DEBORAH ROSS: Classy Keeley can’t save this stilted saga
Summer Of Rockets
Wednesday, BBC2
The Virtues
Wednesday, Channel 4
Rating: 
Stephen Poliakoff’s latest drama, Summer Of Rockets, is its own worst enemy. Just when you are feeling seduced and immersed it does something so absurdly stilted and artificial it snaps you right out of it. ‘Stop the car, Dalton!’ Mrs Shaw cried once last week, and once this week, and Mr Shaw is now in on it too. ‘Stop the car, Dalton,’ he also cried this week. Poor Dalton, their driver, probably doesn’t know if he’s coming or going. And there is no real reason ever to stop the car. It’s purely a writerly device to underline whatever Mr Shaw or Mrs Shaw needs to say. And there are other moments that pull you up. Those five fellas from MI5 who had been sinisterly trailing Mr Petrukhin. Five fellas? To tell him to attend a meeting at 10am in the morning? Behave.
Keeley Hawes and Toby Stephens in Summer Of Rockets. Stephen Poliakoff’s latest drama is its own worst enemy
That said, Summer Of Rockets is infinitely superior to Poliakoff’s last offering, Close To The Enemy, which was, from memory, all jazz hands and slinky nightclub singers, possibly because this is semi-autobiographical. It certainly feels truer. Set in 1957, the main character is Petrukhin (Toby Stephens) who, like Poliakoff’s father, is a Russian Jew and a maker of hearing aids and also inventor of the ‘staff organiser’ that would later become the pager.
Petrukhin imagines he has mastered the perfect British accent (even if he does sometimes sound South African, bizarrely) yet is still an outsider. (‘Here comes the darkie and the Jew,’ notes an MP when Petrukhin trucks up with his black right-hand man.) Petrukhin desperately wants to be accepted and, to this end, sends his little son, Sasha (Toby Woolf ), to a frightful English boarding school and insists his daughter Hannah (Lily Sacofsky) is presented to Buckingham Palace as a ‘deb’, even though she’d prefer to spend her time worrying about nuclear war. Plus, he makes friends with Kathleen Shaw (Keeley Hawes, as magnificent as ever) and her MP husband (Linus Roache), who are old-money posh.
He sounds awful on paper, does Mr Petrukhin, but the fact is I love him. He is just so wonderfully endearing and touching somehow. He is beautifully written, and beautifully performed by Stephens who, you may remember, made the best Mr Rochester ever. (In that adaptation of Jane Eyre co-starring Ruth Wilson – ‘Jane, Jane, where are yoooouuuuuu?’)
As it stands, two episodes in (if, that is, you are watching week by week), Petrukhin has been asked to spy on the Shaws in return for a large government order of ‘staff organisers’ that would save his company from going to the wall, while we learned more about the Shaws. Mrs Shaw stopped the car, Dalton, to tell Hannah about her own missing son, while Mr Shaw stopped the car, Dalton, to tell Mrs Shaw he felt her pain. Visually, it’s all sublimely posh-ravishing but sometimes the pacing is off. When Hannah didn’t make it on time to meet the Queen, didn’t that scene go on for ever? Haven’t we seen the ‘staff organiser’ nearly not work twice now in scenes that also seemed to go on for ever? And those stilted moments that snap you out of it show no signs of abating, as when Hannah had that nightmare about gatecrashing Buckingham Palace and woke up, sat bolt upright and said aloud to herself: ‘Thank God that never happened.’ Who would ever say that aloud to themselves after a bad dream? Who, who, who? I’m not saying that characters in a drama have to behave as people might in real life, but when you notice that they don’t, it does interfere. Also, one final point: why is Hannah so often shown in bed in that skimpy orange negligee? How does that serve the drama? Or is it just, you know, a bit pervy?
Perhaps all dramas at present are suffering from comparison with The Virtues, which is so naturalistic and authentic and gut-punching that nothing else stands much of a chance, and it’s five stars even though I can’t hear what anyone is saying half the time, and keep having to rewind. Normally, I would mind that quite significantly, but this is so compelling, I don’t even care.
Written by Shane Meadows, this stars the absolute powerhouse that is Stephen Graham as Joe, who has returned to the Ireland where he was abused as a child. We still don’t know how or by whom, exactly. Our only clue has been those hazy flashbacks. But this week he visited the (now derelict) children’s home where it obviously took place, which sent him on another bender, and it was phenomenally painful. You do wonder: why am I watching when it hurts so much? I suppose it’s because you feel for him so significantly that to turn your gaze away, and not bear witness to his full story, would constitute a betrayal. Also, the scenes with his sister (spectacularly played by Helen Behan) are plainly terrific, even if you do have to rewind umpteen times. This never hits a false note. Dalton, stop the car? None of that nonsense here.
