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Ladies of the lake

02 August 2013

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MATTHEW, Mark, and Luke believe that they are the rightful owners of Paradise - but, for all its beauty, it seems rather a place of desolation and tragedy. The atmospheric crime drama Top of the Lake (BBC2, Saturday) is by no means short of theological resonance, although the lake in question is accursed by native myth rather than Christian tradition.

Paradise is a stretch of land sold away from the evangelistically named family - a clan of violence and brutality who run a sophisticated drugs laboratory. The purchasers are a rum bunch of women who seek enlightenment from a monosyllabic guru.

Many of the clichés of the genre are here: the detective heroine returns home with a back story of her own abuse as she seeks to find a missing girl; false leads are set up; an obvious suspect commits suicide, closing the case for every-one except our heroine; boorish and incompetent local police, themselves colluding in the general sense of pervading lawlessness, seek to obstruct the superior abilities of the female interloper.

All these elements are familiar, but what sets this apart is the sheer oddness of the conception. Very cleverly, what seems at first sight to be ludicrously weird behaviour becomes more reasonable (although no less shocking) as the story unfolds.

We reluctantly concede that, despite first appearances, such things might indeed happen. Although I suspect that there may be glimmers of redemption, this is a bleak vision, Paradise seeming far more like the howling wilderness of purgatory.

By chance, I saw the breaking news of the announcement of the royal birth (BBC1, Monday of last week). This was TV reporting of staggering incompetence. The camerawork was all over the place; the mixing was ludicrous, a split screen depicting an interesting expanse of empty tarmac; and the commentators seemed overwhelmed with emotion, huge grins almost choking the clichés with which they sought to regale us.

It looked as though they had just rushed to cover a story that no one was expecting rather than something that they had had hours, weeks, months to prepare for. It seemed that all the BBC's vaunted professionalism had been jettisoned as worth nothing: all that counts now is to wallow in feelings.

A different kind of royalty was on show in Burton and Taylor (BBC4, Monday of last week), a glossy docudrama that depicted the great stars' final co-operation, taking the leads in a Broadway production of Noel Coward's Private Lives. This provided a neat scenario, as the play is about a divorced couple who realise that they cannot live apart from each other; and it also provided a resonance with their most famous roles of Antony and Cleopatra, where the force of overwhelming love trumps reason, politics, and caution.

What we saw was more one-sided: it was Taylor who set the whole thing up, desperate to be with Burton again, while he could hardly have displayed greater reluctance. Helena Bonham Carter and Dominic West were terrific, inhabiting their roles with gusto.

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