First stop for producers pitching a new TV drama is location, location, location. Find your place in the sun and the script will follow.
Frauds, ITVs so-so heist drama, starring Jodie Whittaker and Suranne Jones, was set for no particular reason in Malaga and filmed in Tenerife. The Day of the Jackal was filmed with maximum expense in Croatia and Spain. And Sky’s new thriller The Iris Affair gives us a tour of Sardinia, Florence and Rome.
The Iris Affair is a cat-and-mouse caper starring Niamh Algar as code-breaking genius Iris Nixon. Algar, who was superb in Malpractice, specialises in women who have just about had enough, which makes this role a no-brainer.
Iris happily spent her time solving crosswords and online puzzles until she was recruited by Cameron Beck (Tom Hollander) to activate a topological quantum device, invented by a mysterious man called Jensen who has since lost his mind.
‘Genius is madness on a good day,’ Cameron tells Iris in his darkest and most faraway voice. ‘Jensen ran out of good days.’
Jensen called his device, which can sing sad songs, ‘the lamentation of God’, but everyone else calls it Charlie Big Potatoes. For the scientists among us, Charlie, who looks like a giant fungus and is kept beneath a bell jar in a concrete barracks in Slovenia, uses Majorana zero mode quasi particles for cubits and has organic tentacles which have allowed him to grow his own brain.
Charlie’s purpose is to cure cancer, reverse climate change and ‘think thoughts which have yet to be thought’, but none of this can happen until he’s activated. And if he’s not activated soon, the evil investor who provided the billions to build him will have Cameron killed.
But Jensen, who hates Charlie and attacked the device with an axe, is now mute and unblinking in a wheelchair. His codes, however, are kept in a diary, using an encryption system which only Iris can break. It doesn’t take her long to see that one of Jensen’s strange illustrations is the DNA sequence of Deinococcus radiodurans, which means he’s using a book code based on DNA, ‘the book of life’.
When Jensen goes on a murder spree, Iris takes the diary and hotfoots it to Sardinia, where she hides, under various aliases, in a beach hut to die for. Not only are the Sardinian and Roman police now in pursuit of her; so too are a gang of murderous drug-dealers, while a conspiracy YouTube channel, called Two Seconds to Midnight, is devoted to locating her whereabouts.
The show’s creator, Neil Cross, cites as his influences Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief and Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels, but the likeness is superficial at best. The Iris Affair wants to be a classy thriller, but is instead a madcap comedy.
The show reminded me of The Man with Two Brains, where Steve Martin plays Dr Michael Hfuhruhurr, whose colleague Dr Alfred Necessiter has invented a way of storing living brains in jars.
When Dr Hfuhruhurr discovers he can communicate telepathically with the disembodied brain of Anne Uumellmahaye (they sing ‘Under the Bamboo Tree’ together), it leads to a love affair. There is a very touching scene where they go on a romantic date in a rowing boat.
Time was we had no idea why so many middle-aged women in 19th-century novels lay swooning on sofas, because menopause was a taboo subject. It is now mainstream, thanks to Davina McCall’s groundbreaking 2021 Channel 4 documentary Myths, Sex and the Menopause.
For further menopause TV, try ITV’s The Assassin (location: Athens and the Greek island of Salamis), with Keeley Hawes as a retired gun for hire going through a hormonal shift, and ITV’s Small Achievable Goals. In this excruciating Canadian sitcom, Julie (Jennifer Whalen), a producer overlooked for promotion on her 50th birthday, and Kris (Meredith MacNeill), a TikToker with a make-up show for older women, start a podcast together.
When we first meet them, Julie is having a hot flush and Kris is pulling open a door that clearly says ‘Push’. Later that morning, Kris has a meltdown in the local supermarket where she is buying adult diapers.
The whole thing is almost too painful to watch. Where is the topological quantum solution for women who have just about had enough?
