Castle Pillock: 'Hard Sun' on the telly

Hard Sun, Dir. Brian Kirk, BBC One, Saturdays 9:35pm

BECAUSE IT’S A REVIEW, THERE’S LIKELY TO BE SPOILERS IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED ALL THE EPISODES SO FAR.  IS THAT CLEAR?

I’m all for giving things a proper go.  If there are six episodes to something, I’ll give it to at least the third before deciding life’s too short.  However, there are times when I find it hard to stick to this philosophy. 

On paper, Hard Sun is right up my street.  It’s a bit detective, a bit conspiracy theory, a bit science fiction.  It’s got a kick ass female lead.  It’s meant to be labyrinthine, and I do like a bit of labyrinth.  I like ‘out there’ and bonkers.  I don’t get all frilly about violence, if it’s necessary.

I also like the bloody thing to be interesting.

Hard Sun’s protagonists, Detectives Renko and Hicks, played by Agyness Deyn and Jim Sturgess, are straight from Build-Yourself-A-Telly-Cop.  Renko becomes Hicks’s new partner in the aftermath of Certain Events, and they don’t initially get on.  They’re both Complex, and Damaged.  They both have an Agenda. Yes, it is all hammered home with capital letters. There’s a smidge of sexual tension.  Then they accidentally come across a mysterious computer file called Hard Sun, showing that the world is due to end in five years.

People seem very eager to believe that the end of the world is nigh.  In the first episode, one chap shoved a memory stick into a mobile device and showed the file to another chap, in a car park.  Now, if someone showed me pictures of the sun kicking off, and estimates of the numbers of body bags needed, my immediate reaction would be, ‘Eh? What the fuck is this?’  If someone then told me it was the end of the world I’d probably say, ‘What, some sort of drill?  Some sort of war games scenario?’  It would take me at least quarter of an hour and a lot of convincing before I’d even start to accept that this was us in five years’ time.

After about ten seconds, the chap in the car park screamed, ‘Why would you show me this?  I have children!!’  The childfree, apparently, have no investment in the survival of the planet.

At this point I turned to the cat and said, ‘MI5, or some such, will be after them now.  They’ll threaten Mr Cop’s pregnant wife and Ms Cop’s severely mentally ill son, and I’ll bet you a Whiskas Healthy Coat Treat they play David Bowie’s ‘Five Years’ before the end of this episode.’

And lo, it came to pass.

MI5, or some such, beat them up, then they beat each other up, then she warned MI5, or some such, that copies of the file had been left all over the place and would be leaked if she was killed, and by now I was sitting on my hands to keep them away from the fast-forward button.  Oh, I forgot to mention he’s shagging his dead-colleague-who-he-might-have-murdered’s missus.  Of course he is.

We’ve now had three episodes and the message seems to be: if people find out the world is going to end in five years, they will start killing each other in very unpleasant ways.  Nutters will crawl out of every hole in the woodwork.  So we’re all with MI5 then?  Keep the damn thing a secret. 

Despite being the state’s Most Wanted, our two heroes go to work as normal, or as normal as it can be when every case they now get is somehow connected to Hard Sun.  You can tell that the word is out, because gritty graffiti keeps appearing on walls and phone boxes.  More likely on Twitter or Instagram these days, I would have thought.  After her encounter with MI5, or some such, Hicks’s wife chucks him out.  He stands at the front door, lip trembling, begging her to take him back, then goes off and shags the dead colleague’s wife while his own is thinking about it.  There is a poignant scan of his unborn child, unlikely to get beyond reception class.  There’s the old chestnut about the priest who could put a stop to grisly murders were it not for the confidentiality of the murderer’s confession.  There’s even the bit where you think the murderer’s coming up on the girl in the lonely dark street, oh phew he’s gone past her, ohmygod he’s turning round…

There’s also the music.  Tension, weirdness and despair are conveyed by something that sounds like a rusty gear box being cranked into reverse.  Which might work if it wasn’t employed with the frequency of someone trying to get out of a particularly tight parking spot.

What doesn’t help is that I can’t help thinking how different it might be with my fantasy casting of Gwendoline Christie and Idris Elba.  Neil Cross, the writer, also wrote Luther, and occasionally he seems to forget the dialogue isn’t intended for Idris.  He has also said he wants – you’ve guessed it – five series out of this premise.  Perhaps he’s been encouraged by the reaction of the Daily Star, which actually asked: ‘Is the Sun about to EXPLODE like in BBC crime drama?’ (Yes, in about five billion years.) Look out for the Daily Express advising ‘Eating traditional English muffins can STOP the sun exploding, new study shows.’   And the Daily Mail proclaiming ‘Remoaners plot to STOP BREXIT by EXPLODING THE SUN’. 

Hard Sun is rubbish.  The question is, could it yet turn out to be enjoyable rubbish, or just one hard slog?