Half Man, Richard Gadd’s follow-up to the all-conquering Baby Reindeer, began with approximately ten seconds of some people at a wedding in rural Scotland having a good time. Two episodes later, they’re still about the only characters we’ve seen who aren’t having a gruesomely bad one.
After that brief blast of jollity, the show moved to a nearby barn where the groom Niall (Jamie Bell) and his old chum Ruben (Gadd) were renewing their acquaintance in what would prove a characteristic way: with Niall looking terrified as Ruben menacingly recalled their former intimacy, menacingly caressed him, menacingly taunted him and menacingly smashed him repeatedly in the face.
From there, we flashed back to the 15-year-old Niall at his all-boys’ school, where he was being smashed in the face by a bully called Gus, who also denounced him as ‘gay’ to general merriment. But then came the bad news. A new student would be joining the class tomorrow, the teacher announced; a boy called Ruben Pallister, who’d just been released from a young offenders’ unit where he’d spent two years for biting someone’s nose off.
Niall registered the name with obvious alarm, and after school appealed to his mum for sympathy – but to no avail. Ruben, you see, was the son of her live-in lesbian partner, which is why he’d be moving in with them and sharing Niall’s bedroom.
At first, this didn’t go terribly well, what with Ruben pausing his bullying only for a spot of anal rape. Gradually, however, a kind of Stockholm-syndrome friendship developed, as Niall helped Ruben with his exams and Ruben helped Niall by slicing up Gus’s face with a knife.
In episode two, Niall was starting at university, which he saw as a chance to break his Ruben addiction. But only for a day. A quick phone call later, and Ruben had joined him in the halls of residence. I won’t say any more – except that things didn’t go terribly well there either and that Ruben’s taste for horrifying violence remains undiminished.
So yes, it’s safe to say that Gadd’s themes are the not unfamiliar ones these days of male brokenness, rage and self-loathing. That he goes for all this so whole-heartedly does make for a powerfully intense watch, helped greatly by the uncompromising performances. Mitchell Robertson and Stuart Campbell as the young Niall and Ruben are an impressive match for their elders when it comes to radiating the required manifestations of toxic you-know-what. There’s also the unsettling fact that both actors playing Ruben give him an undeniable charisma.
This whole-heartedness, though, has its downsides. The sheer, almost gleeful relentlessness of the misery means that the programme already has a one-note feel, where even the most shocking scenes have become predictable. Gadd’s belief that he’s saying Something Significant is far too evident, leading to a strange mix of self-consciousness and self-importance. Above all, everything is so on the nose that he seems not so much to be exploring the received wisdoms (or possibly weird myths) about men today as simply reciting them.
The Cage is another follow-up series, this one by Tony Schumacher, who wrote the terrific Liverpool-based police show The Responder. It, too, is set in Liverpool, which duly ensures much talk of ‘scallies’ and ‘busies’, and the constant use of the adjective ‘sound’.
In a fairer media world, The Cage would receive a lot more attention than Half Man
As with Half Man, viewers in search of a barrel of laughs will be disappointed. On the other hand, there’s a lot more recognisable human life here – and if the light is hard to come by, at least there’s a fair amount of variety to the shade.
Sheridan Smith plays Leanne, a single mother working at a casino who badly needs money to bail her out of any number of family difficulties. Her colleague Matty (Michael Socha), his face a permanent rictus of anxiety, needs money too – although in his case to fund a gambling addiction and pay off an assortment of bad guys. Both had been individually dipping into the casino safe, but by the end of episode one, faced with an ever-growing list of misfortunes, they’d formed an alliance.
At this stage, unbeknownst to them, a wider and nicely twisty plot is also under way, featuring drug dealers and money-laundering. But Schumacher is equally good on the smaller domestic details such as Matty’s touching relationship with his exasperated teenage daughter and Leanne’s with her senile grandmother.
The result is an unflashy but highly accomplished piece of work, which in a fairer media world would receive a lot more attention than Half Man. As it is (and as this column sadly demonstrates), it’ll surely be overshadowed by a show that so shoutily demands to be the latest big TV talking point.
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