Frauds (ITV1)
That’s how you avoid the Curse of Strictly. Suranne Jones, as a conwoman just out of jail in Frauds, performed a pas de deux with a chicken.
Tucking the bird under one arm, she flapped her elbows and strutted to Neneh Cherry’s 80s hit Buffalo Stance, mouthing the lyrics: ‘You better watch, don’t mess with me!’
Like any good hen night, this six-part heist drama is all about the girls. Suranne plays Bert, a career criminal who has spent the past ten years in a Spanish prison.
She’s come out with a dragonfly tattoo on her cleavage and just a few months to live, thanks to a cancerous tumour on her liver. Or so she claims — you can’t trust a word Bert says.
Jodie Whittaker is Sam, her former accomplice and possibly an ex-lover, though the details of their relationship are still blurred. She’s going straight, apparently in every sense — preferring to live in poverty than to live by stick-ups and picking pockets.
They’re holed up in a rented farmhouse somewhere in Spain, drinking tomato wine, with only a donkey for company. And the dancing chicken, of course.
But Bert has bigger ambitions. The rules of television decree every crook with a terminal illness must pull off one last job, their most audacious ever.
Like any good hen night, this six-part heist drama is all about the girls. Jodie Whittaker as Sam & Suranne Jones as Bert are pictured (R-L)
The pair are holed up in a rented farmhouse somewhere in Spain, drinking tomato wine, with only a donkey for company
With its cinematic, spaghetti western swagger, Frauds could have been nothing more than a pastiche of Thelma & Louise, the archetypal outlaw gals movie
What this scheme is, we didn’t find out for the first hour. And that was too long to wait. By the second ad break, I was starting to wonder where this story was going.
We met other characters, briefly — a painter, a magician’s assistant, a cabaret artiste — but learned nothing about why Bert had sent each of them a mysterious letter.
It was not until the credits rolled, with a trailer for the second episode tonight, that we discovered what she is planning — the theft from a Madrid museum of a giant canvas by Salvador Dali.
The trailer was scintillating. ‘I want to watch that!’ I thought. Then I realised I had been for the last 60 minutes . . . much of it repetitive and meandering.
One long and unnecessary sequence saw the two of them breaking into a bullring, where they larked about in the arena, playing matadors like children.
Bert stole an antique costume from a display cabinet and replaced it with a panto outfit, but since this happened off camera, we don’t know how this was achieved. And anyway, 20 minutes later, Sam stuffed it into a plastic bag and handed it back.
With its cinematic, spaghetti western swagger, Frauds could have been nothing more than a pastiche of Thelma & Louise, the archetypal outlaw gals movie.
Jones and Whittaker are immersed in their characters up to the hilt — entirely believable, despite the forced wit of the badinage
But Jones and Whittaker are immersed in their characters up to the hilt — entirely believable, despite the forced wit of the badinage.
How they’re going to steal a Dali masterpiece, I have no idea, and I want to know.
Maybe that chicken is really Feathers McGraw.
