A new benchmark for British TV.
I’m just going to quickly knock up a post about this terrific BBC TV series, The Honourable Woman. It aired over the summer, but it’s already out on DVD – so everyone please go and buy it.
It’s a story ‘ripped from today’s headlines’, even more so than anything else I’ve seen before that claims to be. It’s about the Israel-Palestine conflict and all its labyrinthine intricacies, and it just so happened to air during Israel’s latest incursion into Gaza. It therefore feels incredibly relevant and close to the bone in a horrible but riveting way.
It stars Maggie Gyllenhaal (with a flawless English accent) as a newly minted Baroness and head of a British-Israeli humanitarian company aiming to bring peace to the region. Just as she awards a lucrative telecoms contract to a Palestinian businessman, he is found dead in suspicious circumstances.
The plot massively thickens from that point onwards, involving a large cast of fascinating characters including her sidelined elder brother (Andrew Buchan), a fiery Palestinian housekeeper (Lubna Azabal), a colourful but shady Israeli billionaire (Igal Naor), and a collection of enigmatic intelligence officers orchestrating and observing proceedings (Stephen Rea, Janet McTeer and Eve Best).
The acting is superb, the cinematography is beautiful, and the plot is totally absorbing in a way unlike anything else on British TV. It’s very complex, finely-wrought stuff that needs the viewer to concentrate and to keep up with it, but it’s so rewarding if you do so. The whole series was helmed by TV auteur Hugo Blick (The Shadow Line), who both wrote and directed it, and I absolutely can’t wait for his next project.
The Honourable Woman is proper grown-up TV – a relevant, intelligent, gripping masterpiece.
Grass and Vanilla 