Reckless; The Movie
Sunday Times; London; Sep 27, 1998; Maggie Brown;
The Guardian; Manchester; Oct 12, 1998; Adam Sweeting;
Daily Mail; London; Oct 16, 1998; Jaci Stephen;
Sunday Times; London (UK); Oct 18, 1998; AA Gill;
Sunday Times; London; Sep 27, 1998; Maggie Brown;
Hearts are beating, ready for the sequel to Reckless. Why is it the stuff of fantasy, asks Maggie Brown, and not just for women of a certain age? 'Isn't it wonderful, Reckless is back," said a fortysomething divorced friend of mine. "I'd forgotten how steamy it was." And we shared a private smile.
ITV has just repeated the series, a surprise hit with 12m viewers last year, starring the heart-throb Robson Green and glamorous Francesca Annis - recently voted "sexiest woman on television" by Radio Times readers - locked in a wild, passionate love triangle across an ominously large age gap. Younger man hopelessly in love with older married beauty, a couple who behave so badly, they have it off in a car park under the stars while jealous husband throws tantrums. It's enough to send teenagers running in disgust from the room and grouchy husbands out to the pub. The TV critics didn't take much notice at the time and haven't troubled themselves with a repeat, naturally. That's all right. It's just left mil-lions of the rest of us contentedly lapping up one of the most sizzlingly successful dramas of the 1990s. Even better, the four-part original, which ends on Saturday, was a warm-up for the sequel - Reckless, the Movie - which will be shown on October 10.
A delicious week of speculation lies ahead. Can such mad love survive and lead to happiness? If the Reckless phenomenon has bypassed you, here's a catch-up. The ubiquitous Robson Green plays one of the nicest screen versions of his Geordie self; he's Dr Owen Springer, a rising youngish surgeon, who returns to Manchester from London to live with his ailing dad, played by that professional screen villain David Bradley. They live in a Victorian terraced house; pub on corner, betting shop next door. There's lots of working-class life, but Reckless moves effortlessly across the class divisions. Springer falls head over heels for Anna Fairley (Annis), the sophisticated, cool, careerist wife of his nasty consultant boss, Richard Crane (Michael Kitchen). His attentions, initially spurned, are returned when Fairley discovers (thanks to some undercover work by Springer) that her husband is having a fling with a bitchy hospital manager, played brilliantly by Daniela Nardini.
The appeal of Reckless, besides a topnotch cast, is that it's based on an age-old truism, that faint heart never won fair lady. If you want something, you have to go for it. But, and here's the key: the chasing usually involves older men in pursuit of somewhat younger women, or at least their contemporaries. What's keeping millions of us pinned to our sofas is that a mature lady is being fought for here. Also, Robson/Springer is that rarely sighted creature, whether on television or in real life, a real man, keen on straightforward one-to-one hetero-sexual sex. Okay, he's a bit short to be genuine heart-throb material, but we do see lots of his hairy chest. He plays football in his Newcastle United strip, can't cook anything more ambitious than Marmite toasties and bacon sandwiches - though he aspires - and sends gorgeous flowers to the woman he loves. He's not short of money, but he never seems calculating. Best of all - and this is the charm of the series - in a world of tricksy screwed-up men, you never doubt that this is truly love. He doesn't play hard to get, or indulge in any games. He never wavers in his goal: to be with her. He blurts out declarations of love, without reserve. Paul Abbott, the writer, who learnt his craft on Coronation Street, deliberately constructed it this way. Springer is allowed to break all the rules in pursuit of the woman of his dreams. He courteously never inquires about Anna's real age. He doesn't talk about the difficulties of having children with a menopausal woman. He shrugs off the well-meaning warnings about Oedipus complexes from younger colleagues. So when Fairley's marriage collapses, and Crane and Springer have a deeply funny and undignified punch-up over her, it is the bereft Springer who moves heaven and earth to pursue her to a Lake District hideaway when she tries to escape the pressure, wheedling the phone number from her secretary. The greater truth, of course, is that everyone loves a lover, especially one who is kind to old ladies (Springer is especially gracious to Anna's mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease). We're presented with a portrait of an educated rough diamond with the kindest of hearts, a persistence that never gets stale...all combined with those devastating blue eyes.
All a fantasy staged for sad middle-aged women like me? Well, the interesting thing is that Abbott wrote this piece from experience. As a young aspiring writer fresh from university, he married an older, more educated woman (though they subsequently divorced). And it's a fact that Annis herself is engaged in a well-publicised relationship with that much younger film-star hunk Ralph Fiennes. This all stokes up the watchability factor. What I've also really clocked this time around is the genius of the wardrobe mistress. Anna Fairley is decked out in a range of subtle, glamorous everyday clothes. The series is an object lesson in how to look great without invoking the words mutton and lamb. You could start a Reckless line at Marks & Spencer: millions of us would turn up for soft turtlenecks (no sagging necks), flattering autumnal-coloured skirts and versions of her soft leather coat with fur collar. Cue Reckless, The Movie, which starts one year on and opens in the trendy warehouse flat they've bought together. Can such a passionate pair live happily ever after? Does everything, after all, have to extract a price? Till Saturday the 10th.
