Well, I don’t. Nor will anyone who prefers their drama to have even the slenderest relationship with that indefinable, elusive thing some of us brontosaurian traditionalists refer to, no doubt pompously, as truth. Mister Eleven has the emotional truth of a packet of cake mix. It is a soul-destroying example of what happens when no one bothers to work out if something which looks good on paper will look good where the rest of us look at it.
Actually the one thing it does do is look good. Michelle Ryan fills a low-cut wedding dress more than fetchingly. There’s eye candy thrown like scatter cushions all over the narrative. They’ll have done the sums, mucked about with the matrices and Venn diagrams and duly calculated that, when you’ve folded in all the vector variables and twiddled with the trigonometry, love is basically a numbers game.
The conceit is that a geek’s obsession with numbers is a manifestation of her desire for control. Not being very good at maths, I lost count of the number of times I glowered at Ryan and thought, “You are nothing more than a theoretical proposition with quite nice hair.”
But hey, don’t ask me. Ask the bloke she married. She (I think she’s called Zaz, btw, though it doesn't feel quite right to give an equation a name) tells him in the very bridal suite that she’s just realised she’s got her sums wrong. “You are unbelievable.” He actually says that. “You’d have called the whole thing off!” Yes, me too, if rather further back in the whole process.
Of course Zaz’s got her answer prepped. “You are being an arsey git.” I do believe someone was actually paid to write that line. And this one from the husband: “If you’re so preoccupied with this number and averages crap then there’s just no point, is there?” I almost blush to type this stuff.
This is one of those dramas that suffers from that type of rare autism Dustin Hoffman had in Rain Man: super with numbers, not so great with people. Toss in a manipulative school-of-Working-Title soundtrack, some quite clever postmodern cutaways and you’ve got a drama that thinks it’s Cold Feet. It isn't. Ryan has been given not a character but a calculation. You don’t believe that’s her stepfather (even though he’s played by the glorious Denis Lawson), you don’t believe teaching is her job, you don’t believe that’s her old bedroom she goes back to after the split. You don’t even believe that's her eye liner. If you want fun with numbers, do a Sudoku. All Mister Eleven proves is that there are lies, damned lies and some incorrigible cynics in television drama.
Mister Eleven concludes on Friday 18 December at 9pm. Watch part one on ITV Player.
