Run Away (Netflix)
New Year’s Day telly, like Christmas, can be a bit too much.
One week after you’ve eaten too much, opened too much and spent too much, now you’ve got too much to watch.
Not only did we have The Traitors to savour, and The Night Manager (covered on other pages), but the return of ITV‘s Red Eye, which was superb and will be reviewed in full next week… plus the two–hour–plus finale of Stranger Things on Netflix.
Chances are, you missed all these treats if you got engrossed in the eight–part thriller Run Away, the latest high–octane family drama from the inexhaustible Harlan Coben, also streaming on Netflix.
Paperback bestseller Coben can be counted on to deliver multiple plotlines that gradually twist around each other like rope, and outrageous cliffhangers.
His characters are all hiding big secrets and will tell any lie or break any law to hold on to everything they’ve got – whether that’s wealth, family or power.
Coben’s great strength is his talent for conjuring every parent’s worst nightmares and lacing them with hallucinogens.
Pictured: James Nesbitt, who plays Simon, and Minnie Driver, who plays his wife Ingrid
Nesbitt plays Simon, the sort of snob who is constantly showing off his luxury watch. But he and wife Ingrid (Minnie Driver) are more tightly wound than any Swiss clockwork
This is soap packed full of steroids. It demands actors who are not afraid to go over the top, and viewers who are willing to suspend all disbelief.
James Nesbitt is perfect for these rollercoaster roles. He starred in Missing You, the Coben drama that launched on New Year’s Day last year, and he’s even more feverish in Run Away – eyes blazing, teeth bared, nostrils flaring… and that’s just when he’s lost his car keys.
Nesbitt plays Simon, the sort of snob who is constantly showing off his luxury watch. But he and wife Ingrid (Minnie Driver) are more tightly wound than any Swiss clockwork. Their daughter, Paige (Ellie de Lange), is a heroin addict, living in a squat.
When Simon spots Paige busking in a park, he urges her to return home – and explodes into violence when her scuzzy boyfriend Aaron intervenes.
Getting arrested and chucked into cells isn’t the half of Simon’s problems: a YouTuber films the fight and posts it on social media with the caption, ‘Rich businessman beats up homeless guy’.
All that happens within the first five minutes. Coben’s thrillers don’t hang around.
So much happens so quickly that it’s a mistake to try and make sense of the plot as it unfolds, let alone to second–guess what might happen next.
A pair of Bonnie–and–Clyde assassins sit in their car, exchanging offbeat, rambling dialogue that parodies Elmore Leonard at his most eccentric.
Meanwhile, Ruth Jones turns up in the park and steals a dog before cadging a free lunch from its owner. Turns out she’s a private detective called Elena, working on a case apparently unconnected to Simon’s arrest.
When her partner and computer hacker Lou (Annette Badland) announces she’d like the night off, Elena snaps, ‘And I’d like to be in Bali with Idris Elba.’ That’s Sir Idris now, please.
Natural Mead of the Night
Summer heat in the city causes nectar in the flowers to ferment and make bees tipsy, revealed David Attenborough in his charming Wild London (BBC1).
‘Research into whether bees get hangovers has yet to be done,’ he chortled.