The Game (channel 5)
Rating: Four stars
Hallmark cards should include a special “In Sympathy” line for actors who thought they would appear in the second series of a drama, only to be abruptly written out.
“We’re sorry you have to go,/ It must have been a shock./ You were expecting a payday, but/ Instead you’re free./ Whether it was a car accident,/ Illness or lost at sea,/ We’ll remember you in flashbacks/ For a much lower fee.”
It looked like Jason Watkins could be the one who failed to come back for season two of The Game.
The first time around, he played a retired detective convinced that his creepy neighbor Patrick (Robson Green) was a serial killer known as the Ripton Stalker.
The psychological thriller ended last year with his character Huw half-dead from stab wounds, while his wife Alice (Sunetra Sarker) begged next to him in the ambulance: “Stay with me!”
But it was Sunetra who dropped the cast list when The Game returned. She made the classic mistake of taking a walk alone along a narrow country road while talking to her husband on the phone.
It seemed like Jason Watkins was the one who failed to return for season two of The Game… but he’s back for this new series
In a Channel 5 drama, no one survives that.
Alice looked over her shoulder and saw a stunt car driving towards her very slowly and carefully. The camera zoomed in on her expression of rigid horror. And… cut!
Before you know it, Huw is cradling her lifeless body, and by the time the next commercial break is over, they’ve had the funeral.
But Patrick can’t be responsible this time, right? No matter how cunning his twisted mind, how manipulative his cunning lies, how charming yet eerily disturbing his smile, he is behind bars. He certainly cannot project his evil beyond the walls of his cell.
That’s not necessary. He needs prison officer Jackie (Tanya Franks) to do that for him.
She is in love with him and, it turns out, just as good at menacing looks, burglaries and all the other tricks a deranged killer needs.
Patrick sits in his cell and writes poisonous threatening letters to Huw, who stands in his study, pins newspaper clippings and photos to the wall and connects them with colored wires.
The second episode opened with a face-to-face interview in the prison visiting room that was even more claustrophobic and harrowing than the confrontations last time – probably because they were even closer physically, knee to knee.
As long as The Game continues to deliver its set pieces between Huw and Patrick, I want to keep watching
It can be read as a clever metaphor for addiction. “One more time,” Huw pleads, begging to be allowed to investigate
Patrick again. “He’s in my head!”
Or you can just enjoy it for its sheer schlock value and the plot devices that keep the two men constantly dancing around each other.
As long as The Game continues to deliver its set pieces between Huw and Patrick, I want to keep watching.
Last knock of the night:
Not content with squeezing out two episodes of extra footage from their chat show The Assembly, ITV is now putting out ten-minute collections of more out-takes on YouTube, under the name The B-Sides.
Hasn’t that barrel been scraped enough already?
