PEACE OFF (BLOODLANDS, SERIES ONE)

  

When you come from a society like Northern Ireland's, you bring an awful lot of baggage to a drama that touches upon your country's awkward history.

Audiences from Northern Ireland tend to be highly sensitive about how their community is portrayed onscreen and they also don't take kindly to any tinkering with real events.

They are also highly attuned to any dialogue or plot development that doesn't ring true and if they don't like it, they will hit the bullshit button in a heartbeat.

As someone who was raised in Strangford in Co Down, writer Chris Brandon will no doubt be aware of the perils of a miniseries that is built around Northern Ireland's difficulty in coming to terms with its past.

Yet here he is in 'Bloodlands,' a Jed Mercurio, Mark Redhead and Jimmy Mulville produced thriller, running amok through the entrails of a post conflict society and doing so with all the grace and sensitivity of an elephant in a greenhouse.

James Nesbitt provides the star power for the BBC1 primetime show as DCI Tom Brannick, a single father whose wife worked for military intelligence and went missing at the end of the Troubles.

His daughter, Lola Petticrew's Izzy is studying medicine at Belfast's Queen's University where she comes into contact with Lisa Dwan's doctor and lecturer Tori Matthews.

Izzy, who is the apple of Tom's eye, believes Tori might be a good romantic fit for her dad.

Tom, however, is otherwise occupied - thanks to the abduction of Peter Balance's former IRA member turned successful businessman Patrick Keenan whose 4x4 is pulled out of Strangford harbour.

Fearing Keenan's kidnapping might cause a political srorm because of his republican background, Brannick and Charlene McKenna's DS Niamh McGovern set out to locate him and explore the reasons for his abduction.

The use of a loyalist paramilitary code word gives cause for concern but Brannick also senses something doesn't quite add up when he finds a photo at the scene.

The photo brings back memories of Goliath, an infamous killer who was suspected of having been involved in the disappearance of four people, including Brannick's wife, prior to the Good Friday Agreement.

Goliath is also rumoured to have been in the police.

With an obvious flair for the dramatic, Brannick chooses the Belfast shipyard as the location to reveal to Lorcan Cranitch's shifty boss DCS Jackie Twomey his suspicions about Goliath's possible connection to the Keenan kidnapping.

After initially encountering Keenan's tough as nails wife, Kathy Keira Clarke's Claire, Brannick's quest for the truth brings him to the door of Ian McElhinney's Adam Corry whose loyalist brother was among the four Goliath victims who disappeared.

This eventually leads Brannick and McGovern to an island off Strangford Lough where they begin the search for a shallow grave that may unearth some of the bodies.

But the grave is a Pandora's Box, raising awkward questions about all those who served in the police around the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, including Brannick and Twomey.

Brandon and director Pete Travis's thriller unfolds over four episodes which is unusually short for a series of this kind.

Normally a BBC Sunday night primetime drama like this would stretch over six episodes.

That makes you suspect that 27 years on from the IRA and loyalist ceasefires and 23 years on from the Good Friday Agreement, there is still a certain nervousness among those who commissioned 'Bloodlands' about the appetite of the British public for a primetime show about Northern Ireland's murky past.

The Troubles were a switch off to English, Scottish and Welsh audiences when they appeared on the news, in TV dramas or movies during the conflict.

That also held true after the ceasefires until Channel 4's sitcom 'Derry Girls' came along with its wry take on the madness of growing up in a society defined by conflict.

With 'Bloodlands' confined to just four episodes, Brandon is a man in a hurry and he overloads his show with heavily orchestrated 'Line of Duty' style twists that quickly become far fetched and shred the show's credibility.

Instead of being allowed to properly develop his characters, 'Bloodlands' writer is often in a desperate sprint to try and get his audience's jaws dropping.

As a result, the show just doesn't do the basics right and is saddled with ear scraping dialogue that eventually becomes risible.

In a bid to engage audiences outside of Northern Ireland, characters keep talking about "the peace," a phrase that no-one living here uses and which, I presume, is a reference to the peace process and not someone's sandwiches.

Patrick Keenan is found handcuffed to a hotel radiator in his manky vest and underpants beside a bag of Monster Munch - a lockdown image if there ever was one.

