“It’s meant to be funny but there are no jokes,” growled the producer. “I said you could have three scenes in the street, so you’ve written four on a boat.
“More to the point, everyone’s either giving 20-minute speeches or one-word answers. What happened?” The writer sniffed and gathered up his papers.
“You just haven’t grasped what I’m trying to do here.”
The same, perhaps, could be said of myself and Paula (BBC2), which I watched through to the final credits without grasping it, although it would be wrong to say I didn’t enjoy bits of it on the way.
Setting out in its early stages, this three-parter had the makings of an OK thriller, what with extramarital affairs, blackmail and murder.
It was bleak but it was also full of tantalising threads. There was Paula’s brother, hailed as a golden boy by their parents but actually living a junkie’s life in a garage.
There was the murdering, blackmailing, charming rat-catcher James (Tom Hughes) with his two wives and his continual flashbacks to some childhood mystery.
Then there was Paula (Denise Gough), seemingly intelligent but unable to stop sabotaging her life.
Unfortunately, by the end of episode three, none of these threads had knitted together.
Despite looking permanently like the sole survivor of a shipwreck, Paula was apparently irresistible to every man she encountered, including the apparently sane detective investigating her.
She “explained” this aspect of herself at one point with a weird anecdote that involved being half-strangled by her brother as a child and going off in a dream state to live with another family in a distant era, then waking up on the kitchen table.
When James came to account for his flashbacks, things were equally incoherent.
However this was more because he mumbled than because it was sheer claptrap, although it might have been. I simply couldn’t understand much of his final speech, despite watching it three times.
In the interim, for no reasons I could fathom, Paula became a heroin addict, adopted a dog and turned into a psychopath, eventually possessing the wherewithal to entomb James in a box in her cellar.
We last saw her heading into a Pizza Express, having just told her detective pal she was carrying a baby.
“Whose?” he asked. “Mine,” she replied. Had she sprouted wings and flown to Kathmandu, I’d have been no less surprised and no more unimpressed.
If I failed to grasp something, I suspect it’s because it wasn’t there.
My favourite film moment comes from Peter Weir’s 1985 thriller Witness and it involves nothing more than a community of Amish people building a barn.
DIY SOS: The Big Build (BBC1) delivered the same rush of warmth as people on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent came together to construct a house in just nine days.
Such was the enthusiasm that even a local passer-by joined in. It was due, in no small part, to the esteem the clients were held in.
Garry and Kyle had adopted four kids, three of them with complex needs, caring for them while also running two primary schools.
Deserving summed them up no better than DIY summed up what was done for them.
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