MAXINE PIQUED (RULES OF THE GAME)

 

There's a great drama to be made about misogyny and sexual harassment in the British workplace.

Unfortunately, BBC1's thriller 'Rules of the Game' isn't that drama.

Despite boasting Maxine Peake, one of the best actresses working in British TV and film today, writer Ruth Fowler and director Jennifer Sheridan have come up with a spectacularly inept miniseries about an important issue.

Peake plays Sam Thompson, a tough nosed single mum and COO of a sportswear company.

Sam is the kind of person who would eat her own kids if she thought it would advance her career.

At the start of Fowler's drama, however, she has been hauled in by the police for questioning after discovering a body in the foyer of her corporate headquarters.

Her employers, the appropriately named Fly Dynamic, are the Jenkins family and it's run by two fly boys, Ben Batt's Owen and Kieran Bew's Gareth.

All sharp suits and open neck shirts, they preside over the company in its shiny, modern glass and steel office structure somewhere in Cheshire.

Gareth boasts as CFO he knows damn all about the business and seems more interested in his pints.

Owen is a bit more focused, planning international sportswear domination by floating Fly Dynamic on the stock exchange.

There's a lot of boardroom chat about how their reputation cannot be bismirched as they pursue that goal.

However there's plenty of reasons for it to be bismirched as Rakhee Thakrar's new Director of HR, Maya Benshaw quickly finds out.

Hired by Sam, who from the off makes her feel about as welcome as Nancy Pelosi at a Trump rally, Maya finds herself on her first day having to deal with Callie Cooke's troubled employee Tess Jones.

Tess, who joined Fly Dynamic as a 16 year old, has been caught on camera in flagrante delicto with a colleague in the office.

She is cocky enough, though, to tell Maya she can't be disciplined because she has too much dirt on her bosses.

However it quickly turns out she is  nursing the emotional scars of the death of Amy Leeson's Amy Dixon ten years earlier on a boozy, drug fuelled work night out.

Digging deeper into this, Maya is shocked to discover Fly Dynamic has a culture of male bosses taking advantage of their female employees and using booze and drugs to get their way.

Oddly, she discovers her predecessor Rory Keenan's Hugh Evans is still on the payroll despite having to leave his HR role under a cloud.

As Maya starts to get into uncomfortable territory for the Jenkins and their battleaxe mum Alison Steadman's Anita, Owen leans on Sam to do something about it before she wrecks the flotation of the company.

This means Sam has to rather improbably suddenly be very nice to Maya and pretend to be her friend, so she can find out if she has any skeletons they can exploit.

Maya, we discover, does and is going through a bit of a tough time.

A previous relationship has ended badly. 

She clashed with her previous employers after uncovering wrongdoing. 

Maya's confidence is so fragile she listens to daily affirmations in her car and she also has a wandering sphinx cat called Audrey.

Not only that but she has to fend off offers from a neighbour to attend dreadful Stepford Wives style wine and cheese parties involving Owen's obnoxious wife Zoe Tapper's Vanessa and Gareth's insecure wife, Katherine Pearce's Carys who is worried about her husband's taste in pornography.

As Sam is questioned by Susan Wokoma's DI Eve Preston, Fowler and Sheridan try to tease the viewer by not revealing right away which of the characters' bodies has been discovered in Fly Dynamic's headquarters.

However the harsh reality for 'Rules of the Game' is that it's really hard for viewers to care.

That's because 'Rules of the Game' is so poorly written, with on the nose dialogue and characters that are so loathsome, shallow and irritating you'd feign a botulism outbreak just to avoid them in the street.

Peake tries her best to turn Sam into a character with a bit more depth but ultimately fails, thanks to a leaden footed script that requires her to walk around in a constant state of rage.

Batt and Bew fare even worse with roles that are essentially 'Fast Show' caricatures of hard partying, macho North of England businessman.

Thakrar's Maya is a put upon Disney Princess in an office full of big, bad wolves.

Steadman sleepwalks through her cod Maggie Thatcher routine.

Tapper is saddled with a dreadfully unconvincing, Chardonnay swilling 'Footballers Wives' role.

Pearce tries her best as Gareth's shabbily treated, cuckolded wife but where's the joy in that?

Wokoma and her pony tailed assistant, Dario Coates' DS Peter Alan are the least convincing cops since DI Goldberg, DS Broome and DS Cartwright in Netflix's 'Stay Close' and that was just two weeks ago.

We should be feeling more sympathy for Cooke's Tess but we don't.

 

Dominic Vulliamy, who plays Maya's camp, lazy colleague Duncan Stephenson, seems to be under the misapprehension that he is playing Jack Donaghy's assistant Jonathan out of '30 Rock'.

Most of this is down to the writing, with Foster giving the impression that she thinks she is concocting smart, quotable lines but they sound like they could have come from the mouth of 'The Fast Show's' Swiss Toni.

To give you a flavour of how terrible the writing is, have a look at these gems.

Take DI Wokoma's observation: "Women like pills. Men like blowing their brains out. Hanging's the great leveller."

Or Gareth's response to a question from Maya about why he isn't in a business meeting wowing them: "With what? My B-Tec in Science? My average sized penis? Like most middle class wankers who inherited a business they know nothing about, my talents lie in knowing how to delegate."

On being told by Carys she has discovered her husband has been watching violent pornography, Vanessa trots out: "Oh, well done you. Well, it's nothing to be ashamed of  I've always really enjoyed watching gang bangs - fascinating stuff, really quite athletic."

And so it goes on and on.

There are many examples of how to craft gripping dramas about sexual harassment in the workplace.

AMC's 'Mad Men' springs to mind and on the big screen Kitty Green's 'The Assistant' and Jay Roach's 'Bombshell'.

However Foster and Sheridan seem to have learned nothing from these.

Instead what we get is an unconvincing four part miniseries that blusters its way through a subject that demands much more care and much more subtlety.

It's hard to fathom why BBC executives thought 'Rules of the Game' might be a must see drama about misogyny and sexual harassment in the workplace because it feels about as authentic as 'Footballers' Wives'.

Maybe it's a ruse to help viewers get over the post Christmas blues and make them feel better about their own workplaces?

After all, could any workplace be worse than Fly Dynamic's?

'Rules of the Game' is a shocking terrible waste of an important subject and a shocking waste of Peake and Steadman's talents in particular. 

Move over 'Stay Close,' we have another viable contender for worst drama of 2022 and we are not even close to February.

('Rules of the Game' was broadcast on BBC1 between January 11-19, 2022)

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