Deadwater Fell (Channel 4) is basically Broadchurch in Scotland. David Tennant is a doctor rather than a policeman, and at the centre of a crime rather than investigating it, and he’s letting his freckles show, but switch your mind to its Broadchurch setting and you will not be disappointed. You may even rejoice that, possibly alone among all things in this bleak and benighted year of no apparent Lord at all 2020, the Tennant TV imprimatur continues to deliver what we need. And, I hope, in a way that also continues to fund his theatrical career to deliver what he needs in the way of more creative challenges. I seek win-win situations these days with the mad desperation of a starving pig snouting for truffles in a barren landscape. I also don’t want him reappearing as the instead of a Doctor. Those were bad Whovian days for me, though your mileage may vary.
I digress! Foolishly, when there is so much to be getting on with. The car crash with which the first episode opens? Pish posh – a mere bagatelle! For darkness lurks beneath the bucolic surface of the small village of Kirkdarroch, in which Tom Kendrick (Tennant), his wife Kate (Anna Madeley) and their three adorable children live, neighbouring their best friends Steve (Matthew McNulty), a policeman, and his girlfriend Jess (Cush Jumbo), a teacher at the same primary school as Kate. Just how much darkness we only begin to realise after a horrific house fire in which Kate and the three children die. Tom is dragged to safety and taken, in life-threatening condition, to hospital.
Piecemeal, via flashbacks done carefully enough to compel rather than confuse or irritate, we come to know them better. Kate had been on antidepressants since her last child was born, though she was coming off them when she died. Dual family picnics are marred by tension between the Kendricks (the particular tone of marital bickering beautifully caught), and it is Kate who has the opening car crash as she drives the upset children home in the aftermath, with Jess in the passenger seat. Jess is having IVF and – at least once – sex with Tom.
The police find evidence that the family were drugged before the fire began, and a cloud of suspicion descends over the village. Suddenly there are shadows everywhere.
In summary it sounds soapy, but in reality it is ruthlessly unsensationalist and at times deeply moving. More small revelations accrue – the tin of spliffs Jess finds and pockets as she clears out her friend’s desk; the CCTV footage of Kate buying the padlock that was used on the children’s bedroom door; an indecipherable call from Kate to her disliked mother-in-law 15 minutes before the alarm was raised on the fateful night. It all adds up to a promising further three hours for us, and a tough time to come for Tom. The school’s headmaster – for reasons not yet clear – rejects the village’s fear of a stranger wishing them harm. “It’s Tom,” he rages drunkenly at a dinner party. “It’s Tom.”
But is it? Or was it Kate? Or maybe Jess, consumed by her secret lust for Tom and jealous of Kate and her abundant fertility? What happened, physically and to the family dynamic, after the car crash? What about Steve’s ex-wife, who keeps landing him with their kids – she must have something yet to reveal? What about Steve himself? Or, of course, there may be a deus ex machina yet. Deadwater Fell is so well and honestly made, however, that I doubt it will have recourse to the last.
Whether it will catch the public imagination like Broadchurch did is anybody’s guess. It feels far more solidly engineered, easily as convincing in its portrait of a small community suddenly shattered by an awful event, and it elicits more emotional investment from the off. I’m finding it an irresistible treat, but these things are essentially alchemical and unpredictable. Broadchurch with freckles – think of it like that if it’ll help. Come on in; the Deadwater’s lovely.
