Is there a German word for the moment when, in the matter of art, utter disbelief sets in? At first, The Jetty, a BBC drama starring Jenna Coleman, seems vaguely plausible: OK acting, atmospheric locations, the odd quirk (the plot features Japanese knotweed, which will endear it to the Daily Mail, a newspaper lately obsessed with the alien invader, even as it has a breakdown over the scene in a which a schoolgirl does something very rude to a horse). But don’t get settled, there on your sofa. Thirty minutes into the first episode, Coleman’s character, DC Ember Manning, rants about Airbnb and struggling locals to an out-of-towner whose holiday property has been burned down by an arsonist – and, in as long as it takes her to tell him to dig a mega-basement back at home instead, you will doubtless lose faith with the entire project, just as I did. She’s supposed to be a copper, not Ed Davey on speed.
The Jetty has been trailed hard, sold as a kind of hip alternative to Happy Valley (to that show’s gritty, small-town northern-ness they’ve added – wait for it – a podcaster). Except it’s not fit to touch the hem of Catherine Cawood’s high-vis jacket. Oh boy, it’s bad: so awful, in fact, that I can’t stop watching, crazed as I am to know when Manning will next look over her shoulder and see either an instance of possible sexual violence or yet another coincidence (one or the other happens every four minutes).
The ridiculousness builds like gas in a party balloon. In the second episode, Manning’s mother, Sylvia (Amelia Bullmore), tries to contact a missing teenager for her via a seance. The girl in question, Amy (Bo Bragason), was last seen (by us) in flashback, playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” on the piano – a sardonic soundtrack in honour of her father, who is having sex with an estate agent down the hall. And, yes, it does put him quite off his stride.
Amy vanished 17 years ago, a cold case Manning wants to crack, possibly because she has just found a photo of her own late husband, Malachy, with Amy (it was in a shoebox, natch). Yes, it’s weird he never mentioned he knew Amy before the testicular cancer got him, but it’s weirder still that Manning now sticks this picture on her fridge door, as if it were a Snoopy magnet or a takeaway menu. But then, no one behaves as they should in these parts. Take the true-crime podcaster, Riz (Weruche Opia), a “specialist” in violence against women. Although she’s ostensibly here in rural Lancashire to nosey into Amy’s disappearance herself, she spends most of her time drinking red wine in one of the aforementioned Airbnbs (a converted cow house whose owner clearly went mad down at Dunelm).
Riz bears about as much resemblance to someone who knows anything about violence against women as Wallace and Gromit or Peppa Pig. No, she won’t share her leads with the police (probably because she doesn’t have any). No, she can’t let anyone see the case file she has miraculously filched (though here’s a Post-It with a name scribbled on it). “What do you think you can do that I can’t?” she asks Manning, in her annoying, sassy voice – a question so dumb, I wonder if the script editor had exited to Dunelm, too. Let’s think about it, shall we? Manning has a warrant card, a squad car, access to police computers, and a team at her disposal that can drag lakes, among other things. Riz, on the other hand, has a fluffy bathrobe, turquoise acrylics, and a chronic ponderousness when it comes to podcasting (“This is a beautiful place, but beneath the surface… blah, blah…”).
All this is laughable, but it’s also insulting. It is impossibly hard to get a series to screen, and yet The Jetty made it. Cat Jones, its creator, is keen to reveal her amazing discovery that, even “post #MeToo”, misogyny is still all around if you look beneath the carpet, and the BBC is thrilled to be able to deliver a dramatic dispatch from the outer reaches of civilisation (or somewhere, possibly Bacup). Personally, I’m weary of listening to homilies about male violence voiced by characters who are in every other respect strikingly inarticulate. Such only-for-entertainment gravity, tinny and written by numbers, is just another form of levity in disguise – one of a kind that most women could at this point very well do without.
The Jetty
Available on BBC iPlayer
[See also: The Turkish Detective is both familiar and delightfully other]
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This article appears in the 17 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The American Berserk