There's a whole to do about the door of the hotel room where Keenan is handcuffed being booby trapped, even though there's a bloody great window that the police could peer into to check what is actually going on inside.

Politicians are curiously absent from the show, yet in real life they would be all over the events that unfold - demanding explanations.

So too would the media but journalists are absent too, appearing to be asleep as the mayhem unfolds.

'Bloodlands' is also lumbered with all the worn out clichés of the police procedural on British and Irish TV.

Brannick is the tired but knowledgeable senior detective with an enthusiastic sidekick that we have seen countless times before.

You know the type - he's a haunted loner with a tragic past but has a good investigative instinct.

His boss Jackie Twomey is a company man - good at the politics of the police but pompous, obstructive and not really all that impressive as a detective.

McGovern is so enthusiastic about her job, she spends a lot of her time saying out loud their investigative theories, whether it is in the office or a crime scene.

Sometimes the twists in 'Bloodlands' make no sense, even to Northern Irish viewers - so God only knows what audiences elsewhere will make of them.

The show's climactic showdown is unconvincing but by that stage, many people will have given up - feeling cheated, confused and exasperated by the show's poor execution.

As for the cast, they simply cannot win with a script as feeble as this.

Even the most seasoned hands struggle.

Nesbitt, who we all know is capable of great work, wanders around constantly with a pained, almost constipated expression on his face.

He cannot imbue Brannick with the depth of the desperate father he played in 'The Missing' or the helplessness of Ivan Cooper in 'Bloody Sunday' because the raw material is simply not strong enough.

Cranitch, who was so good as the troubled detective Jimmy Beck in Jimmy McGovern's 'Cracker,' is hopelessly one dimensional as Twomey.

McKenna, another actor of considerable ability, sleepwalks her way through her stock sidekick role.

The same can be said for Petticrew, Dwan, McElhinney, Keira-Clarke, Ballance and Chris Walley, who many will know from the BBC3 and RTE's sitcom 'The Young Offenders'.

It's hard to fathom why Walley, an Olivier Award winning stage actor, is there at all.

He's totally wasted as a curly haired, naive detective called Birdy.

On the plus side, Michael Smiley's sporadic appearances as a seasoned forensic scientist called Dinger offer an all too rare bright spot.

The same can be said for Susan Lynch who turns up in the final episode as another detective Heather Pentland for the show's inevitable interrogation sequence.

But then there's the treatment of Flora Montgomery - another actress of great ability who turns up all too briefly in the first episode as a senior police officer, is given practically nothing to do or say and then disappears for the rest of the run.

Travis and his Icelandic cinematographer Arni Filuppson deserve credit for the vibrant way in which the series is shot.

The rugged Co Down landscape is beautifully captured in a way that could easily fit into a Scandi noir series and the hand held camera sequences give the show some grit.

It's just a pity Brandon's script is not up to scratch and nowhere near the level of Scandi thrillers like 'The Killing' or 'The Bridge' which the creators clearly admire.

But those shows were allowed to unfold and breathe over eight to ten episodes, sometimes moving at a leisurely pace as they invested in their characters.

What makes 'Bloodlands' so appalling is the fact that Northern Ireland has built up quite a strong reputation in recent years for its crime fiction.

Armagh's Stuart Neville, Co Down writer Claire McGowan and Belfast author Adrian McKinty have all taken elements of the conflict and produced novels that havee earned critical acclaim and many awards.

Given their success, it seems remarkable that their work has been bypassed in favour of this undercooked nonsense.

The revelation at the end of 'Bloodlands' run that the BBC has commissioned a second series only adds to this sense of injustice.

Yet Brandon is getting a second chance and he is going to really have to up his game if the show is ever going to win over Northern Irish audiences.

If 'Bloodlands' were a conventional thriller set in Liverpool or Glasgow, stripping out the Troubles storyline and substituting it with gangsters, 'it would still be one of the most convoluted dramas to hit our screens.

It's a mess of a show best summed up by one tweet which noted that even with four episodes, it seemed to go on longer than the Troubles.

The bullshit button has well and truly been worn out during 'Bloodlands' run.

It's time to order a new button.

('Bloodlands' was broadcast on BBC1 from February 21-March 14 2021)

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