Age is no laughing matter

Last night's TV reviewed: The Invisibles; (The) Taggart; The Bill; The Baron; The Inbetweeners

Last night, it was decision time: Ken v Boris, Tories v Labour, and, before the swingometer took centre stage, age versus youth: The Invisibles (BBC One) v The Inbetweeners (E4). At least in this election – despite the spookily similar names – there was one clear winner and no need for a recount, or staying up till all hours in the vain hope that Robert Peston might appear and start squawking about Nick Clegg’s budget plans. (A boy’s gotta find his pleasures where he can.)

The loser, the shambolic, hopeless, where-are-the-matchsticks-to-keep-my-eyelids-from-closing-FOREVER loser, was The Invisibles, which finally appeared after weeks of trailers featuring spidery, abseiling figures, implying a drama with the stylistic dash of The Thomas Crown Affair. That, like the drama itself, was a con. Anthony Head and Warren Clarke played Morris and Sid, a pair of past-it cat burglars – legends, we were told, called “The Invisibles” – who apparently were so marvellous in their day that they robbed from royalty. But now, older and slightly rickety, they were trying to go straight in a quiet seaside town. Fatefully, this was also a drama with something to say – something obvious and clunking – about ageing. Over and over again. 'The Invisibles', you see, also refers to the elderly within society. So, Morris (Head) hated the new block of flats that he and his wife (Jenny Agutter) moved into because they were for old people and had smoke alarms; and under the door drifted leaflets for coffee mornings and bridge-for-beginners’ courses.

There's a rather shocking interview with the scriptwriter William Ivory in this week's Radio Times, in which he describes the genesis of The Invisibles. "The starting premise," he says, "was that it would be about people on the wrong side of 50 trying to get back into the mainstream. And then I thought, 'What if the mainstream isn't mainstream? What if you're trying to get back into the underworld?'" Just take a mouthful of that and swill it around, if you've got a moment. He thinks that crooks coming out of retirement is a twist, a new idea. (Terry Nation, said once, that he called his wife and said, "I've had this brilliant idea for some baddies. I'm going to call them Daleks." She said, "Drink your tea while it's hot." Every writer needs a Mrs Nation, now and then, to pour hot tea on their bright ideas.) Whatever next? How about a drama involving a policeman who solves crimes – but he's a maverick who doesn't go by the book. Or no, hang on, this one's even better: a successful City type moves to a seemingly idyllic village – but it's populated by lovable eccentrics. That's going to make the viewers sit up and take notice, isn't it?

I'd mind The Invisibles less if there weren't so much talent involved in it. Ivory himself is an interesting, if inconsistent, writer, with a CV that includes the dustbin-men drama Common As Muck and The Sins, a decidedly odd serial about an ex-thief-turned-undertaker, played by Pete Postlethwaite. The retired clichés, beg pardon, crooks are played by Warren Clarke and Anthony Head, with Jenny Agutter as Head's wife. I don't think any of them can have felt unduly taxed by the complexities of this one. Where was Mrs Ivory when we needed her? Did no one in the seasoned cast have a queasy feeling about the script? Or notice the absence of jokes in a comedy caper? Next time you are in a pub, try to get a laugh with: "Port and brandy - nature's amoxicillin!" Try even to say it.

So the premise is simple: Syd and Maurice used to be Britain's top burglars, committing glamorous thefts and never getting caught. After 18 years living it up on the Costa del Crime, they have returned to Britain – largely, you gather, because Barbara wants proper tea and Marks & Spencer – to live in luxury retirement apartments in a seaside town in Devon. But Syd's ne'er-do-well son is desperate for money, owing to a contrived and unfunny accident involving some expensive koi carp, and Maurice, while he can't stand the boy, is chafing at the bonds of age. Early on, he was shocked to realise that their new flat comes equipped with an emergency phone of a type advertised by Thora Hird. So, naturally, they decided to try one last job to see the boy clear. Thus, the two old blaggers don their boiler suits and balaclavas again – only to discover that crime, like everything else, had got a whole lot tougher than they remembered it.

