Jekyll

Abstract

Tom's allies all just happen to be women - and what a prejudice-free cross-section of modem, contemporary Blairite Britain they are.\n If you happen to consider him a smarmy, ingratiating blight in the first place , then Jekyll isn't going to change your mind; or, to put it another way, if you find Nesbitt's screen persona creepy, then watching him turn it up several notches to super-creepy isn't as much of a surprise as it might be for those who think he's either (and I take these examples from the script) "A world-class hottie" or "Mr. Sexy Pants". Playing Hyde like some demented jack-in-the-box, Nesbitt leers and gums at every available opportunity, while the character himself often seems to be an amalgam of Hannibal Lecter (identifying people's habits by smell), Dr. Bruce Banner ("Don't annoy me.

Hartswood Films/BBC/Stagescreen Productions (2007)

"We'd like you to review Jekyll." the Coven said. Jekyll..? Ah, yes, Jekyll. BBC. Updated version. James Nesbitt ... "It's with James Nesbitt," I said, thinking that would settle the matter. "Yes," they said. "No, no, you don't understand. I saw the trailers, it's with James Nesbitt." "Yes," they said, "We know." "But don't you see, in order to review it, I'd have to watch it!" How much clearer could I make it? But they were remorseless, as is the way with covens. "Yes," they said, then added, "We understand it won't be easy." Which was kind of them, I suppose, but... Jesus creeping shit, I've got to get out of this! "Look," I nearly shouted, pointing at Witch No. 1, "you yourself said you despise James Nesbitt and all that he represents!" "That's true," she conceded, but said no more. Then, I'm ashamed to admit, sheer panic took over. "But it's James Nesbitt] You know, the one from up North who's always doing that I'm-just-one-of-the-guys act when you know what he's really thinking is, I AM IT! I am God's fucking gift to women and don't they just love me! Yeah, baby, YEAH! I'd rather sandpaper my scrotum for three hours than watch James Nesbitt for one!" But, as you'll have gathered, it was all to no avail. Remorseless, that's the only word for it.

Still, I thought later, how bad could it be? Well, bad enough, obviously, but Stevenson's story is short, so the adaptation couldn't be any longer than an hour, could it? An hour-and-a-half, at the most, like that recent, godawful version of Dracula the BBC did ... Then the DVD arrived in the post. Jekyll. Season One. Running time: 330 mins, approx. Season One\ 330 minutes] Three hundred and thirty minutes! God's balls, what sort of bad karma was I reaping here? I grabbed the calculator. Five and-a-half hours. Five and-a-half hours ... of James Nesbitt! Right, you've asked for it, you've really asked for it! One fair and impartial review coming up...

Tom Jackman (played by guess who) has been feeling not quite himself lately. And when he's not quite himself, Tom does bad things. Very bad things. Like smoking. And drinking. And having sex with women. He may even eat take-away pizzas while watching football on the telly, though we're not actually shown that. As Tom is a happily-married New Man and a dab hand at changing nappies, such Neanderthal tendencies naturally upset him, so he does the only thing possible under the circumstances. He leaves his family, rents a dingy flat, and straps himself into a chair whenever he feels he might do anything Bad. When we first meet him, Tom is interviewing a girl named Katherine Reimer (Michelle Ryan), who claims to be a psychiatric nurse but dresses like Lara Croft. Katherine gets the job of monitoring Tom's mood swings and warning him when they're due. Good Tom communicates with Bad Tom by Dictaphone, so they can keep abreast of things. Important things, like where did you park the car before you wigged out and ended up in bed with that prostitute?

Tom, who used to work as a scientist for a firm called Klein & Utterson, becomes aware that he is being followed by a black van - you know, the sort with tinted windows that sinister people like to drive. He also visits his family from time to time, though he feels unable to tell his wife, Claire (the pulchritudinous Gina Bellman), why he has left home. One night, during one of his Bad moods, Tom is approached by the occupants of the van, who are indeed sinister (they must be, they wear suits), and are led by an American called Benjamin Lennox (Paterson Joseph), who is polite in a sinister kind of way. The sinister people seem to want something, but Bad Tom is not in the mood so he throws one of them through a window before shinning up a nearby building like a monkey.

Eventually, Bad Tom gets to leam about Claire and the kiddies and goes to pay them a visit, introducing himself as Cousin Billy. When Good Tom leams about this, he leaves angry messages for Bad Tom, warning him to stay away from his family. He also discovers that Claire has hired a pair of lesbian private investigators to follow him, and from them he leams that there really was a Doctor Jekyll in Edinburgh in 1886, who allowed a certain well-known author to write his story as a fiction. But any connection with the original Jekyll seems to hit a dead end when it is revealed that he had no descendants. So Tom must look elsewhere to find the answers before Hyde takes over completely...

