A Poet in New York; Imagine …; Wallander – TV review

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/may/19/poet-in-new-york-tv-review

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If you like your TV men drunk, white, middle-aged, sweaty, dishevelled, testy and self-loathing (and I know I do), this was the weekend for you. On BBC4, Detective Kurt Wallander was suspended after leaving his police revolver in a bar. Was that the wrong thing to do, his hound dog eyes asked his boss. On BBC2, Dylan Thomas stood on the threshold and told the latest woman in his bed: "I've had 18 straight whiskies. I think that's the record," before collapsing and dying a few days later in hospital aged 39.

Which of them do you think unearthed the spy ring that covered up the suspicious death 30 years ago of a Swedish diver off the coast of Stockholm? Dylan Thomas. All drunk Welsh poets are undercover Swedish detectives. That's not Swedish they're talking, it's what Welsh sounds like after 18 whiskies.

But it's not all good news. For years no one throws up on TV and then I decide I'll have a snack. Just as I'm raising the mini Weetabix to my lips, the man on screen vomits his. It's Newton's fourth law of thermodynamics. What isn't Newton's fourth law is that they throw up so noisily – that's years of dramatic training.

And so it was on A Poet in New York (Sunday, BBC2) where Tom Hollander as Thomas put me off my cereal before going on stage to perform Fern Hill. As he recited, his voice fought sonorously with the ghost of Richard Burton's, though I could have done without the soupy incidental music linking poem to flashback of little Dylan scampering across the green, green grass of home. When he spoke, though, Hollander was pure Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones. To be fair, Dinklage is playing a character in a fantasy realm, so he can speak any way he wants.

Maybe you were moved to tears by the throbbing vibrato as Hollander did Thomas doing the narrator for Under Milk Wood or, later, his vibrato plus grandstanding when he recited Do not go gentle into that good night. I felt like Oscar Wilde reading Little Nell's death. Giggly with impiety.

I knew this drama was going to be tough going after someone asked Thomas how he was. A simple "fine" would have sufficed, but oh no. "Well, I have never been awfully well, John, you know that, but at the moment, apart from a spot of gout and the gastritis of course and the asthma, and piles, warts, boils and carbuncles, a bit of cirrhosis, a touch of TB, brittle bones and an overwhelming sense of panic and terror, I'm absolutely tip-top." John, having gone for smokes during the speech, returned with his best sympathetic rictus. John, incidentally, was poet and critic John Malcolm Brinnin and was played by Ewen Bremner, having much less fun than he did as a wired junkie in Trainspotting.

As Thomas drank himself to death in New York, scriptwriter Andrew Davies cut back to Wales. This was the deathbed scene in which Thomas's dad said farewell to his prodigal son. "Married the wrong girl, between you and me. Youthful concupiscence is not the best indicator of lasting happiness," said dad, raging insufficiently at the dying of the light. "Life's mostly boredom and then a bit of pain and fear to finish up. You'd probably put it more eloquently." If this drama was anything to go by, certainly more verbosely.

Hollander and Essie Davis as Caitlin performed well youthful concupiscence gone sour. When Dylan goaded Caitlin over her under-roasted wild duck, she decked him. "I'm going to spill his great poet's brains on the floor and then I'm going to go down the pub and fuck every man in it," she said as she pinned him to the ground. If I'd picked up this couple on life's highway, I'd have ditched them at the next services and sped off, and nuts to the great poetry. But not John: he again was on hand with his best rictus.

"Why does it have to take so bloody long?" asked Thomas at one point. "What?" "Dying." I felt similarly about Julien Temple's 100-minute love letter to Rio (Imagine …, Sunday, BBC1). There's only so much upbeat pre-World Cup twerking, gunplay, civic braggadocio and compulsory carnival a tight-ass gringo can take.

Happily, the tight-ass gringo's favourite Wallander (Krister Henriksson, Branagh a close second; Saturday, BBC4) is back for six new miserable episodes set in those anti-Copacabanas, the Baltic beaches around Ystad and Stockholm. This wasn't the most compelling of episodes, but given that Kurt seems to be losing his memory and that mental acuity is existentially essential for the detective who can't do anything right except solve crimes, the drama's going to get more satisfyingly dismal before we're done with him.