Last Night's Television - Mistresses, BBC1; In the Line Of Fire, ITV1

The passion's all spent

In its efforts to shake off the suggestion that it is a British version of Sex and the City, the BBC has been busy trailing its flagship drama series,
Mistresses, as a British version of Desperate Housewives. It’s the ponderous homespun wisdom of the voice-over that does it: “What a tangled web we weave, when we practise to deceive.” Last night’s opening episode suggested that the web wasn’t going to be so very tangled.

You’d imagine, for example, that if Siobhan (Orla Brady) was going to carry on mistressing, she’d at least be fairly circumspect. In the last series, we learnt that Siobhan was madly in love with her adorable husband, Hari, but had been driven into the arms of her boss, Dominic, because the pair were having trouble conceiving. Having become pregnant by Dominic, she’d decided to stay with Hari, have the baby, but carry on working with Dominic as well. Oddly, this arrangement wasn’t working out so terribly marvellously, and Siobhan and Hari’s sex life had fallen apart. Oh, dear. What to do about such a miserable situation?

Siobhan’s excellent idea was to sneak out of the marital home in the late evening and sit around in the bars of top hotels picking up nameless wealthy businessmen and having “uncomplicated” sex with them. “You’re very smart,” commented Hari, as Siobhan returned home, sated. Siobhan was for a second thrown. Did Hari mean that she was very smart because she’d had the foresight to go to the all-night chemist and pick up some Hedex as cover for her nocturnal assignations? No, no. What Hari meant was that he was very dumb, but not so dumb that he hadn’t noticed the slap, the jewels and the LBD.

Still, Siobhan was worried, so she called her great friend Katie (Sarah Parish), so that she could meet her for a crisis lunch. Katie was on her first day at a new job, having in the last series messed up as a GP by having an affair with a terminally ill patient, assisting him in his suicide, then taking up with his son. Katie suggested to Siobhan that it might be best not to carry on with her new hobby. Siobhan was not convinced. If there were a parallel with Sex and the City, then Katie would be Miranda. But there isn’t.

Why? Because in Mistresses there are no jokes, there is no attempt at self-conscious social commentary, and there are no giant corsages, though the clothes are nice. There’s just an assumption that beautiful, intelligent, professional women deserve sexual transcendence and could only behave like idiots if there was an cast-iron psychological reason. Unlike men, who, as we all know, hang with the lads and have affairs because they are bastards.

Except for the men who are heroes, of course, like the men of CO19 “F” relief. In the Line of Fire followed a group of these men, and even caught a glimpse of a woman occasionally, as they fought gun crime in London. The armed police describe themselves as “a necessary evil”, and one told a particularly weary tale as he explained that he used to be a soldier stationed in Northern Ireland. The level of hatred directed at the police among certain communities in London was, he said, similar in its intensity to that directed at the British Army there. It was “their sons, their fathers who were getting shot”, but they wouldn’t help.

No great secret was made of the communities that were under discussion. Two people are shot every day in London and 70 per cent of suspects, and 50 per cent of victims are black. On their various raids and arrests, the corrosive effects of real and theatrical victimhood were easily apparent. The police were impervious to the point of gentle amusement when one young man accused them of picking on him because he was black. Followed from a nightclub because he had been reported as brandishing a weapon, the suspect did not have a gun on him when he was apprehended. “I struggle hard in the black community,” he insisted. He did have blood on him, though, which matched that spilled in a stabbing earlier in the day. He eventually received a 21-month sentence.

The particular accusation of racism directed against the police was absurd, since the accusation came from a man who knew perfectly well that he really was a dangerous criminal, and not an innocent victim of racism. Yet, any racist watching would find plenty of material to confirm his prejudice, precisely because of this behaviour. In the Line of Fire was dangerously lacking in wider sociocultural context. When one officer said: “God knows what it will be like in five years”, you couldn’t help feeling that shows such as this one had absolutely no ameliorative role to play.