurprisingly then, it was the show’s complexities that held the biggest attraction for her. “I was really drawn to this story because it’s not just about the disappearance of a child,” she says. “It’s beautifully interwoven with Maggie’s own story – the fact that the child went missing when she was pregnant and that the case re-emerges when her child is the same age as Callum was, and how do you then do your job? How do you separate the two?
“Her own child is also going from nursery to school and is starting to have problems. But because Maggie’s not there so much, she hasn’t learned to deal with them in the same way that her husband has. That makes the title of the show then very interesting.”
_{Jamie Sives, Tommy Potten (centre) and Tamsin Greig in The Guilty.}

Cameron believes that Grieg’s performance alone could bring about the recommissioning of the show (much as Olivia Colman’s acting did with Broadchurch). “She could be an incredibly iconic detective,” she tells me over tea in the catering van. “She’s just got something that you’ve never seen before.”
Back on set I watch Kelly and Boyd stand side by side at their bedroom window, silhouetted as they stare down at the garden where Callum was buried and the neighbours who could be to blame. It may be becoming a familiar image on our TV screens, but I’m not inclined to quibble. If The Guilty can deliver another stylish drama to add to our catalogue of triumphs, then I for one can’t wait to watch.



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Not going to give a synopsis of this drama but adding a p.s to my post about it because I watched a part I had missed first time.

  There seems to be a loose set of friendships between similar age adults due to their being neighbours. One man appears possessive of his wife/ partner , implications from dialogue that they  are having a new start following her infidelity.
 It is this couple involved in the drama at the bbq, she refuses a dance with her man then is dragged up by another and there is a punch to this guy and a slapped face for the wife.
 Dad of soon to vanish Callum wades in to break it up, his concern for the woman who was smacked by her partner giving his own wife, Mum of the vanished child reason to wonder at the level of his involvement.

 I HAD MISSED : Mum seen sleeping on sofa, clearly still upset at how she has seen her man behave with excessive gallantry towards the female friend...she then wakes and goes up to check on kids, finds youngest not in his bed. Goes to look where he was found previous day, on the common ground in front of the houses, he is not there.
 And Mum's police interview.... " I always check, it was the only night I never checked " [ before turning in for the night]. This is 3rd May, seen on the missing posters in the room of the house used for the campaign.

 What is interesting is the filming of the missing boy, sometimes out of focus as if the viewer is meant to ask
 Is this Mum imagining what happened? Did it really happen? Is this what one or both parents told police what [ they believe ? ] happened.

 Over and out. A recommended watch. The flashbacks and present day are filmed very well and it will I am sure show in next 2 episodes the evolving of the campaign and more from police interviews with parents, friends and the nanny. Interested to learn why with at least one school age child a nanny was needed or wanted for 2 children. A bit too much like a mark 2 Broadchurch in some ways, but enough differences to make it a compelling drama.

'Broadchurch' was good IMHO as was 'Guilty' because the human reactions and the settings appeared plausible and real, as well as there being plenty of suspense. We can all imagine what it might be like to lose a child... hence the appalling fascination of the McCann affair. I did NOT like the supposed thriller in the middle... the slightly more arty and surreal one 'Southcliff', was it called?

THE GUILTY...

is written by

Debbie O’Malley, who has written scripts for Eastenders, Holby City, Law & Order

is produced by

Elaine Cameron of Hartwood Films:

http://www.hartswoodfilms.co.uk/about-us/elaine-cameron/

and directed by

Ed Bazalgette:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bazalgette

Ed is a cousin (3rd cousin) of Sir Peter Bazalgette, who was knighted for his services to television, namely being the creator of 'Big Brother' and founder and Chairman of its production company, Endemol - Wikipedia says this about him:

"In January 2005 Bazalgette became Chairman of Endemol UK and Creative Director of Endemol Group worldwide. He was responsible for shows including Big Brother and Deal or No Deal which were hits around the world, and led Endemol's digital entertainment strategy. Although Big Brother was an adaption of an existing series in the Netherlands, Bazalgette is credited with popularising the format around the world thanks to the adaptations he built into the UK version. During Bazalgette's time on the global board, Endemol grew strongly and in 2005 it was launched on the Dutch stock exchange. Over the next eighteen months it trebled in value and was sold in 2007 for €3.2 billion. In September 2007 it was announced that Bazalgette was standing down as Chairman and would assume the role of advisor".

"Trebled in value in 18 month's"?

I have to laugh out loud at that one. 

It is no wonder that he dumped it, on someone else.

What a reptile.

A reminder of the second episode at 9 this evening.

It surely must be more than coincidence that this drama is being broadcast at the same time as a critical point in the Maddie mystery - so many parallels.

Interesting tonight when the dad`s fling with the blonde tottie over the road came to light.  So obviously a lot more going on the night the child went missing than originally admitted.

Who was the bloke at the end who said `I did it, I killed Callum`?

Usually I have the problem when a character turns up again and I can't remember seeing them before!
 
He was I think the man who was earlier hanging about outside the house and Callum's mother said that he was Tom Somebody who'd done some odd jobs for them.
 
Here's the ITV player.
 
https://www.itv.com/itvplayer/the-guilty/series-1/episode-2

Thanks NFWTD - I`m sure he was in Episode 1 but I`m not going to watch it all again.  He`s probably another red herring !

So the Dad was lying all along to cover-up for his other son who he mistakenly thought had killed the child. But it turns out the child had actually caused his own death by copying something dangerous he had seen someone else do.

Woofer wrote:So the Dad was lying all along to cover-up for his other son who he mistakenly thought had killed the child. But it turns out the child had actually caused his own death by copying something dangerous he had seen someone else do.

Ah well, I was going to watch all 3 episodes in one go..............not much point now.

candyfloss wrote:

Woofer wrote:So the Dad was lying all along to cover-up for his other son who he mistakenly thought had killed the child. But it turns out the child had actually caused his own death by copying something dangerous he had seen someone else do.

Ah well, I was going to watch all 3 episodes in one go..............not much point now.

 I watched episode 1 and have recorded 2 and 3. Is there an emoticon with hands over your eyes and ears? or should we have a 'spoiler' alert.

For me, the series didn't maintain the same level of interest all the way through.

The "covering up of an accident" could certainly apply to another real-life case, couldn't it?

Who was Felix - the older boy who'd showed Callum a dangerous trick - in relation to the Reid family?

I'm having my common problem in not remembering seeing a character (who turned out to have some relevance) before.

But it turns out the child had actually caused his own death by copying something dangerous he had seen someone else do.
________________________________________________________

But it turns out that M had actually caused her own death by copying something dangerous she had seen parents do.

No Fate Worse Than De'Ath wrote:For me, the series didn't maintain the same level of interest all the way through.

I found it rather dull and full of mostly disjointed subplots. There are too many of these suburban murder mysteries of late but nothing comes close to Broadchurch as a complete package in my view. Bring back Endeavour.

candyfloss wrote:

Woofer wrote:So the Dad was lying all along to cover-up for his other son who he mistakenly thought had killed the child. But it turns out the child had actually caused his own death by copying something dangerous he had seen someone else do.

Ah well, I was going to watch all 3 episodes in one go..............not much point now.

So sorry Candyfloss - didn`t think.  
Was too thoughtful about the comparisons to the M case.