By James Walton - Peter Kosminsky is one of those sainted writer-directors, like Stephen Poliakoff, whose work routinely receives huge acclaim (and usually several awards) even when it’s not very good. Admittedly, Warriors does deserve its classic status – but that was made in 1999. This century, Kosminsky’s dramas have too often felt like rather self-important lectures on the great issues of the day. This was especially true of his last series Britz, which tackled British Muslims with clunking earnestness – and naturally won a Bafta.
Fortunately, and unexpectedly, none of this applies to The Promise (C4), which, judging from yesterday’s opening episode, will richly deserve any gongs that come its way. True, it did begin a bit creakily when Erin Matthews (Claire Foy) found her grandfather Len’s diary of his time as a soldier in 1940s Palestine – and was instantly transformed from a stroppy teenager into a young woman fascinated by the politics of the Middle East. By happy coincidence, she also announced to her startled mum that she was off to Israel herself in a few days with her Jewish friend Eliza (Perdita Weeks).
Still, once this structure was in place, it meant the action could cut deftly between Erin’s experiences of Israel today and Len’s of the same place 65 years before. The contrast worked beautifully as a means of showing how an often-forgotten part of the British past has affected the present.
Len (Christian Cooke) had just been at the liberation of Belsen when he was sent to Palestine as one of the 100,000 British soldiers charged with keeping the peace. As a result, he was sympathetic to the Jews now pouring into what they considered their homeland. The sympathy, however, was not mutual. Because of the strict British quotas on new immigrants – enforced by, among other ironic methods, putting Jews into camps – radio propaganda accused Len and his comrades of being Nazis. And then, Jewish nationalists started shooting them…
Meanwhile, back in the 21st century, Erin was getting an unsentimental education too. Eliza’s parents provided the liberal Israeli perspective. Their son Paul (Itay Tiran) gave her the radical anti-Zionist line, complete with an eye-opening trip to the West Bank.
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As the conflicting points of view piled up, you could argue that Kosminsky is more interested in the political ideas than in the characters he’s created to embody them. Yet, at least the creation is on the right side of workmanlike, and also helped by a strong cast.
More importantly, though, the political ideas are utterly gripping in themselves – and in a welcome new development, Kosminsky lets them jostle up against each other without telling us what to think. Instead, he allows every group to put their case convincingly, while also making it heartbreakingly clear how incompatible their aims are.
Towards the end last night, experienced Kosminsky watchers might have felt a twinge of alarm that pro-Arab Paul would turn out to be the author’s voice – with Erin as the audience’s ear. But then he was blown up in a suicide attack, bringing home another bleak truth: just because you refuse to see certain people as your enemies, that won’t necessarily stop them killing you.
The Promise, in fact, was so good that it provides a rare and happy chance to compare a big British drama favourably to a big American one — and this, even though the US offering came from HBO, was directed by Barry Levinson (Diner, Rain Man) and starred Al Pacino.
You Don’t Know Jack (Sky Atlantic, Sun) was the biopic of Dr Jack Kevorkian, whose public willingness to help 130 terminally ill patients commit suicide caused enormous controversy in America throughout the 1990s. He was put on trial several times, but always cleared by juries – until he moved on from assisting the deaths to administering the lethal dose himself…
All of which should make for a fascinating and nicely tangled story. The trouble was that the programme turned it into a straight fight between goodies and baddies, as Kevorkian and his brave band of liberals took on the dark forces of the Christian Right, whose arguments ranged from the stupid to the hysterical.
Depending on what you think of assisted suicide, this may or may not have been a moral failing by the programme-makers – but it was certainly a mistake dramatically. You Don’t Know Jack was classily done, and Pacino remains a man it’s not easy to take your eyes off. None the less, if an issue-based drama of nearly three hours isn’t to end up monotonous, there really does need to be some development or complication of the issue – and here that was never allowed to happen. The effect, oddly enough, was like watching Peter Kosminsky at his worst.