The Couple Next Door (Channel 4) | channel4.com
Slow Horses Apple TV+
Being Kae Tempest (BBC Two) | iPlayer
The Doll Factory Paramount+
Does putting out the bins count as sexual foreplay these days? Should I be tossing in the black bags with wild erotic abandon? Perhaps a spot of light frottage against the recycling crates?
I ask because there’s a deranged, sexed-up, putting the bins out in the rain scene in Channel 4’s new six-part thriller The Couple Next Door. Indeed, written by David Allison, based on a Dutch drama, the series at first looks daringly intent on updating the fusty, pampas grass-strewn/ car keys hurled into fruit bowls reputation of the British “swinging couples” scene.
Evie and Pete (Eleanor Tomlinson and Alfred Enoch) move into an idyllic Leeds suburban enclave that Pete describes as a “bit Desperate Housewives”. They meet a neighbour couple, yoga coach Becka (Jessica De Gouw) and motorbike cop Danny (Outlander’s Sam Heughan), a signposted alpha male, all brooding looks and muscles that look as though they’ve popped out of jelly moulds. After (spoiler alert) suffering a tragedy, Evie and Pete find themselves drawn into a new sexual openness, but can they cope?
Aside from the bin nonsense, this facet of The Couple Next Door is interesting. While a tad overplayed (an insufferable beach scene involving hot couple-dancing makes you want to bury everyone involved up to their necks in quick-drying concrete), it at least attempts to examine the hidden world of no-strings sex (“it could get messy with friends”) and issues of public exposure, judgment and emotional consequences.
Elsewhere, Tomlinson gives an affecting, unravelling performance, while Hugh Dennis is creepily compelling as an obsessed neighbourhood stalker. (Whether viewers are ready to see the Outnumbered patriarch snooping at erotic images and rummaging down the front of his trousers is quite another matter.)
Otherwise, The Couple Next Door staggers under the weight of its dull, unnecessary subplots. Pete’s work in local journalism (as is de rigueur with local journalists in TV drama, he can magically afford a huge posh house). The unveiling of a secret part of Danny’s world that turns out to be yawnsome filler. Some humdrum criminal shenanigans. All of which wastes the characters and the premise, and makes the drama, while still watchable, suddenly seem like a bog-standard thriller with a garnish of kink. Sadly, The Couple Next Door peaks with the bins.
Over on Apple, I’m now convinced that Gary Oldman is using his Slow Horses character’s dishevelment to troll lookist Hollywood. The darkly witty espionage thriller (based on Mick Herron’s novels about demoted MI5 misfits) has returned for a third series, again starring Rosalind Eleazar, Saskia Reeves, Kadiff Kirwan, Aimee-Ffion Edwards and Christopher Chung. Oldman’s character, the unkempt, farting, belching, belly-scratching, perma-smoking, kebab-munching Jackson Lamb (long a walking, talking antonym for metrosexual) has, if anything, gone further downhill.
He is still sleeping in the Slough House office and attempts to wash himself with Fairy Liquid. While he has health issues, you wonder what could actually take him out. A squirt of air freshener? Add Lamb’s bracing language (“Fuck me with a wire brush”) and you can see why boss Diana (Kristin Scott Thomas) vibrates with contempt, though this time she lavishes it on talented but hapless agent River (Jack Lowden): “When you show up, frogs start raining from the sky and blood pours from the taps.”
The previous series felt slightly underplotted, but this one claps along like thunder. There’s the signature caustic interplay: not least between Scott Thomas and returning Sophie Okonedo as MI5 supremo Ingrid, whose faux sisterly tete-a-tetes unfurl like passive-aggressive tai chi. Elsewhere (staying mindful of spoilers), one of the “slow horses” is in peril, an enigmatic stranger (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) is at large, and there are conspiracies and explosions galore. At times it feels as if sage, acid Lamb doesn’t show up enough, but Slow Horses still works because, unlike glossier spy fare, it doesn’t fancy itself.
“My brain is such a ferocious place sometimes,” says the subject of Being Kae Tempest in BBC Two’s Arena profile on the poet, rapper, author, playwright and trans activist. The documentary follows shorn-headed Tempest, 37, on tour with their fourth album, The Line Is a Curve (rattling with anxiety before a show at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire; performing for vast crowds at Glastonbury), and chilling out (playing darts, making omelettes). There’s a look at their gender dysphoria: weeks after undergoing top surgery (a double mastectomy), Tempest lies in the bath having their face shaved by their girlfriend (“It’s a calm I’ve never known… It’s like coming home to my body at last”). There’s also a rake through their history: from formative south London years and the struggle for recognition, to global selling albums, winning the Ted Hughes poetry prize and Mercury and Brit nominations.
Coming across equal parts fragile and driven, Tempest won’t be everyone’s chai latte (like their spoken-word art, they can seem almost excruciatingly earnest), but they should be commended for fully and sincerely opening up for this absorbing profile. The result is an uncommonly deep dive into the countercultural creative impulse.
I’m halfway through drama The Doll Factory (Paramount+) and it’s playing the gothic card hard, creeping about in the shadows of deliciously overblown Victoriana. Created by Charley Miles and based on the book by Elizabeth Macneal, this six-parter is set in London at the time of the Great Exhibition. Esmé Creed-Miles plays Titian-haired Iris, a frustrated artist who paints faces on dolls with her embittered sister (Mirren Mack), herself blemished by smallpox (“I was the beautiful one first, remember?”).
Iris attracts a mysterious taxidermist (Éanna Hardwicke), then a furtive artist (George Webster) who wants her to model for him: “You must be my queen.” But why do screams pierce the dark night? And why is blood being scrubbed from a carpet?
It’s all very full-on (dancing candlelight, carnal reveries, grisly brutality, encroaching menace), but in a climate of benign, vacuous period drama, that doesn’t feel like such a terrible thing.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Couple Next Door ★★★
Slow Horses ★★★★
Being Kae Tempest ★★★★
The Doll Factory ★★★
What else I’m watching
Reservation Dogs
(Disney+)
Aw, the third and final series of the inventive hit comedy about Indigenous American Oklahoma teenagers, created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi. Opening with a frustrating, heartbreaking sojourn in California, Reservation Dogs will be missed.
The Great British Bake Off final
(Channel 4)
The last stand of Bake Off 2023. Did Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith crown your favourite cake-icer/dough-kneeder? For two unlucky losers, it’s heartbreak in a pastel tent.
Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator
(BBC Two)
For those of us with a yen for Roman history, this is a neatly crafted three-part docudrama about the life and reign of Julius Caesar that thoroughly explores his dark side.
