Ride or Die began with a typical day for a fiftysomething woman in a TV drama. Having assassinated a Russian oligarch in an Alpine mountain resort, Judith (Hannah Waddingham) skied away with Olympian speed, effortlessly evading capture by the many goons who pursued her, right until they crashed into trees. Back on solid ground, she went into a bar where she beat all the blokes in drinking games, before pulling a hunky young barman who was heartbroken the following morning when she made it clear that this was merely a one-night stand. Then, zooming home in a sporty Merc, she still found time to call her friend Debbie in London with the assurance that ‘I’ll be back for book club’.
But prior to the white wine and literary chat, Judith first had to contact the shadowy agency (is there any other kind?) she works for and receive some dismaying news. Sam, her apparently teenage line manager, passed on the director’s disapproval of her rule-breaking ways and tried to pension her off with a Patek Philippe watch. Judith, of course, was having none of it. Understandably terrified of her, Sam agreed to give her a one-last-chance job: killing Billy Donovan, head of a London crime syndicate. Much to Judith’s disgust, though, the agency’s chosen weapon was poison. (‘Poison’s a coward’s game,’ she protested. ‘Where’s the showmanship?’)
Meanwhile, Debbie (Octavia Spencer) had problems of her own. En route to a gala dinner, her high-flying MP husband, whose career she’d masterminded and whose speeches she’d written, announced he wanted a divorce. Debbie responded by hitting the aperitifs hard, unaware that by her seventh, she’d become a widow – or that, having shot her husband in an upstairs room, the killers were now coming after her.
Luckily, the gala was being hosted by Billy Donovan, which meant that Judith was on hand (looking a knockout in her evening dress, obviously) to get her friend out safely after comprehensively beating up all the armed men rash enough to try and stop her. But now came the tricky part: having to explain to Debbie that she wasn’t a forensic accountant after all, but another of those hot female assassins you get these days (on television).
During the book club scene, Debbie described crime thrillers as ‘painting by numbers’. At the time, this seemed something of a hostage to fortune, given Ride or Die’s own warm embrace of the current conventions of shows about menopausal women: basically, that there’s nothing they can’t do (in this case, even read without glasses) and that men are rubbish.
Here, however – at least judging from the first two episodes – the painting is done with such shamelessly garish brio that only the most committed of spoilsports would allow themselves to be distracted by such things as implausibility and ludicrousness; especially since the programme itself appears to be (mostly) in on the joke. There are also some fine gags, the stirring sight of Waddingham having the time of her life and, in a rare lurch into believability, the somehow convincing sense of real friendship between Judith and Debbie. Let’s just hope – I fear unavailingly – that Ride or Die doesn’t lead to yet more wildly inaccurate articles by middle-aged women about how underrepresented middle-aged women are on TV.
The Undeclared War follows another current television trend by being a direct sequel to a series broadcast four years ago. (No wonder it spent the opening scenes assiduously labelling every character who appeared and getting them to exchange information they already knew.) Otherwise – and despite all the high-tech computer stuff – this is essentially an old-school spy thriller where the baddies are the Russians and Chinese, and there’s a mole at work among the Brits.
The current convention of shows about menopausal women is that basically there’s nothing they can’t do
Simon Pegg plays Danny Patrick, head of operations at GCHQ and possibly the world’s most worried man, who always seems on the brink of saying that he’s picked the wrong week to quit smoking. Then again, he’s got plenty to be worried about. Not just those dastardly foreigners and that even more dastardly mole (‘One of our own!’ he cried wonderingly, in one of those cigarette-tempting moments); but also a government that clearly prizes a trade deal with China over the defence of the realm.
From my somewhat vague memories of the original series – written by the sainted Peter Kosminsky – this one, by Colin Teevan, is not just a sequel but a major reset: pacier, twistier and wisely opting to drop the central gimmick of giving computer science external metaphorical form (whereby, for example, the breaking of a firewall was represented by the breaking of a wall). Granted, Kosminsky’s version wasn’t without its qualities, but it wore its research so heavily that watching it sometimes felt a bit like doing homework. Teevan’s, while still well-informed, proves more unbuttoned, more gripping – and, in short, more fun.
Comments