“We were the best, we’re not any more,” Morris banged on every five minutes. Head’s accent drifted all over the place, from South Ken to East Ham, and eventually settled for a rocky outcrop in the Thames Estuary. Clarke looked like a baffled toad. Agutter was so fragrant she should have been attended by a cartoon chorus of woodland nymphs. Lame drama chafed against lamer comedy. The duo first tried to burgle a friend’s place (they banged their knees, leading to more grumbling about ageing). The tone went absurdly Mission: Impossible as they prepared to rob a gangland chief’s place (expensive bits of kit, slinky music). But they were caught, beaten up and eventually saved by the pub landlord- played by Dean Lennox Kelly- who arrived late and cheered things up considerably ("I was the man behind the Rotherham 7. You've probably heard of us. Well, anyway ..."). There were spectral overtones of Minder and suddenly he mutated exhilaratingly into Terry McCann and flattened the baddies. "I'm the hardest man you've ever met in your life. I'll be back and I'll be angry. You don't wanna see that."

Ivory did pull off a couple of minor reversals of expectation along the way. Their first job, which went disastrously wrong, turned out to have been a practice: the bloke they were burgling knew who they were, and was only shouting at them to make it seem authentic! And the seedy, over-friendly landlord of the local pub turned out to be the son of their long-deceased partner, eager to take over Dad's business. But the gags about the effects of age are even more arthritic than our heroes, and no sentient being could have been remotely surprised by the ending, which had the trio toasting the rebirth of their criminal careers. Plausibility hasn't been a high priority, either. Returning from a night's breaking and entering, Maurice insisted to his wife (who wants to stay respectable) that they'd been making a night of it at a curry house, and she, despite being self-evidently close enough to smell his non-curry breath, swallowed this.

In a recent interview to promote The Invisibles co-star Warren Clarke described the show as “mad enough to strike a nerve”. I suspect he meant strike a chord. Not only because nerve-striking is never pleasant, but because at the time he was saying how this show’s gentle humour made a nice change from the grisliness of other crime series. It wasn’t entirely inapt, though, because the character he plays, retired crook Syd Woolsey, is just the sort who’s always striking a nerve when a chord is what’s needed. It wasn’t just the fact that Maurice the master safecracker had gone rusty and Syd the alarm systems maestro hadn’t been keeping his techie knowledge up to date. Nor that they needed to double up on glucosamine to get their joints lubed before a job. More than anything, it was that the world had moved on. Theirs, we are told, was a golden age of crime when skill was more important than thuggery. They didn’t approve of how standards had slipped.

And yet to match Morris’s grouchiness, I’ll say that burglary is unpleasant, burglars are not to be celebrated, especially ones such as Morris and Sid, so totally lacking in comedic value. Surely we live in an age in which the myth of the gentleman criminal is tarnished: the subtext of The Invisibles is that crime was once a stylish business, with swaggering sophisticates robbing for the hell of it rather than the next crack fix, which is tosh. More dispiriting still is the way the programme sanitises crime: they never hurt anyone but their own, and you didn't have to lock your doors and yadda yadda. Even the modern thuggishness we're exposed to seems peculiarly harmless. Having been punched in the face by a younger thug and their heads slammed on a concrete floor, Syd and Maurice didn't have a mark on them. After The Sopranos, which showed you what violence really does, that portrayal of it as cost-free seemed mildly obscene. Anyway, Morris and Sid are dislikeable, inept, poorly characterised crooks. I hope they get collared or someone nicks their free bus passes. And looking on the bright side, Portaferry, standing in for Devon, is particularly pretty if, quite obviously, perishing. Presumably they were filming out of season.

The ageing Taggart (ITV1), which has been kept alive with vitamin B injections into the buttocks, bucked up with a shivery tale about lifts. (Stuart Hepburn, being the writer, also got to play the corpse.) Taggart has always thrived on ingrained, superstitious, primitive terrors, deep rooted as neeps, and most people believe lifts are out to get us. A Study in Murder started with a college principal being crushed in a lift shaft ("Help! Hel ...") and ended with DC Stuart Fraser alone in a lift with the murderer at the controls, dropping and stopping it in torturing jerks. Fraser successfully appealed to his better nature. In my view, a risky strategy. While we are on the subject, there is a theory that you should jump up and down in a plummeting lift in the hope that you will be hovering in mid air when it hits bottom. This is, in every sense, a hit-or-miss affair. Current thinking is that it is better to lie down, ideally on top of your fattest fellow passenger. Let me know how you get on.

