Learners
BBC1, 9pm
My Boy Jack
ITV1, 9pm
WATCHING Learners was like climbing into a metallic-silver mid-range family hatchback (the kind you'd fail to pick out as yours if you left it for 20 minutes in a half-empty car park), and then going for a pleasant tootle in it around the suburbanised foothills of Mike Leigh Mountain.
It was OK, in other words; a reliable, well-assembled performer, but far from attaining the peak of serio-comic TV drama. But at least it did provide one new revelation, while also confirming another truth we knew already. What we surely knew already is that David Tennant is believably, commendably different in every role he undertakes.
As the time-travelling oddity Doctor Who, he remains sparkily all-knowing. In Recovery, he was a loving husband and father who, after suffering a brain-injury, couldn't help becoming a pitiable domestic monster.
And in Learners, he was Chris: a super-patient, nerdy, ultra-supportive Christian mouse who lived life by the good book.
Who truly loved life's strugglers and saw it as his joyous duty to make them succeed. And who also suffered from asthma. And a mummy's boy hair-cut.
An unlikely sort of modern-day hero then, but just the sort of active, practical, enabling one that a struggling gal would need as her driving instructor if she was the type of gal who'd so struggled to drive a car that she'd failed her test nine times.
As stifled mother-to-two-children-and-one-feckless-husband Bev, Jessica Hynes was a big hit as that failure. She was also Learners' major new revelation. Hitherto, Hynes has been a dumpy second banana/modest stooge in a range of comedies, everything from The Royle Family to the recent Britflick Magicians, starring Mitchell and Webb. She was also Simon Pegg's tomboyish support in Spaced. In Learners, however, Hynes covered the female thesp's waterfront: from foxy, love-struck hotty to angry, thwarted prole by way of dedicated mom and sly seducer. More of Ms Hynes asap (especially as a foxy, love-struck hotty, please).
Where Learners failed was in convincing us that meek, decent, but terribly geeky Chris would have captured the heart of his glamour puss employer, a sleek woman with self-harming taste in men (one failed marriage behind her; newly pregnant by an abusive love-rat).
The mis-matched pair's sudden union in a too-neat romantic denouement ultimately proved a three-point-turn and hill-start too far for Learners' own status as a credible comedy vehicle.
My Boy Jack was more obviously flawed. It outlined the true, too-short life story of Rudyard Kipling's soldier son, Jack, killed by German machine gunners one day past his 18th birthday in 1915, barely 30 minutes after he'd stepped on to the lethal stage of the First World War.
On the plus side, My Boy Jack proved there's more to Daniel Radcliffe than has been asked of him as the half-dimensional hero of the Harry Potter films. In particular, myopic Jack's brave and senseless death - fumbling in the mud for his dislodged spectacles - was touchingly under-played.
Portraying Kipling Sr, David Haig gave a solid sense of the patriotic poet-propagandist's gung-ho vigour and muscular sentimentality. Sadly, Haig the actor wasn't quite matched by Haig the dramatist.
What undermined My Boy Jack was the fact that Haig had underwritten the role of its central female character, Jack's mater, played by Kim Cattrall. While her son was being eagerly packed off to certain death by his colonialist pater, Kim was merely required to look mournful and mildly reproving (it's awfy slimming, ladies). I've copped more female rage for losing one of my wife's earrings than Rudyard received from his missus for fatally mislaying her son.
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