The BBC and ITV are still making drama, but the spiralling costs (£350,000 an hour is considered cheap) mean there are fewer shows. Now 5 has come along with a way of making more drama for less by commissioning from a small group of tried and tested companies, using a band of well-known actors, and filming outside the UK.
The upshot is it’s working, with Osman saying 5’s dramas are doing “huge, huge numbers”, though no details were provided.
Geordie actor Jill Halfpenny and Sally Lindsay are two of the best-known faces in 5 drama, both regularly occupying what I think of affectionately as the 9pm Mad Women Slot. Incredibly, Number One Fan finds them together for the first time. Think Pacino and De Niro in Heat, but with a better drop earrings game.
Halfpenny plays Lucy Logan, a daytime television presenter who is not in any way, shape, or form to be confused with Lorraine Kelly. She’s not Scottish, for a start. So what if Lucy, which sounds a bit like Lolly, Kelly’s nickname, is also a hard-working lassie with fingers in many pies, including being the face of a fashion label. Not our Lorraine, clear?
Lucy, meanwhile, is so down-to-earth she still does her own supermarket shop. It is while hunter-gathering that her bag is snatched, and the mugger sprints off. Not fast enough, however, for Donna (Lindsay), who springs out of nowhere, rams him with a trolley and proceeds to slap him into submission.
Lucy is so grateful, but modest Donna is having none of it. “I’m just ex-military,” she says. “The training kicks in.” Get that woman over to the Strait of Hormuz and get her slapping, you are thinking. Instead, Lucy invites her to the studio and showers her number one fan with lots of freebies. But is Donna all she seems?
It would be a dull old world if she were. Happily, the makers of Number One Fan have bigger, increasingly incredible things in mind for Lucy and Donna as the story unfolds over four nights.
Surrounding Lucy and Donna, as is traditional, are several useless or untrustworthy men, including one obsessive, played by the always good value Dean Andrews (Emmerdale). His character has a novel recipe for the truffles he sends to Lucy. No spoilers, but maybe hold off on that tootsie till 10 pm.
Halfpenny and Lindsay (new detective series, anyone?) are both ex-Coronation Street. I’d say they can do this stuff in their sleep, but that might be considered dismissive. The story might take one or five handbrake turns, and by Thursday the doors will be well and truly blown off, but this pair give it their considerable all.
As that very wise man Osman said, “Not everything has to be Succession … Most people want a good story well told.”
On that measure, Halfpenny and Lindsay more than deliver.
