The key to surviving the next couple of weeks of TV is to avoid like the plague anything that smacks of seasonal viewing. So, no Christmas specials (such as the semi-celebrity, elderly grown-ups version of University Challenge where the questions are even more laboriously PC than on the student edition), no Harry Potter, no adverts featuring tinsel, dragons and patronisingly diverse families making merry. Basically, you want to steer clear of terrestrial TV altogether — but with one exception. You may use BBC iPlayer to download the only decent drama series that slipped through the net: Giri/Haji.
Joe Barton’s blackly comic Anglo-Japanese thriller was by some margin the most original and inspired thing on the BBC all year. But it was a bit unlucky with the reviews. Lots of critics clocked from the first episode — which began with a Tarantinoesque Yakuza massacre in Tokyo — that it was exotic, gory, different, and not a little bonkers. But perhaps they found it too hard to categorise to give it the rave notices it deserved.
Giri/Haji is by turns cartoonishly violent, melancholy, funny, romantic, moving, poetic, charming and beautiful. There’s a scene at the end, for example — don’t worry, I’m not spoiling anything — where the characters suddenly break off, mid-violent action, into a lovely, meditative, exquisitely choreographed slow-motion expressive dance. It could have been awful, for such experiments always carry a risk, but instead it was a wonderful, memorable moment redolent of that golden age when writers such as Dennis Potter weren’t afraid to push artistic boundaries.
It’s Barton’s first original authored series, based on a story his girlfriend had told him about her crime-science course. One of the students was a middle-aged detective who’d been sent over from Tokyo.
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