Secrets

This article first appeared in The Age, October 30, 2004

The British are good at secrets; they are the stuff of their history, and thrillers. Did Queen Victoria really believe that the spirit of her beloved Albert had entered John Brown, her Scottish manservant, in a twist of logic that allowed her to justify offering him 'every conjugal privilege'? And if not, why did she ask a servant to ensure that she be buried with his picture? The servant was not to tell her children this had happened, not even Victoria's heir, the long suffering Prince Edward, the son she blamed for Albert's death because he'd arranged for an 'actress' to greet his father in bed one night thus setting off a complicated series of incidents which resulted in Albert's death.

The final episode of Looking for Victoria (tonight, ABC, 7.30 p.m.) reminds us that dark and complicated private lives are not the sole privilege of the current House of Windsor. Nor are such secrets relegated to Royalty. Families are messy things, as PD James lays out in the new two-part-series The Murder Room (Sunday, ABC, 8.30 pm), and Cracker (tonight, 9.30pm, ABC). In both series brothers are at war, husband and wives battle like there's no tomorrow and sisters act out like teenagers even if they are middle-aged. There is nothing straightforward about how anyone is related to anyone else but we can assume in discovering the complications we will get to the heart of the crimes at hand. In a sense these crimes are really excuse to explore the complicated threads of genes and emotion that connect disparate people - criminals and investigators alike. The crimes create the pressure that blows everyone's secrets into the open.

Martin Shaw is compelling as Commander Adam Dalgliesh the policeman/poet who, like Fitz, has a problem with women but great intuitive capacity with criminals and their victims. He is called to investigate the death of a well-connected doctor, Neville Dupayne, who is burned to death in his parked sports car. The death replicates one of the crimes displayed in The Murder Room, a museum owned by the Dupayne family, which is dedicated to murders between the wars. There are, of course, dozens of suspects and it is slightly predictable that almost everyone who walks into a scene had reason to see Neville dead. As is often the case in such dramas there is much sexual weirdness humming away under the surface and alot of claustrophobic forms of loving.

The British are particularly good at this - perhaps it's the grey skies which oppress everyone. A small town atmosphere presses in on The Murder Room, depsite the fact that it seems to be set in London. That city is also a character in Cracker, albeit an anonymous and ugly one that offer none of the hope that would keep many of its characters going.

One of the secrets that eats away at people in both shows is that they are gay which, according to the logic of such secrets, means people are killed, that they are killers, and that they want to kill themselves. Thank god, after all that, for the relatively sunny world of Queer as Folk (Monday, SBS, 10.00 pm) which returns this monday night. In Pittsburgh people are out, and there aren't many secrets, even if life is no longer one long party .

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