“Everything’s so bloody uphill, isn’t it?” whined kitchen salesman Ted (Douglas Hodge) upon realising that he’d left the charcoal for the evening's barbeque at the supermarket. But the charcoal wasn’t really the problem. There was the girl from the estate over the road - “all big earrings and attitude” - dropping litter outside his house and then shouting abuse when he suggested she pick it up. There was the unspeakable package shoved through the letterbox shortly after he complained to the girl’s school and got her suspended. And there was the lucrative deal with developers that Ted may or may not have ballsed up following an awkward phone conversation with the client, on very the day that his boss and his wife were coming around for a barbeque. And now, the damned charcoal.
Inexplicably buried in the late-night slot, One Night is a four-part drama by Paul Smith, a writer better known for comedy than serious drama, that looks at the intersecting lives of four people separately affected by a single terrible event. Exactly what this event entailed wasn’t clear, but we knew it was linked to the pasty 13-year-old (Billy Matthews [pictured below], a Thomas Turgoose in the making) who pitched up at a police station before the opening credits and handed in a gun.
Picking up on themes explored in films such as Falling Down and Do The Right Thing, last night's opening episode looked at what happens when humiliation is piled upon humiliation, and when a man decides that today he is not going to stand for it. Like Joel Schumacher’s nameless protagonist in Falling Down, the middle-aged Ted could sense younger, keener salesmen snapping at his heels and threatening his livelihood. He had also noted the contempt with which he was viewed by others, from the kids who dropped rubbish in the park to the supermarket worker who couldn’t see past the angry, sweaty man going off on one about charcoal.
While Ted didn’t quite turn vigilante, Michael Douglas-style, he wasn’t above dispensing his own form of criminal justice, grabbing a local boy whom he presumed to have thrown a brick through his window and, after giving him a swift beating, locking him in his shed. It was at this point that our sympathy shifted, and when the action moved from bittersweet Mike Leigh territory to something altogether more menacing.
There were times when Smith rather overcooked the contrast between the affluent central couple and their down-at-heel neighbours, most notably when Ted was poised to sip his first cocktail of the day in his gorgeous south-facing garden just as the kids in the park over the road cranked up the grime. For those brief few seconds we were in Victor Meldrew world. Had Ted picked up a dachshund instead of a phone, we wouldn’t have blinked.
For the most part, however, the writing was more nuanced than that. It was to Smith’s credit, and Douglas Hodge’s grimly plausible performance, that until the kicking-the-kid-in-the-guts incident, we remain understanding of Ted’s plight while seeing how pathetic he appeared in the eyes of his tormentors.
So far, One Night is about a man overwhelmed by petty irritations and unable to see the consequences of his actions. While, early on, one assumed a public-spiritedness to Ted’s attitude towards litter, it later became clear that this was bound up with a sense of entitlement and superiority, a feeling that he shouldn’t have to get so close to his neighbours, let alone pick up after them. For that he paid a hefty price.
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