DEBORAH ROSS: The Secrets She Keeps is good but forgettable

The Secrets She Keeps

Monday & Tuesday, BBC1 

Rating:

The Kemps: All True

Sunday, BBC2

Rating:

The Secrets She Keeps is one of those television thrillers that has enough twists to hook you in but will ultimately prove forgettable, like that recent one starring Francesca Annis or that other one starring Sophie Rundle and Martin Compston or that other one starring Julia Ormond. Or that other one starring Joanne Froggatt. I can’t even remember what they were called. It’s a particular genre. It’s the hard to take seriously but not so hard to enjoy (dammit) genre. And it’s good that we forget because, otherwise, how would we have room for the next one that’s inevitably going to come along?

This is an Aussie tale about two women who are pitted against each other, as per. These hard to take seriously but not so hard to enjoy (dammit) thrillers wouldn’t work on any level if women were sisterly, God forbid. So here we have Agatha (Laura ‘Downton’s Lady Edith’ Carmichael), who is poor and downtrodden and has straggly hair and works stacking shelves in a mini-mart. The other is her opposite. The other is beautiful Meghan (Jessica De Gouw), who is a mummy blogger with beautiful hair and lives in a beautiful house with a sports-presenter husband and has two beautiful children with a third on the way. Agatha has a Girl On The Train-type obsession with Meghan, turning up for the same yoga class and that sort of thing. (The Girl On The Train is the one we do remember, possibly because it kicked this genre off.)

Agatha is also pregnant. However, once we learn that she previously lost a baby at 32 weeks, after which she was told she’d never conceive – we discover this through one of the show’s exposition-heavy moments – we know this pregnancy isn’t all it seems. There was a shock twist at the end of the first episode (of six), which wasn’t such a shock if you’d already guessed, which is likely. But, still, a decent enough hook. It’s not where Agatha is going with this – I think we’ve guessed that too; the signposting isn’t exactly discreet – but how. And will she pull it off?

This thriller doesn’t break any particular new ground or venture where similar thrillers haven’t been before. Is Meghan’s life really that shiny? (No, is the short answer.) Will Meghan regret inviting Agatha into her life? (What do you think?) As for the menfolk, as for Meghan’s husband and his best friend, they are cardboard cut-outs who don’t have much to do except be wholly shallow and awful. But just when you are starting to tire, an excellent scene will come along, as when Agatha cons money from the family of the supposed father of her baby, or there’s the news that the supposed father, a marine, has managed to secure leave to be there for the (supposed) baby’s birth.

Plus, Carmichael is terrific, managing to make Agatha repellent but also, on occasion, sympathetic. I will probably see this through. Prior to forgetting all about it and making room for the next one. Which may be due any minute now.

On to The Kemps: All True, where brothers ‘Gary Luther Kemp’ and ‘Martin Gloria Hunniford Kemp’ were taken back to the childhood home that they hadn’t visited ‘since that last documentary three years ago’ and where Martin reflected on growing up poor: ‘We had an outdoor toilet, outdoor living room, outdoor cellar… even the attic was outdoor.’ I did laugh, as I did throughout this delicious spoof mockumentary, where the Kemp boys not only sent themselves up but did so gleefully. You have to love them for that.

Created by writer-director Rhys Thomas, who appeared on screen as the documentary-maker, this sent up their Spandau Ballet years and their rivalries – Martin to Rhys: ‘I don’t want Gary getting more screen time than me just because he wrote the songs’ – and their animosity towards Tony Hadley, and even their marriages. Here, Martin is married to both Pepsi and Shirlie and likes Pepsi better ‘because she lets me go the cinema and doesn’t moan about it’. (Shirlie moaned about it when Martin went to the flicks instead of being there for the birth of their son. ‘It was the night of the Mighty Ducks II premiere,’ he said. ‘What was I expected to do?’)

This was often wonderfully silly. There was an appearance on Who Do You Think You Are?, where they discovered that their great-great-great-great-grandfather invented the peg, and they also discovered a further brother, Ross Kemp, ‘but not that one’. It included celebrity cameos from Daniel Mays and Christopher Eccleston, who turned up to read for their movie franchise, The Hardest British B******* Of The Galaxy, and also Rag’n’Bone Man, who had agreed to cover one of their songs. His riders included Calgon and Finish Quantum dishwasher tablets because ‘I live in a hard water area’.

This was best when it was just slightly off rather than outlandish, and it did veer towards outlandish by the end, but you can’t really quarrel with lines like ‘but everyone was married with Patsy Kensit’. Can you?