5 December 2024

Netflix’s Black Doves is as irresistible as it is annoying

This festive spy thriller is farcical and freewheeling –and like a decent cracker it packs a certain bang.

What to watch this Christmas? As I write, the tape of Gavin & Stacey’s return after five years away is still under armed guard in the tinsel-bedecked office of the BBC’s director-general – presumably, it’s hidden next to the new presenter of Match of the Day – and I’m therefore unable to tell you much about developments in the mellow world of Nessa (Ruth Jones), Smithy (James Corden) et al.

So let us turn instead – jingle bells! – to Black Doves, a series on Netflix that comes with more festive lights than Blackpool Pier at illumination time. Saving this one up for the holiday can only be a good thing: a hefty swig of advocaat will help it go down.

The show in question is a spy thriller by Joe Barton (Giri/Haji, The Lazarus Project), and it’s set in London at Christmastime. But wait, this is Netflix’s capital, not ours. The city looks weirdly shiny and sanitised; even as the bodies pile up – like Black Friday bargains, they come thick and fast – it’s more stage set than throbbing metropolis.

And its characters seem to have been built to match it. Helen (Keira Knightley) is married to a cabinet minister called (honestly) Wallace Webb (Andrew Buchan), and they live in a World of Interiors house with their cute twins, from where she operates as a spy, not for some foreign government (too old school) but for an organisation whose raison d’être is capitalist rather than ideological. Personally, I think Knightley makes for a somewhat unconvincing spook, in spite of her karate-chop moves whenever a bad guy arrives. But as usual, Buchan is brilliant: the more preposterous his lines, the more plausible he makes them sound.

Helen’s partner – or at any rate, her protector – is Sam (Ben Wishaw), who’s single and gay, though not averse to the odd pick-up in spite of the dangers (presumably) of kompromat. And when he’s not busy lugging an automatic weapon around in a guitar case, he’s drinking Sauvignon and snorting coke with his architect friends. Again, I struggle slightly to believe in Wishaw, and, although I perk up whenever the pair’s handler Reed (Sarah Lancashire) appears, even she seems out of place here. The script’s tone is so wildly uneven, and the characterisation so thin, it feels like Lancashire is doing her best with some pretty bad (for her) material. Sure, Barton is sometimes riffing on the classics of fictional spying, but when Reed meets Helen in a half-empty cinema that’s playing Brief Encounter, it just seems ridiculous given the constant presence of slick tech in every other scene.

I won’t say too much about the plot, partly because I don’t want to spoil it, but mostly because, after two episodes, I still don’t know what the hell is going on. Suffice to say that Helen, we find out almost immediately, has been having an affair, and this has compromised her and resulted in bloody mayhem. Reed is furious and Sam has been called in to clean up, except he’s got some kind of underworld debt to pay as well – and also, the Chinese ambassador is dead, possibly murdered, and his daughter missing. I mean, it’s a lot. If this was a hamper, you’d still be opening pâté de campagne in February.

But still, I’m going to keep watching. If Black Doves is often farcical – while Helen deals with her enemies in her kitchen, upstairs her MP husband performs a metaphor by snoring on obliviously – its commitment to the unlikely gives it a freewheeling spirit that is as irresistible as it is annoying. I guess I do want to know if the ambassador was murdered etc (and let us hope it had nothing to do with the Ferrero Rocher), but mostly I’m just interested in finding out what, ultimately, Barton is really up to.

Spycraft performed for the highest bidder rather than for a nation state speaks so well to the times; we’re almost edging into satire. It’s oddly satisfying when one of Sam’s expert contacts is revealed to be working on a make-up counter at Liberty, as if lipstick and fingerprints were on some kind of continuum and vanity was almost as serious a sin as carrying out a hit.

As Christmas messages go, this isn’t very “Hark the Herald”, I know. But like a decent cracker, it does at least pack a certain bang.

Black Doves
Netflix