CHRISTOPHER STEVENS critiques Gone: David Morrissey is mesmerising as a repressed headmaster hiding secrets and techniques
Gone (ITV1)
Everything clock-work has a limit. Wind the spring too tight and it snaps. Nothing changes on the outside: the face remains the same, but inside, the machine is broken.
David Morrissey is superb, in Gone, as the head teacher of a minor public school whose internal clockwork has exploded, after the disappearance of his wife.
The more rigid his expression, the more clearly he conveys the secret panic and turmoil of his character, Michael Polly.
Mr Polly (called ‘Mike’ by nobody except his over-familiar deputy head) is a disciplinarian, a stickler, a cold fish, a man so tightly buttoned up that his waistcoat ought to be labelled, ‘Warning: Contents under pressure.’
He exudes a presence that makes children snap to attention as he stalks the corridors, and can impose a hush on morning assembly with a silent, steely gaze.
But look closely and you might see hints that his iron self-control hides a secret inadequacy. One insolent junior teacher wonders aloud what qualifications he has. And Mr Polly himself admits, though he’s only talking to himself, that he hasn’t read as many classic novels as people might imagine.
If he’s capable of concealing this, what else does the world not know about him? Such as – what was his relationship really like with his missing wife?
David Morrissey as Michael Polly, head teacher of a minor public school whose internal clockwork has exploded after the disappearance of his wife
Morrissey’s performance is mesmeric, capturing the dual nature of this brutally repressed man, displaying one persona while allowing us to guess at the other.
Eve Myles, as a detective sergeant under a cloud, helps us to do the guessing in this six-part serial. DS Annie Cassidy has been relegated to family liaison duties, by a boss who has apparently never forgiven her for failing to solve an earlier murder case.
She’s trying, and failing, to extricate herself from a relationship with a senior colleague, DI Craig Stanhope, who is too smooth by half (played by Peter McDonald, an actor whose creepy charm can make the skin on the back of my neck crawl under my hairline to hide).
As rumours spread around the school, and the hunt for the missing woman takes a darker, violent turn, Gone follows the conventions of the whodunnit. There’s no shortage of suspects: school staff, and perhaps a pupil or two, as well as Mr Polly’s troubled daughter Alana (Emma Appleton), his frosty in-laws, and a mysterious contact on a mobile phone, ‘Claire’, whose real identity supplied a cliffhanger surprise last night at the climax of the second episode.
Viewers under 50 or so might feel that the depiction of the school is too caricatured, and that no teacher could ever be such a martinet, no regime so sadistic. Those of us educated before the 1980s, though, might recognise it very well, and feel an extra chill that has nothing to do with the plot.
Were schools really so cold and crocodilian? Of course not… some were much nastier.
