I always used to wonder why casting directors ever sent for Dougray Scott when they might just as well have used an old chest of drawers or a pile of deckchairs instead, but at last this gloomy Scottish actor seems to be coming into his own. Maybe his stint in Desperate Housewives kicked something loose, but he wasn't bad at all in BBC One's Day of the Triffids at New Year, and he's better still in this four-part gangster drama set in Manchester's terrifying criminal underworld.
Scott plays Michael O'Connor, a former Manc crime lord of epic notoriety, now trying to live a new life and start a new family in Ireland, following his release from prison. Needless to say, the ghosts of his dark and bitter past come calling when his 15-year-old son Sean (Reece Noi) is caught up in the fatal shooting of a teenage gang-member in Manchester. Sean has been living with his aunt Connie (Sophie Okonedo), a police officer and the sister of O'Connor's murdered wife. Despite Connie's determination to keep Sean from being sucked into the local networks of criminal gangs, and indeed Sean's success in keeping his nose clean, he becomes a victim of circumstances. He witnesses one shooting, is hunted down by the shooter because he recognised him, then finds himself taking the rap when the killer himself is shot. Michael, already wracked with guilt for being an absent father to his son, decides he must leave his Irish idyll and come back to Manchester to do everything in his power to help Sean, now incarcerated within the morale-sapping walls of Strangeways prison.
Screenwriter Frank Deasy (best known for his work on Prime Suspect) has knitted together a dense, claustrophobic web of interconnected lives and entwined narratives. Unusually for British TV, he has managed to evoke something of the labyrinthine texture of American series like The Wire or The Shield, at least as much as anyone could within a framework of four episodes rather than American-style multiple seasons. Deasy died last September, but at least must have derived some satisfaction from seeing Father & Son win rave reviews when it was shown in his native Ireland a few months earlier.
Deasy's intention was to depict the way lives are shaped by accidents of birth or geography, so that the noblest intentions are boxed in and suffocated by bleak surroundings and a lack of options. It's a theme Dougray Scott has talked up in several press interviews, pointing out that his character, Michael O'Connor, was born into a world of criminal violence and ended up in a young offenders' institution, "which is basically an apprentice shop for criminals. How do you judge someone like that? What other opportunities does he have?"
Well, you're forced to judge O'Connor rather harshly when you get a heads-up about his past from armed response copper DCI Tony Conroy (a tough but sympathetic Ian Hart). He was involved in drugs, armed robbery and gun-running, and after his wife Lynn's murder, he arranged (from his prison cell) the torture and murder of her killers.
But Father & Son derives much of its power from the sense that O'Connor's return to Manchester, a move hinting strongly at a dark and bloody ending, is driven by the same tragic machinery that has dragged Sean into a life he struggled to avoid, and which must shower collateral damage on his aunt Connie and O'Connor's pregnant partner too. Scott's impressive performance manages to suggest a man sensing a last chance of redemption, while never letting you forget that his is a life neck-deep in cruelty and violence. The ties that bind begin to choke the protagonists when Sean is taken under the wing of prison kingpin and O'Connor's former criminal partner Barrington Smith (a flesh-creepingly scary Terence Maynard, pictured above with Reece Noi), and it becomes clear that Smith has manipulated events in order to bust himself out of jail. Nemesis, retribution, come-uppance etc will all play out inexorably over the next three nights.