The Guardian; Manchester; Oct 12, 1998; Adam Sweeting;
It's difficult to concoct a satisfying sequel to a successful series, especially when you have to keep the characters and the interlocking threads of the drama in play for the duration of a sprawling two-hour special. So writer Paul Abbott deserves free drinks for life and a new word processor for his ebullient efforts in Reckless: The Sequel (ITV, Sunday). In the original series, what initially looked like the implausible pairing of Robson Green as Owen Springer and Francesca Annis as Anna soon developed its own eccentric allure, though it probably wouldn't have done without Michael Kitchen's superb performance as Anna's cuckolded husband, Dr Richard Crane. This trio naturally formed the core of The Sequel, but Abbott - faced with a dramatic situation that boiled down to `Will Owen and Anna get married or not?' - deftly brought pace and colour to the story by deploying a raft of additional characters.
Geoffrey Palmer and Pauline Yates bickered and fussed as Crane's parents, who found their son every bit as obnoxious and self-centred as everybody else did. Anna Patrick played Annis's prickly and unlovable sister, while Abbott extracted mounting tension from the fraught relationship between Crane and Conor Mullen's Dr John McGinley, as the latter struggled to cope with Crane's increasingly irrational demands.
The Sequel was especially successful in balancing farce and black comedy against vexatious adult preoccupations like getting older, the way the past can corrode the present, and the difficulty of being decisive even when you know you must. Green made Springer convincing by keeping him simple, while Annis exploited several opportunities to shake off her customary hauteur and show some crockery-shattering emotion.
Again, though, it was Kitchen who controlled the show, as a man whose outward display of icy control was dismantled by the jealousy and rage erupting uncontrollably inside him. He felt compelled to travel back from a conference in Iceland by dog-sled, kayak and snowmobile, merely in order to ruin his ex-wife's wedding. He was reduced to trawling the internet for information about infidelity (`Twenty-two thousand matches found,' reported his computer drolly), then shouting it through the letter box to persuade Springer that his marriage to an older woman was doomed. Unfortunately, it was the wrong letter box, and Crane was arrested for a breach of the peace. The final ironic twist was that it was the battered and humiliated Crane who ended up with most of the sympathy.
Daily Mail; London; Oct 16, 1998; Jaci Stephen;
Men keep telling me that they fancy Francesca Annis. Robson Green's character Owen fancied Francesca Annis's character Anna in Reckless. Magazine and newspaper articles keep telling me how fanciable she is. And, in real life, Ralph Fiennes left his wife for her. So why can't I see it? That was the problem I had when Reckless first hit the screen. I just couldn't accept that Anna was a woman in her early 40s. Her hair had that shampoo and set, circa 1965, quality about it and she did very little but stare enigmatically during the rare moments when she wasn't taking her clothes off. The shampoo and set was back for Reckless: The Sequel (ITV) and ended up getting hitched to Owen, in just as unconvincing fashion as when it attracted him the first time around. But on this occasion I didn't care two figs, because the real star of this very witty drama was Michael Kitchen, who played Anna's ex-husband Richard.
Kitchen acted his co-stars off the screen. He did so before, too, but in the sequel, writer Paul Abbott gave him much more to do, and the result was a fascinating psychological portrait of a man driven by obsession, malice and love. The emotional journey was brilliantly conveyed, as Richard fed his obsession and attempted, in increasingly barmy ways (the excursion back from Iceland - dogs, kayak, snowmobile - was a riot), to prevent his wife from marrying her young lover. The moment when he finally realised he no longer wanted what he had fought so hard for, was devastating. This was an exceptional performance by someone I am now convinced is our greatest living actor. The range, the depth, the wit, the passion, the pain - it was all there in Kitchen's extraordinary charismatic presence. If he does not win an award for this, there is no justice. But then, maybe sometimes it's enough to know you're a genius.
Sunday Times; London (UK); Oct 18, 1998; AA Gill;
Back home, the big show was a second gander at Francesca Annis and Robson Green playing chemistry with each other in a two-hour feature, Reckless - The Sequel (Sunday, ITV). The original knicker-wetting, excellent series was good because Annis is still someone who makes a mockery of the term "older woman". In fact, when any of the cast mentioned to Green that she was 18 years older than him and what was he thinking of, I shouted at the screen: "Yes, but she's Francesca Annis, the normal rules don't apply! She's got a special dispensation from God and Oil of Ulay!"
The film version swapped the edge-of-the-seat, will-they-won't- they tension for an altogether larkier attitude, which wasn't altogether an improvement. Indeed, Annis's part as the love interest was relegated to plot-pushing. She'd come on, shove the story, and swan off. The high point was unquestionably Michael Kitchen, who played the fabulously furrowed and impotently compulsive ex-husband. It was a controlled, not to say knotted, comic performance of real stature. And there was Geoffrey Palmer as his father, who has now honed his schtick down to a terse telegraphese. I wonder if people write ordinary dialogue for him and he just naturally edits it into military shorthand before delivering it through a face like an eunuch's scrotum. The production oleaginously slipped into the inevitable ahh! of a wedding finale.
Many thanks to Deb for digging out these reviews.