When Hollywood stars stoop to do telly, it can’t just be any old thing. You don’t see Meryl Streep on EastEnders.
They expect special treatment, like Nicole Kidman with the delicious Big Little Lies (Meryl herself has joined the cast for season two this year).
But sometimes special treatment turns toxic: Carey Mulligan got landed with the prestigious but awful thriller Collateral, while Toni Collette’s Wanderlust was hideous.
Richard Gere’s first major foray into TV, MotherFatherSon (BBC2), is in a different league of terrible. It looks glossily smooth but the title alone betrays that this is pretentious claptrap. What you couldn’t guess till you watch is how belly-laugh bad the dialogue is.
Richard Gere’s (left) first major foray into TV, MotherFatherSon (BBC2), is in a different league of terrible
Helen McCrory is Kathryn, the mother of the title, divorced from media mogul Gere, who takes their son Caden (a witless newspaper editor) to lunch and starts to reminisce about his childhood.
She remembers how he ran away on the beach, ‘and when I found you, you were on the sands . . . holding a dying seal’.
I honked with laughter. Scriptwriter Tom Rob Smith has obviously never had a seaside holiday in his life. But it got better: Kathryn recalls how her darling boy sang to the stricken marine mammal, and she serenades him with the song in the restaurant — a sad Irish folk air, naturally, just the sort of thing any little boy would choose.
‘I was so proud of you,’ she weeps. I was weeping too, but for the wrong reasons.
Gere, whose workaholic billionaire looks surprisingly tanned and relaxed for a man with an