Needless to say, at 330 minutes, there is a lot more plot than this. An awful lot more plot, which jumps back and forth in time while becoming progressively more and more silly. Any initial curiosity as to how the programme-makers were going to handle a new version of Stevenson's tale quickly evaporates after the first episode, as it becomes clear that what they are really doing, apart from exhausting the viewers' patience with one improbability after another, is using Stevenson as a springboard for a sort of ghastly, politically correct morality play.

Not only do the bad people wear suits, they also work for an all-powerful corporation (possessed of "more money than God"), and it should come as no surprise to leam that most of them are men, including Tom's friend, Peter Syme (Denis Lawson), who of course turns out to be a bad egg. Tom's allies all just happen to be women - and what a prejudice-free cross-section of modem, contemporary Blairite Britain they are. There's Claire, of course, the devoted mother, and Katherine, the perfect Girl Friday (but successful and independent too, no doubt), and the lesbian gumshoes, one of whom is Asian and one of whom is pregnant, and the Muslim amputee tap-dancer who'll only perform in a burka... Okay, okay, I made the last one up, but really! Do scriptwriters feel obliged to work in these ethnic-gender "role models" before they submit their work to the BBC, or does some wretched casting committee twist their arms by saying, "Well, we think we can green-light this, yah? But we were just wondering if it mightn't be more ... you know, if the private investigator couldn't in fact be a woman? Two women, actually. In a relationship, why not? And maybe one of them is, like, Asian, or something ..." Jesus wept, it's enough to make one go out and buy the Collected Works of Bernard Manning.

Given such characters, it goes without saying that the performances are pretty woeful as well, though Bellman deserves some credit for managing to deliver her inane dialogue with a straight face. Michelle Ryan's character, though given a big build-up in the first episode, soon disappears into irrelevance, perhaps because the PC Squad realised she was both white and heterosexual. And then there's James Nesbitt. Ah, yes, James Nesbitt - how could I forget? Obviously, one's opinion of Nesbitt's efforts rather depends on one's view of Nesbitt himself because, make no mistake, this series is all about him. If you happen to consider him a smarmy, ingratiating blight in the first place , then Jekyll isn't going to change your mind; or, to put it another way, if you find Nesbitt's screen persona creepy, then watching him turn it up several notches to super-creepy isn't as much of a surprise as it might be for those who think he's either (and I take these examples from the script) "A world-class hottie" or "Mr. Sexy Pants". Oh, yes, I kid you not.

Nesbitt's interpretation of Hyde is certainly different but, along with the script, suffers from jarring shifts in tone, from the occasionally disturbing to the frequently ridiculous. Playing Hyde like some demented jack-in-the-box, Nesbitt leers and gums at every available opportunity, while the character himself often seems to be an amalgam of Hannibal Lecter (identifying people's habits by smell), Dr. Bruce Banner ("Don't annoy me. That's not a good way to go."), and Mike Tyson ("When yuo [sic] sleep I will eat your children"). And it's really neither clever nor funny to have Hyde peer back through time at the original Dr. Jekyll (also played by guess who) and say, "Doesn't look a bit like Spencer Tracy."

Robert Louis Stevenson didn't write The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a vehicle for lame gags, but then, as with the wretched Dracula, the makers of Jekyll seem more interested in hijacking a well-known name and using it to flog their disagreeably prudish post-feminist agenda than with doing justice to anything so outmoded as the author's original intentions. And make no mistake, there is something distinctly retrograde in the conceit that the original Dr. Jekyll is turned into Hyde by nothing other than good, old-fashioned lust (even allowing for the fact that Gina Bellman could bring out the beast in any man still in possession of a pulse), as indeed there is in the depiction of the three principal characters. Good Tom, as we have seen, is good because he is New Man, caring, unthreatening, and dull. Claire is good because she is a mother, a status which, being natural to her womanhood, must therefore be exalted and beyond reproach. But Bad Tom is bad, not only because he smokes (obviously!), but because he does ... what exactly? That which is natural to man, but which state, church, and women do their best to curb, control and suppress...

All of which is to give more than enough attention to a series that, in addition to being an insult to Robert Louis Stevenson, is also an insult to the viewers' intelligence. That the BBC actually intends to commission another series is deeply depressing, and I hereby give warning that if anybody comes to the Good John suggesting he review Series II, they'll have to deal with the Bad John first.

JOHN EXSHAW