A Suitable Boy
Sunday & Monday, BBC1
I Hate Suzie
Thursday, Sky Atlantic
Rating: 
Mortimer And Whitehouse: Gone Fishing
Sunday, BBC2
Rating: 
This week we finally said goodbye to Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, which limped on for however many weeks it was – it seemed to go on for ever – and finally (finally!) Lata chose between her three besotted suitors.
I spent most of the series wanting to shake her by the shoulders while saying: ‘Just choose, love, then we can all go home.’ I suppose it was tricky as it’s not like she had sexual chemistry with any of them – not a squeak – but in finally (finally!) choosing ‘Shoe Man’ she will, at least, never be short of shoes. Which is good. Personally, I’d always choose shoes over sexual chemistry, but that could just be to do with age.
The fame game: Billie Piper as the troubled Suzie Pickles in I Hate Suzie. Throughout, Suzie is all blind panic, and Piper acts this to perfection
Now, while you could say A Suitable Boy was too slow and without drama, you couldn’t say the same about I Hate Suzie which, based on the two episodes I’ve seen (of eight), never lets up for a single second, even if you rather wished it would. This is written by Lucy Prebble (the playwright, who is also part of the team that writes Succession) and was devised by her and Billie Piper, who stars and is absolutely terrific.
Piper plays Suzie Pickles, who won an X Factor-type show at 15 – Piper was a child pop star herself – but that was ‘Twenty Years Ago’, say the intertitles, worryingly. Suzie now lives in the country with her husband Cob (Daniel Ings) and their deaf son Frank, and has kept the show on the road by appearing in a sci-fi series and a Nazi zombie show,
But one morning, good news. She’s landed the dream role of a Disney princess and is over the moon. ‘Mummy’s going to be a princess!’ she signs excitedly to Frank. But then, disaster. Her phone, she learns, has been hacked and ‘intimate’ photographs are about to be released online, and whatever she’s doing, it isn’t with Cob.
Blind panic. That’s where she’s at. It’s also the morning of a photoshoot at her home, so the magazine team invades with hair people and make-up people and a pair of wolfhounds and a fur coat (the look is ‘Cruella de Vil’).
Throughout, Suzie is all blind panic, and Piper acts this to perfection. The camera goes as close to her face as a camera can go, and it’s all written there – the blind panic, along with the guilt and the shame and the fear. She jumps at every sound. It all goes to her guts. (Seriously, don’t watch if you can’t take a graphic toilet scene.) The first episode ends with her locked out of the house and walking though the local village in the fur coat (now blood-stained) and bursting into song.
So it’s inventive, this take on ‘the dark side of fame’ – remember, Piper herself has been tabloid fodder for 20 years – but it’s so, so frantic. The camera angles are frantic. The random close-ups are frantic. It’s as if we’re on a theme-park ride that won’t stop or slow down, if only for a minute so that you and, more importantly, the characters, can pause, take a breather and assess what’s what.
The second episode, which features a sci-fi convention and a messy, sleazy, hotel cocaine party, is just as exhausting and stressful, and you will also be wondering: what or whom am I meant to care about here? Suzie who, frustratingly, seems her own worst enemy? Cob, who undermines her at every turn? Why would she even bother to fight for her marriage when it’s so joyless and he is such a tool? I’ll keep with it, to see where it goes, but for the moment, while it wouldn’t be accurate to say I hated I Hate Suzie, I couldn’t love it either.
If you are after more restful television, then hurrah, Mortimer And Whitehouse: Gone Fishing is back. And if you need to know whether Bob is going to take a tumble this time out, let me put you out of your misery: yes. This week Bob and Paul were fishing for salmon in Scotland when Bob, aside from falling over, experienced a hot flush ‘because men get the menopause too’. But Paul was not convinced. ‘Are you sure, Bob, it’s not because you’re standing in direct sunlight in your thermals?’ Bob wanted to know who Paul’s favourite artist was, but Paul couldn’t answer that. ‘I’m not very good at art, Bob. I don’t know how long to look at a painting before I move on to the next one.’
There is nothing scripted that is better than Bob and Paul unscripted. And also, it can be extraordinarily moving. Bob talked about his father’s death and that was extraordinarily moving. Meanwhile, Paul’s the true fisherman, and even though we’re three series in, Bob doesn’t seem to have learned a thing, judging by the way he nearly takes Paul’s eye out when he casts off.
Honestly, you’d think he was only along for the scenery and the friendship, although, actually, what else does anyone need? Apart from good shoes?