Aidan Smith's TV week: Deliver Us, Torn, King Rocker

Small town, big secrets. TV loves this set-up and will plonk a large flat stone in the middle of Sleepyville’s main drag and invite us to lift it, hoping that we find creepy-crawlies, not cliches.

Julie Gayet as school-teacher Victoire in Torn moves to small-town France and reuintes with her big love

Two new dramas can’t resist the scenario - one French, the other Danish - and I can’t resist sticking with them, at least for now. First, the new Scandi-noir thriller, Deliver Us (Channel 4), which begins with a teenaged boy mucking about in a field, flattening the corn, a scene which makes me think of Theresa May and her answer to the question: “What was the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

The image is shattered when the boy, Askell, is killed by a truck. Askell’s dad, Peter, calls it murder but the driver, Mike, continues to stalk the town as the resident psycho. Kasper, who was in the passenger seat, has just been allowed home from “the mental ward”.

Kasper’s parents, John and Anna, forbid him to see Public Enemy No 1 until Mike beats up John. Mike can’t be removed from the local bar because he has some weird hold over the owner, Tom. Somebody call the police! No, that’s Viktor, a one-man operation covering 11 towns - he’s too busy (and a wimp).

Morten Hee Andersen is Mike in Deliver Us, seemingly untouchable as the local bully

Returning to this fear-ridden place is Paul’s brother Martin, a hunky novelist possibly based on Karl Ove Knausgaard. Women love Martin and right away Askell’s old girlfriend is bonking him in his flash car. Anna is the girl he left behind when he got the hell out.

The sex in Deliver Us takes you by surprise. For instance, Mike and Tom’s frustrated wife Bibi on the pub pool table. I guess there’s nothing else to do, apart from cower. This is a town, you’re thinking, which needs a festival.

Then … cut to festival where everyone tries hard to enjoy themselves until Peter shows up drunk and rants about civilisation having gone for a burton because 100 years ago Mike would just have been strung up and everyone could have lived happily ever after. What’s going to happen? Dunno, but this is desperate, menacing, gripping stuff.

If Deliver Us summons up a picture, however fleetingly, of our uninspiring last-but-one Prime Minister, then Torn (All4) reminds me of old Cointreau ads for risible romantic declarations such as:

Comedian Stewart Lee digs up the monster musical talent that is Robert Lloyd in King Rocker

She: “Ah, you dreamed of owning a restaurant like this.”

He: “One of my two dreams, yes. The restaurant and marrying you.”

She is Victoire, a teacher; he is childhood sweetheart Florent. The setting here is a petite ville in southern France, Victoire having dragged her husband Samuel and two children there from Paris. The older boy hates the quieter life while the hubby remarks that at least he finishes work early now, though initially we don’t know what he does for a living.

But it’s not quiet for long. At least not in Victoire’s heart as passions are reignited. She should be careful; she has a heart condition. And mountaineering doesn’t seem like a good idea either, but she and Florent used to climb when they were young lovers and now they’re doing it again, the climbing and the loving.

Could Torn, then, be called a rope opera? Being French it's not shy about melodramatic moments such as the hapless Samuel finding the still-warm bodies of symbolic kamikaze birds on his patio. Victoire forgets their wedding anniversary; Florent, trying for a baby with his partner, forgets an IVF appointment. They forget everything when they’re together and after Florent has chucked a steak the size of a dustbin lid onto the grill and got her in a clinch, Victoire has to caution: “Don’t overcook it, you have a Michelin star to uphold."

Maybe Torn will overcook; in fact, being swept along by its fundamental Frenchness, I almost hope it does. One of the adulterers has blurted to their other half about the affair, prompting an extreme reaction, which in turn rather cleverly reveals Samuel’s job. I don’t think you’ll know any of the cast of Deliver Us and perhaps only Bruno Debrandt - from the already much-missed French policier Spiral - in Torn. But in the case of both shows, I reckon you’ll want to find out what happens next.

I think I know my post-punk until I watch King Rocker (Sky Arts). The career of Robert Lloyd, leader of the Prefects who then became the Nightingales, passed me by. Thankfully the comedian Stewart Lee was paying attention and he’s come up with a quite magnificent film out of two middle-aged Midlands geezers drinking and laughing in various pubs, establishing it as the new gold standard for rockumentaries.

“Career” might be pushing it. As one of Lloyd’s bandmates remarks: “We were popular with everyone apart from the people who buy records.” Lee’s approach is gumshoe forensic, rounding up famous folk (Duran Duran’s John Taylor, foodie Nigel Slater, Confessions of … actor Robin Askwith) who amusingly struggle to remember their encounters with Lloyd.

This is actually two rise-fall-rehabilitation stories in one with Lee equally fascinated by the King Kong statue which once stood in Birmingham’s Bullring before a move to a giant outdoor market in Edinburgh where it came a cropper. Happily restored in the Lake District the two men walk round its formidable backside. Lee loves Lloyd’s lyrics and how they mine profundity from ordinariness. “The problem with you is you over-analyse things,” chuckles his hero. Well, so many of these programmes under-analyse.

A message from the Editor:Thank you for reading this article. We're more reliant on your support than ever as the shift in consumer habits brought about by coronavirus impacts our advertisers. If you haven't already, please consider supporting our trusted, fact-checked journalism by taking out a digital subscription.