Tendentious drivel

It told the story of two best mates, Frankie and Peter, serving in an unidentified northern regiment in Afghanistan where Peter quickly discovers he can’t cope under fire — and as a punishment is made the unit’s ‘camp bitch’ by the sadistic Lance Corporal Buckley (Mackenzie Crook).

‘Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.’ So I suppose you could argue that  Jimmy McGovern was merely following the fine tradition of Robert Browning when he wrote his drama about cowardice, bullying and murder among British soldiers on the frontline in Afghanistan. But I wouldn’t. I think Accused (BBC1, Monday) was despicable: among the most emetic, dishonest and utterly wrongheaded dramas I’ve ever seen on television.

It told the story of two best mates, Frankie and Peter, serving in an unidentified northern regiment in Afghanistan where Peter quickly discovers he can’t cope under fire — and as a punishment is made the unit’s ‘camp bitch’ by the sadistic Lance Corporal Buckley (Mackenzie Crook).

Buckley was a gift of a part for Crook (the psychotic nerd from The Office), with his hollow, staring eyes and skeletal frame. He got to smear his bitches in liquid excrement, gob in their food, butt them in the face with a rifle, force them to urinate on one another’s beds, even beat up a Military Policeman when he threatened to arrest him. Gosh, it must have been fun to play a character of such pure, unmitigated evil: and then to be knifed to death in a way you just know is going to have everyone watching cheering to the rafters.

But while such crude moral schemata work well enough in Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, you do hope for something a little more sophisticated from the BBC.