I don’t much like the Cote D’Azur. It may once have been elegant and charming, the haunt of writers and painters chasing light and love. Now it is just about money and showing off how much you have. The coast is overdeveloped to the point that beauty has been swallowed up by the beast of questionable planning and ostentatiousness. Pretty harbours are lost among towering superyachts. You can’t get anywhere because the roads are clogged. I could go on: Saudi royals stealing the beaches; Russians stealing the limelight; moaning Brits priced out and pushed back into the hills to sulk over their Daily Mails.
Still, I’m not going, just watching a TV drama – Riviera (Sky Atlantic) – set there. And all of the above could be good news for a thriller. It worked for Hitchcock and To Catch a Thief after all, even if that was before the Riviera got spoiled.
So Villa Carmella, a (fake) renaissance palace, is home to billionaire banker and philanthropist Constantine Clios and his family. One son is a coke-snorting shagger, the other a layabout, the daughter a messed-up self-harmer. Second wife Georgina, an art curator, is jetting to New York hoping to pick up a Malevich. Villa Carmella has a lot of hanging space for paintings.
Constantine can therefore sneak off to a party on a yacht. With another painting, by Claude Lorrain: Juno Confiding Io to the Care of Argus, which may have significance. There is a beautiful young woman on the yacht who seems to have a connection to Constantine – perhaps she is Io to his Jupiter, or just an escort? She hasn’t been turned into a cow yet, anyhow. She strips to her knickers and dives from the top deck into the Mediterranean. And then – boom! – the boat blows up.
Oh! Constantine gone-stantine. Was it an accident though? Or murder? Or is Constantine still alive, as Georgina begins to suspect? Was the death a fake, like the palace, and – it later emerges – the Lorrain? Intriguing, no? Hmmm, quite. It would help if the Riviera were better.
The show is “based on an original idea by Paul McGuinness”, who, you will remember, used to manage U2. Quite a vague idea, it seems (I’m getting this from the lavish press pack), something along the lines of: the south of France (where PMcG holidays) is quite interesting, lots of money, stuff going on, some of it bad; the artworld is interesting too, the last unregulated market …
It was Neil Jordan who came up with the actual story. Yes, Jordan who wrote and directed The Crying Game. He was helped with the writing by John Banville. Yes, Banville who won the Booker prize. Sky was on board (the idea, not the yacht), threw loads of money at it. As well as the superyacht and the big villa, there are helicopters, and car chases, beautiful outfits and (fake) artworks. And some decent actors: Julia Stiles is Georgina, plus Lena Olin, Adrian Lester and Iwan Rheon.
And yet it is awful. There is probably a half-decent feature-length one-off drama in there. For something to be dragged to 10 one-hour episodes, though, you need three-dimensional characters you can become interested in and care about. This lot aren’t even fun not to like, and those decent actors seem to know it.
The dialogue they have to work with doesn’t help. “I wasn’t his type?” Georgina asks her predecessor, the first Mrs Clios, raising her eyebrows. “Never, and that’s what hurts the most,” she replies. Dynasty was better than this. What happened to those great writers? Maybe they gave up too. Took the money and ran.
Certainly there is more money than thought here. It smacks of TV made by too many people and designed to appeal to too many people (an international audience), and it ends up appealing to no one. Not me, anyway, I have watched three episodes and that’s more than enough. Riviera might be flashy and moneyed but it lacks personality, charm, humour, soul. It is shallow, vulgar and boring. Perfect, then, for the setting.
Wife Swap: Brexit Special (Channel 4) was a year too late, wasn’t it? Given that it revolved around the in v out arguments, rather than the manner of out. Otherwise, it was squirmingly gripping TV – newly divided Britain fed into an old format – that I could only watch through my fingers. Highlight: Nigel Farage getting shat on, even if it was just his picture in the paper and by a dog.
