The Syndicate
BBC1
I’m not sure where to start with this week’s review. What to tell you first about the new series of The Syndicate (Tuesdays, 9pm), Kay Mellor’s immensely shouty Lottery drama? Should I begin with the fact that among its cast is Anthony Andrews? (The very same Anthony Andrews who, in 1982, received a Bafta and a Golden Globe for playing Sebastian Flyte in Granada’s wondrous adaptation of Brideshead Revisited.) Or should I proceed straight to the set-up, which is basically a lolloping great pound-shop Downton Abbey with a brisk order of Being There on the side? (Being There is an Oscar-winning film from 1979 in which Peter Sellers plays a simple-minded gardener who knows nothing of the world save what he has gleaned by watching TV.) Truly, The Syndicate is the gift that keeps on giving: overstuffed, derivative, melodramatic and utterly batty. It also says quite a lot about where television – and, by extension, its audience – is right now. Social class, money, a certain (very stupid) view of Englishness: they’re all here, spread out like the guts of the grouse some of its characters are shortly to shoot.
I would love to have been in the meeting when Mellor pitched this version of her drama (each series features a different group of Lottery players: the first and second were set in a supermarket and a hospital, respectively). What did she say? “I’m gonna set it in a stately home – only the earl is so broke he can’t afford a butler! And then his cook, cleaner and all the others who are still on the payroll only bloody go and win the Lottery!” I imagine this is quite close, actually. And how did her bosses at BBC1 reply? “Fantastic, Kay. Everyone loves Downton, and – to quote our friend Alan Yentob – the old C2, Ds all dream of winning the Lottery. How can this not be a hit?” At which point, I imagine, Mellor smartly disconnected from FaceTime and began typing . . .
Scene one: Hazelwood Manor, a stately home near Scarborough, and the seat of Lord Hazelwood, the 8th Earl of somewhere or other. In the kitchen, Cook is working on dinner.
Gamekeeper, plonking two pheasant on the table: You need to pluck these while they’re still warm.
Cook, outraged: I was preparing pheasant before you shot out of your father’s c***, sweetheart.
The dialogue is word-for-word accurate. To be fair, this is scene two. I skipped scene one on the grounds that it was too long and boring (Hazelwood Manor’s cleaner, Dawn, had overslept, and was struggling to rouse her family from slumber.)
Lord Hazelwood, our broke but paternalistic toff, is played by Andrews, and his arriviste wife, Rachel, by Alice Krige. She has a son, Spencer (Sam Phillips), who is keen to sell Hazelwood Manor in order to pay off the family’s mounting debts (they’re so deeply in hock that they can’t even afford canapés for dinner) – and as it happens, he’s in luck, for here comes a group of Americans over for a shoot, a load of clichés in sunglasses who take one look at the earl and exclaim: “Genuine British aristocracy!” Perhaps they’ll turn the estate into one of those golf courses on which their fortune is built. At which point Mr Earl, Mrs Earl and Baby Earl – we know he’s a baddie by his Third Reich hair – will be free to join Liz Hurley over on the set of The Royals, where they’d surely fit in very well, being made of purest cardboard.
Below stairs, the motley staff comprises, among others, Julie the cook (Melanie Hill) and Godfrey the gardener (Lenny Henry), who has Asperger’s and can’t cope with loud noise, which must be a nightmare, given that he’s trapped in a Kay Mellor piece. By the end of episode one, this lot had won £14m on the Lottery, and though such a change in their fortunes had grave consequences for Lady Hazelwood, who had to make her own coffee after supper, we can be certain that in future episodes things will go far more badly still for them.
Money can put lead on roofs and lobster in canapés; it can get a girl out of her overalls and into the arms of the nearest travel agent. But it can’t ever buy you happiness, a reassuring half-truth this show likes to underline childishly in thickest Biro.
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