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Max factor
Midnight Man (ITV1, 9pm); Come Dine With Me (C4, 8pm)
LIKE policemen and private eyes
on television, fictional journalists
come complete with a set of
quirks, doubts and a troubled personal
life. Max Raban, anti-hero
of three-part thriller, Midnight
Man, ticks all the boxes as a maverick journalist.
He's out of work, having cost his newspaper
employers a lot of money over a disputed
story. His wife's left him, taking his
young daughter with her. He lives on Pot
Noodles.
And to make matters worse, he has a phobia
- a fear of going out in daylight. Hence his
name, Midnight Man.
But unlike that other night person Dracula,
he doesn't sleep in a coffin and, as he's
played by James Nesbitt, he possesses a certain
charm despite a silly hat, chin stubble
and dirty mac.
Most nights you'll find him going through
people's rubbish in search of juicy titbits of
information about their personal lives and
habits.
Any useful stuff is peddled to his old boss,
the sort of newspaper man who has nothing
better to do than sit around waiting for a disgraced
reporter to ring with far-fetched
stories.
Max strikes lucky - if rooting through
other people's rubbish can ever be considered
to have an element of luck - when he's asked
to dig the dirt on a defence secretary having
an affair with an erotic dancer.
Among the minister's trash, he finds a fax
referring to a headless body. He ties this in
with the discovery of a corpse in this condition.
He may come to regret making the connection
because he's stumbled across that
favourite of modern thrillers, the government
conspiracy.
Could there really be a death squad going
around eliminating people who hold views
at odds with the establishment? Does that
nice Reece Dinsdale mean it when he barks
"Kill her" down the phone when Max hesitates
to do as he's told?
Like Raban himself, David Kane's thriller
is treading familiar territory with conspiracy
theories and government cover-ups. This
is a world where men in balaclavas bundle
innocent folk into the back of vans and shoot
them in the head - and that's only for not paying
the TV licence.
How long, you wonder, before increasinglymad
Max sees the light, both literally and figuratively?
It could be fun, in a blood-splattered
way, finding out over the next two
episodes.
MORE tears, tensions and disasters in
the latest edition of Come Dine With
Me, the programme in which four
strangers cook three-course meals for each
other and then award marks. The winner
takes home £1,000.
Those responsible for the revised format of
a single one-hour programme instead of five
SCRIBE AND PHARISEES: James Nesbitt plays Max Raban, a journalist who stumbles on a government conspiracy scandal
TWO MINDS: Jonathan Race and Robert Pickavance in Patient No 1
half-hours have abandoned altogether the notion
that this is a cooking programme and
opted for the reality TV route of bringing together
four people with the potential of rubbing
each other up the wrong way.
Vegan Tony, a 68-year-old campaigner on
vegetarian issues, is there to stir conversation
in the dining room as well as in the pan in
the kitchen.
His idea of conversation while eating is to
recount how he became vegetarian at 50. He
was shooting pigeons, winged one of the
birds and had to kill it by hand.
The other three aren't put off their food,
doing rather better than the chap last week
who excused himself from the table after the
first course to put his head down the toilet
and throw up.
Energetic grandmother Jan drives the others
crazy with her incessant talking on the
first night. They can't get a word in edgeways,
apart from complaining that "I don't like
fish" on learning the main course is lemon
sole.
Back at Tony's place, he's serving avocado
and smoked tofu for starters. "Is there a
taste," asks Nick, which I take as a bad thing
to say and don't hold out much hope of Tony's
wish to convert his diners to vegetarianism.
Fun-loving mum Sam isn't saying anything.
She has her hand over her mouth because
she feels sick. Again, not a good omen.
The next night she looks queasy again
when, after a discussion on food that makes
your wee smell, Tony produces another nausea-
inducing story about drinking something
in Japan that resembled phelgm.
I was worried too by Jan's starter, ezogelin,
which sounds more like a disease than a
Turkish soup.
10:17am Thursday 8th May 2008
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