AS THE nights draw in, ’tis the season for mystery and suspense; and there is a concerted effort to make us think that there is more in heaven and earth than can be measured, weighed, or costed (always avoiding, of course, any actual religion — that would be far too challenging). So BBC1 regales us with the second series of The Missing (Wednesdays), in which a victim of abduction stumbles into her parents’ town 11 years after she went missing.
So far, this sounds like a crime thriller. But it is more than that: after two episodes, the young woman is apparently not who she seems to be but another, abducted and imprisoned alongside her. Why is she impersonating her? How does her story link to a war zone in Iraq?
The high-quality script and acting persuade us almost to accept all this nonsense as possible, although, perhaps, it is the format of the drama which seduces us, a brilliant zigzagging backwards and forwards through a couple of years — always signposted, but no less confusing for that. Has the girl now, apparently, died? Why is her father hideously scarred? What drove her brother to drug addiction? The big question is whether the eventual resolution will be rational, or invoke layers of supernatural intervention.
On ITV, the three-parter Him (Wednesday of last week) depicts a young man emotionally scarred by his father’s marital desertion, subsequent remarriage, his mother’s remarriage, and the step- and half-siblings that have arisen from these unions. His parents and step-parents all display a catastrophic ineptitude in responding to his anti-social behaviour and sense of betrayal: it could be marketed as a manual of how not to step-parent.
The added ingredient is that he has supernatural powers: by concentrating so hard that he gives himself a nose-bleed, he can make machinery malfunction, change TV channels, and almost destroy his stepmother’s cruelly perfect house. It is confusing, morally: the adults treat him so badly that we think him fully justified in wreaking havoc on their smug lives. At a key moment there was a potentially meaningful shot of bells pealing from the church; will the C of E play a part in the denouement?
The supernatural is distressingly invoked in Britain’s Ancient Tracks With Tony Robinson (Channel 4, Saturdays). So far, he has led us on the Icknield Way and the Ridgeway, showing us vistas and magnificent sites — but it is too superficial, and, even worse, entirely syncretistic, hopping indiscriminately between archaeology, history, myth, and mumbo-jumbo.
It feels rather like the BBC’s famed impartiality, having to give equal attention to hard research and romantic balderdash like so-called “ley-lines”. We are learning more and more about our distant ancestors’ economic, social, and cultural lives, understanding how sophisticated and organised they were, and what we are learning provokes wonder — and yet ancient legend seems as important to Sir Tony as the insights of his professional archaeologist chums.
I see the incoherent hand of TV wisdom here: if you are making a factual documentary, the only sure way to engage viewers’ attention is by bandying around as often as possible the word “mystery”.