It was hard to get away from crime last night. The Bill (ITV1) staged one of its big set-pieces, with two bombs in a street market and an encouraging turn out of ambulances and fire engines. "Mayday! Mayday!" yelled the sergeant, all too appositely. TV crews and photographers got the customary hard time from the cops ("You'd think they'd have more respect!"), which is a bit steep since the police were shown clustering round supersized TV screens at every possible opportunity, to find out what was happening. A looter ("Is it because I's black?") was arrested. So was a sex pest masquerading as a doctor. Not, unfortunately, the bomber. PC Emma Keane (Melanie Gutteridge) seized centre stage and demonstrated an excellent pair of lungs ("Everybody out NOW!") before she was blown up by the third bomb. I was quite moved to see her lying there shrouded by a thickly drifting snowstorm of shredded paper. If this fine woman had a flaw, it was, arguably, a mistake to run in v.e.r.y s.l.o.w m.o.t.i.o.n towards the bomb.

Meanwhile quite the most bizarre series on television at the moment, The Baron, continued to kick up a late night storm on ITV1. The tiny fishing village of Gardenstown on the east coast of Banffshire is not the worldliest of places, to say the least. Six churches serve the devout population of 700 and there’s only one pub. So why its good citizens agreed to co-operate with an ITV reality show in which three celebrities competed for a vacant 300-year-old local lairdship called the Baron of Troup, simply passes all understanding. Innocence, one assumes.

Thus far we’d seen the contestants – the late actor Mike Reid, pop singer Suzanne Shaw and inveterate bad boy Malcolm McLaren – arrive on the island and begin their election campaigns, utterly ignorant of the local population and its values. While Reid and Shaw went the traditional route of charm and flattery to solicit votes, it soon became apparent that McLaren was out to provoke as much outrage and uproar as possible. By the end of last night’s show, he had created such a stir at a hustings – insulting the village (“the worst place I’ve ever been to”) and suggesting that days be set aside for locals to take drugs, have sex and drink themselves sodden – he was all but run out of town by what he described as a “lynch mob” of incandescent locals. Pathetic, bottom-of-the-barrel television that this was, I’ll probably tune in for next week’s concluding part. If only to see whether the villagers took up McLaren’s other suggestion, to “burn a Wicker Man on the beach”. Somehow, I’d fancy him for the Edward Woodward role in that particular pageant.

The rude, juvenile comedy in The Inbetweeners- the first such programme specially produced for the digital channel E4- proved a little sharper. Sixth-former Will (Simon Bird) has landed at a suburban comprehensive. He's a posh, swotty boy, walking the corridors to a hum of sneers at his clothes, his shoes, his hair, his prissy briefcase, the simple fact that he is an outsider. At first his classmates hate him, but he blithely ignores their insults and insinuates himself into a group of foul friends. He is a normal teenage mix: insouciant, confident, vicious, scared and offended when all the boys fantasise about having sex with his mother. “She’s so sexy she could be a prostitute,” one observes. The actors look so much older than 17.

When one dad gives his son £20 for the pub, he asks him, “Promise me you won’t spend it on the fruit machines”. “I can’t do that,” the son replies. Will, frustrated at not being served, tells the barman that the other drinkers are underage (“Look at that bum fluff – 16, look at that bra – it’s padded”), making him even more unpopular. The second episode began with a disabled girl getting hit in the face with a Frisbee and progressed through (somehow inoffensive) homophobia and Will terrifying a seven-year-old that his parents were about to be vaporised in a dirty bomb in London. The floppy hair and spoddy specs are a disguise. He is, as he said, “hard”, and pretty funny.

Again, this is not breaking new ground. It's about the trials of being 16, of wondering what sex is like, of hoping none of your friends spot that you don't know what sex is like, and of trying to get served in pubs. I don't know about you, but I was like Proust with the madeleines here, and therefore prepared to indulge Damon Beesley and Iain Morris's uneven dialogue. It would be interesting to know who E4 thinks the target audience is. Presumably not 16-year-olds, to whom the business of being 16 is deadly serious. Perhaps it is middle-aged types, for whom the pain and embarrassment is now distant enough to be laughable. Or almost.