Boxing Clever: smoking hot David Tennant in Des — and Fantasy Ireland
David Tennant stars as serial killer, Dennis Nilsen, in Des
David Tennant makes me sick. That amount of talent in one person is all the proof you need that God doesn’t exist. Or if she does, David Tennant is probably her son.
His latest outing has him playing Dennis Nilsen in (Virgin Media One, Monday 10pm and Virgin Media Player.) Nilsen, aka Des, was a brutal serial killer in 1980s London, strangling as many as 16 young men, stashing the bodies around his house and decapitating some of the corpses so he could boil their faces beyond recognition. Not the kind of guy you’d like to watch for three hours in a true-crime drama. Unless David Tennant gets his hands on it, and you can’t take your eyes off the screen.
We first meet Des when he arrives home from work to find detectives checking on the smell of rotting flesh in his drains. He accompanies the detectives down to the station and confesses to his crimes with a twinge of regret, as if he had knocked down a dog in the street.
The rest of the show is basically people smoking cigarettes: the lead detective, Peter Jay (played brilliantly by Daniel Mays) needs Des to help him identify the murdered men so they spend a lot of time chain-smoking across a desk from each other.
Tennant portrays Des as a toddler — charming, engaging and funny in places, and then petulant when the police don’t give him what he wants. He’s attractive enough that you wouldn’t mind spending an hour chatting to him, as long as he was chained to the desk and you didn’t have to work your way through a packet of Benson & Hedges.
The other lead character in Des is his biographer, Brian Masters, played with twitching uncertainty by Jason Watkins. Cue loads more smoking between him and the subject, where we learn that Des was traumatised by the death of his grandfather when he was young. Des reckons this might explain why he ended up as a cold-hearted killer, at which point you’re screaming the ‘16 Des!’ at the screen.
This three-parter is gripping to the end, with a nice bit of tension during the trial when Des decides he couldn’t possibly be criminally responsible for his actions. And if you still want more, is on the Virgin Media Player as well — a documentary about the killer voiced by, you guessed it, David Tennant.
I’m not sure (RTÉ2 Thursday 11:20 pm, and RTÉ Player) is aimed at me. The animated series, written by the two guys behind Zig and Zag, has monsters, Michael D, a greedy priest, and an evil leprechaun called Flatley. The late-night slot suggests something edgy, but it goes for pleasantly funny and quirky, rather than the brutal bite you’d get with Podge and Rodge. That doesn’t make it wrong though. There is something soothing about Michael D and his three helpers taking on the forces of evil, in the time of coronavirus. It grew on me over the 10 minutes of episode one. I’ll tune in for the next installment.
