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Baptiste is everything the last Line Of Duty claimed to be but wasn’t

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

Fiona Shaw is extraordinary. Baptiste (BBC1) is a drama about a woman at a constant pitch of hysterical terror — and yet who, even when she is screaming, can barely express her feelings.

i can’t think of any other actress capable of exposing so much raw pain, and simultaneously showing us that her character is numb to it.

ambassador Emma Chambers, whose husband and daughter are both dead and whose sons are hostages, is so tightly wound that her emotions are cut off. Her repression acts like a tourniquet.

For much of the story she is in a wheelchair. at one point, about to recruit former police inspector Zsofia arslan (Dorka Gryllus) for a surveillance mission, she pummels her paralysed legs.

‘i can’t move them but i can feel every excruciating thing,’ she says. Her emotions mimic her legs — they’re agony but unresponsive.

The drama follows two parallel timelines, the beginning of her family’s terrorism ordeal and its aftermath. Earlier, in an effort to drown out her feelings, she walked around her apartment, switching on TVs and radios — piano concertos, rock, news bulletins all blaring.

Writers Jack and Harry Williams use a similar technique to overwhelm us with action. Scenes do not follow in chronological order: they multiply, one on top of the other.

it’s not difficult to tell the present-day events from those 14 months earlier. Grieving detective Julien Baptiste was stubbly and wild-eyed at first, but at least he was coherent. and still married.

Later, he’s divorced, drunk, beer bellied and matted with white hair. He looks like Father Christmas after a bottle of absinthe. But those are just the two primary storylines, like a pair of rails in a track. other lines branch off at all angles.

We saw Baptiste and his wife Celia (anastasia Hille) break into their daughter’s home and find her dead from a drugs overdose beside their grandchild’s cot. and we watched arslan’s father, a Turkish immigrant in Budapest, face down a racist yob with a petrol bomb and then calmly treat the youth for burns.

in less expert hands, all this would either be overexplained or incomprehensible. This script strikes a perfect balance, often using bitter comedy to advance the plot.

as Shaw’s character walked into the police station where a terrorist was being held, the metal detectors shrieked. Chambers snarled at the unlucky officer on duty — she was the ambassador, she was hardly likely to be carrying a knife. Did she have a knife? of course she did... Complex, full of surprises and thought provoking, Baptiste is everything that the final series of Line of Duty claimed to be but wasn’t.

Bradley Walsh appeared to have his own theory about the corrupt top cop running organised crime in Line of Duty. as he launched a game show called Take Off (BBC1), with contestants vying for places on a holiday to Los angeles and Las Vegas, he kept referring to co-presenter Holly Willoughby as ‘H’.

Brad and Holly’s double act is the only aspect of the series that works. The party games are all dreadfully lame, none worse than a test of reactions where four people, on a cue from Brad, try to snatch up one of three passports on a table.

in another, Holly wobbled along a luggage conveyor belt in fourinch heels, pointing out visual puns that spelled the names of U.S. states. a whisk, a scone, the sun... from that you’re meant to guess ‘Wisconsin’, apparently.

Between rounds, an Elvis impersonator sang snatches from the King’s songbook. it was more Skegness than Vegas.

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2021-07-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-07-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

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