Imagine: Stephen Frears — Director for Hire
BBC1
★★★★☆
The Gold: The Inside Story
BBC1
★★★★☆
“Are you difficult to work with?” Alan Yentob asked the director Stephen Frears in Imagine. “I’d have thought I’m an absolute pain in the arse,” the Oscar nominee replied, later adding: “Directors are ridiculous.” But powerful too. Imagine having so much sway that Anjelica Huston’s agent advised: “If Stephen Frears tells you to shit in the corner then that’s what you must do.” Thanks for the mental image.
This was entertaining TV largely because Frears seems curmudgeonly but honest (he once said of his film Mary Reilly, “I won’t hear a word in its favour”). Yentob seemed slightly nervous of him as they rode on the ferris wheel in Vienna while revisiting locations from The Third Man, Frears grumbling at the cameraman (“What’s he doing? Is he coming?”).
Frears is there making a new drama for HBO starring Hugh Grant and Kate Winslet, so it meant Grant could add his two penn’orth, which is always good value if you ask me. Grant praised Frears’s talent and work ethic. “But?” Yentob asked. “Oh, he’s a grumpy f***er,” he said, knowing such soundbites are what maketh a good documentary.
There wasn’t much about Frears’s personal life or childhood, save for an anecdote about how he got caned at school, liked going to the cinema in Leicester and a brief meeting with his son Sam. Mostly it was people such as Helen Mirren and Judi Dench saying what a great director he is, and Steve Coogan explaining what a hard taskmaster he’d been while making Philomena, but his decisions had been right.
I hadn’t known that for My Beautiful Laundrette there were three other men on the shortlist to play Johnny alongside Daniel Day-Lewis — Gary Oldman, Tim Roth and Kenneth Branagh. It was poignant to see Hanif Kureishi being interviewed in good health, before the appalling fall in Rome that has left him partially paralysed.
It’s the diversity of Frears’s skill that is most impressive. The man who has a terror of repeating himself has made an art of being the anti one-trick pony.
For anyone who came away from the true-crime drama The Gold with the slightly romantic impression that the team behind the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery were Robin Hoodesque class-warrior geezers simply fighting the rich establishment, here was a corrective. The Gold: The Inside Story revealed the dirtier, nastier truth, assisted by police footage from the time and the testimonies of detectives who investigated the case.
The robbers had pistol-whipped one of the guards, and cut the clothes off another before dousing them in petrol. We saw the real-life DCS Brian Boyce, played brilliantly by Hugh Bonneville in the drama, a gentle-voiced, smiley man who was still clearly affected by the killing of the surveillance officer John Fordham. Kenneth Noye stabbed him ten times with a kitchen knife (he was acquitted of murder, arguing self-defence), telling police at the scene: “I don’t give a f*** who he is. I hope he dies.”
● The Gold review — a rollicking good drama, ingeniously written
● TV shows like The Gold have to stop glorifying murderers
This was the same delightful chap, played so charismatically by Jack Lowden, who told the jury that convicted him of conspiracy to handle stolen goods, “I hope you all die of cancer.” After the trial, footage showed one of his friends attacking a photographer outside court. There’s not one piece of this story that wasn’t worthy of a TV drama, though. And the final statement that half the gold is still missing tees up series two nicely.
