TV review: Pasty-faced hero worth staying up for

It never pays to underestimate the pasty-faced English actor David Thewlis, star of Jimmy McGovern's stunning new drama The Street.

For all his weak-chinned, gormlessly ill- favoured looks, he is the only actor to have co-starred in a movie with Brad Pitt and been the one to get the girl, in Seven Years in Tibet.

In The Street, he doesn't exactly get the girl; rather, he secretly dumps her, by pretending to be dead.

In a plot similar in spirit to Daphne du Maurier's The Scapegoat, Thewlis plays twin brothers - one a standup war hero, the other a weak, gambling tosser. Both live in the same Liverpool neighbourhood, with Harry the good twin subsidising the family of Joe, the weak twin.

Harry, one night, chokes to death on a lemon sherbet, and in a split- second decision, Joe pretends he has died and takes Harry's place. What sounds corny is so well written and acted, you feel sick to the stomach and torn about whether you want Joe to get away with it or not.

Not that most viewers will see the series, as it's criminally buried, as usual, after 11pm on a Wednesday, with absolutely no promotion. Never mind that McGovern's first big series, Cracker, was a popular phenomenon that viewers are still enjoying reruns of 15 years later.

Since Cracker, McGovern has produced ever darker and tougher TV, which is what frightens the TV schedulers off - in this country, at least.

They've been bitten before, after throwing McGovern's The Lakes away in an unpromising slot, only to have to repeat it because of public demand. McGovern's talent is the ability to tell a compelling story, while rubbing the viewer's nose in the grime and depression of life on a low income.

In Cracker, the main drawcard was the infuriating loveability of the hero, Fitz, played by Robbie Coltrane. Since then, McGovern has taken the risk of forsaking the insurance policy of a cuddly central character.

Here they all are, eking out a living, sometimes behaving nobly, more often with emotional immaturity - take 'em or leave 'em.

And somehow, you can never leave them because the storytelling's so good. McGovern's insurance policy this time, for sceptics, is a fantastic cast, starting with Thewlis and promising, later, the always wonderful Timothy Spall.

It never pays to underestimate Thewlis, for all his weakish chin and pasty face.

The Street takes a similar formula to Paul Abbott's Clocking Off, about factory employees, in concentrating on a particular household each episode, but letting the odd person from a few doors down drift in and out.

In last week's debut episode, the switcheroo was concluded, painfully and hideously, with a new story to come tomorrow night. Joe's deception went off perfectly, till he realised that, posing as Harry, he had to face up to what the rest of the world really thought of Joe.

Only 20 people came to his funeral, no one from his work. In living the life of his more successful, decent brother, he was more confronted than ever by his own miserable failure.

Another promising late night throw-away on Wednesday is Monroe - Class of 76, on TV3 (11.15pm). As it stars Robert Carlyle, in his unsuccessful audition to be the next longest running British detective after Inspector Morse, it's ahead on points even before you start watching it.

Alas, though the story is intriguing - a class of primary school children is being stalked and murdered into adulthood - it's way too long and ponderous, and it's easy to see why the audition was unsuccessful.

Carlyle plays Tom Monroe, a moody and talented copper, and Daniel Mays is his sergeant sidekick.

It's beautifully filmed, beginning with a tormented man stumbling through the woods, a strange narration overlaid about the death of a school friend, and finally, shockingly, standing in the path of a truck to be dispatched in an instant.

It turns out he is one of several former classmates of murdered girl Amy Irvine to have died in not entirely explicable circumstances. Correspondence between the truck suicide and another former classmate indicates they believed they were being stalked for revenge.

Monroe's job is to find out by whom, and also what really happened to Amy. Any story that raises the possibility of a Lord Of the Flies motif, of little children doing the unthinkable, is strangely compelling.

But the script requires Monroe to spend so much time gazing into the middle distance in a soulful fashion, having visions and flashbacks and wrestling with his yet-to- be-introduced demons, that you could easily lose patience.

*The Street, TV One, Wednesday, 11.10pm.

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