Platform 7 (ITVX) | itv.com
Smothered (Sky Comedy)
Louis Theroux Interviews Chelsea Manning (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Seeds of Deceit: The Sperm Donor Doctor (BBC Four) | iPlayer
Call me a tragic old goth, but I’m not averse to a drama with a spooky premise. On ITVX, Platform 7 is a four-part psychological thriller with a metaphysical element. Adapted by Paula Milne from Louise Doughty’s 2019 novel, it opens with the spirit of a young teacher, Lisa (Jasmine Jobson), trapped at a train station, where she fell on to the tracks to her death from platform 7.
In death, Lisa has only splinters of memory. In life, she had a boyfriend (Toby Regbo), family, friends, a promising career and a guy who kept hanging around outside her flat, staring at her intensely. As a transport cop (Yaamin Chowdhury) looks into her case, Lisa – at first resigned to wandering the train station for all eternity in her PJs – comes to question the events surrounding her death. Had she been suicidal? Did she jump?
Basically, Platform 7 is a mystery investigated by the dead person – akin to an older, UK-set version of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Of course there are some silly, inconsistent elements. As time goes on (spoiler alert), the narrative inconvenience of Lisa’s ghostliness (such as not being able to leave the station or touch things) is somewhat perfunctorily dealt with. Another suicide victim (Phil Davis) turns up, whips up a terribly sad storyline, then abruptly disappears. The denouement is revealed surprisingly early, though frankly it’s so heavily signposted, you’d need to be as thick as custard not to have already guessed it.
For all that, Platform 7 is interesting. Without wishing to dish more major spoilers, it tackles some dark and difficult themes head-on. Doughty, who also wrote Apple Tree Yard, is nothing if not adept at a screen-worthy page-turner. I was wondering how Jobson would fare as a mainstream lead (I’m such a fan of her career-making turn as Jaq in Top Boy) and she’s great: delicate and subtle, then driven and alarming. While far from perfect, Platform 7 is diverting, atmospheric fare for a chilly winter’s evening.
Sky Max gave us a mismatched romance, The Lovers, a few months ago. Now Sky Comedy offers the new six-part UK dramedy Smothered, created by Monica Heisey, one of the writers of Schitt’s Creek.
It stars Danielle Vitalis (Famalam; I May Destroy You) as Sammy, a twentysomething driven to cynicism by the slog of modern romance (ghosting, apps): “I’m doomed to be a successful businesswoman with an amazing personality, a perfect arse and no love.” When she meets slightly older Tom (Big Boys’ Jon Pointing) at a karaoke bar, they decide to have a meaningless fling (“If you’ve got any dark secrets or a middle name, I don’t want to hear about it”). Does their hookup evolve into something more meaningful? Are feelings caught? What do you think?
This is an opposites-attract mega deal. When we first see Sammy, she’s bored at an orgy. Tom (staider, with more responsibilities) lists her on his phone as “Insane Girl From Bar”. Aisling Bea plays a pithy businesswoman who’s opening a restaurant (“There’s no sign of Geri Halliwell. My God, that’s the first time that’s ever happened”), and the wider cast includes Rebecca Lucy Taylor (AKA pop star Self Esteem), Blair Underwood and Lisa Hammond.
Smothered’s star-crossed odd-couple premise isn’t original, and in common with many dramedies it needs to seriously up the gag count. That said, I’m finding it extremely moreish and steeped in charm. Vitalis and Pointing keep things popping with playful chemistry and off-the-charts likability.
Louis Theroux Interviews Chelsea Manning is a tense, guarded affair. A US intelligence officer turned (as billed here) “arguably the most famous military whistleblower in American history”, Manning was jailed for 35 years in 2013 for leaking classified material about Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks. After seven years in jail (during which she transitioned from male to female), Manning had her sentence commuted by Barack Obama and is now a speaker and writer.
This was Theroux’s penultimate outing in what has been an interesting, albeit uneven second series. His encounter with Joan Collins in St Tropez was curiously limp (how was this even possible? Collins is interview catnip). Earlier in the run, there was an intriguing encounter with Pete Doherty, mainly conducted at the musician’s home in Etretat in northern France. Doherty, these days looking a bit like a minor character from The Adventures of Tintin, was one minute engaging (talking drugs, chaos, his ex Kate Moss and more), the next weirdly vacant, his mojo awol, like a spent firework.
With Manning, poised like a watchful bird, it’s different again. There are tears about personal struggles. When pressed about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (currently in HMP Belmarsh fighting US extradition), a flash of annoyance (“I’m always the side character in my life. I’m tired of it”). However, elsewhere it’s all blank replies and chary stonewalling. What should be a conversation ends up feeling almost like a standoff. Maybe it’s too much to expect a whistleblower to feel safe enough to fully open up?
Over to BBC Four true crime docuseries Seeds of Deceit: The Sperm Donor Doctor, about Dutch medic Jan Karbaat, who ran a fertility clinic from 1980 to 2009. There, he secretly inseminated patients (including unmarried women and gay women no one else would treat) with his own sperm, producing scores of children. He died in 2017, still inseminating women with syringes of water when he needed money.
If you watch this off-kilter but compelling series, prepare for a tsunami of unnerving details. The conflicting views of Karbaat (“charming”, “creep”). The suspicions of his patients. The failure to medically screen other donors. The now adult children, some angry, others remarkably sanguine, who meet up with one another. The abuse of power and sexual abuse. Once, Karbaat ejaculated on to a woman’s stomach, syringed it up and inseminated her – and she was so desperate that she let him.
Seeds of Deceit turns into the story of the devastation wreaked by one man’s unchecked God complex. While tonally wobbly (borderline jaunty at times), you end up haunted by the women who yearned to conceive.
Star ratings (out of five)
Platform 7 ★★★
Smothered ★★★
Louis Theroux Interviews Chelsea Manning ★★★
Seeds of Deceit: The Sperm Donor Doctor ★★★★
What else I’m watching
John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial
(Apple TV+)
Unsettling three-part docuseries about the 1980 murder of John Lennon. Yoko Ono isn’t interviewed, but using grainy footage and eyewitnesses, the programme looks into the murder and Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman.
Mayfair Witches
(BBC Two)
Loosely based on Anne Rice’s supernatural trilogy, and starring Alexandra Daddario (The White Lotus), this US drama about a female paediatric neurosurgeon descended from witches is slow to get started, but then ups its game.
Panorama: The Water Pollution Cover-Up
(BBC One)
Joe Crowley packs a punch with this short documentary looking into the sewage being pumped into British rivers and how the scandal has been covered up.
