Summary
Boat Story might masquerade as a straight-up crime thriller, but it’s much, much weirder than that. Luckily, the weirdness is the best thing about it.
The funniest thing about Boat Story, an eccentric BBC mystery courtesy of Jack and Harry Williams, is the idea of international viewers on Freevee, where it streams abroad, trying to make sense of the Yorkshire accents. This is to say nothing of the unlikely plot turns and set pieces that punctuate Season 1, an odd six-episode mystery about a pair of desperate, idiotic normies who treat themselves to a washed-up consignment of cocaine with very little thought spared for who it belongs to.
Two things about Boat Story are clear immediately. One is that it’s pretty good. It has a frantic charm and a dark streak and a sense of humour. The other is that it’s a bit full of itself, with various formal flourishes including a self-referential voiceover (from Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) that knits each episode together but detracts from the overall experience.
That experience relies on the charisma of its leads, Daisy Haggard and Paterson Joseph, who play Janet Campbell and Samuel Wells, respectively. Sam and Janet don’t know each other until they meet by chance on the beach, where they stumble across a wrecked fishing boat, that stash of cocaine, and two corpses who were fighting over it. These kinds of discoveries, by the way, apparently happen more than you think in real life, and the Williams brothers were inspired by real-life cases.
Both Janet and Samuel have their reasons for pocketing the narcotics and spinning them into a fortune – he’s a ruined gambling addict; she lost a hand in an industrial accident but was finessed out of a compensation payout – without any of the sense required to pull such a scheme off successfully.
Needless to say, some bad guys descend on Yorkshire looking for the coke. One of them is the thuggish Guy (Craig Fairbrass), playing exactly the kind of role he’s known for from the interminable Rise of the Footsoldier sequels but with a twist; his violent henchman character hides a sensitive side and a love for pottery. Guy’s the triggerman of a charismatic Frenchman known as The Tailor (Tchéky Karyo, Baptiste), who is at once the kind of gangster who’d beat a man to death with a hammer but also the type to fall head-over-heels for a down-to-earth Yorkshire baker named Pat Tooh (Joanna Scanlan).
The idiosyncrasies are obvious and implausible, but they’re absolutely what make Boat Story work. The predictability of your average crime plot is quickly replaced by a legitimately surprising misadventure in which nobody can quite be relied upon to do the thing you expected them to do an episode or so prior. The arch supporting characters – not just Fairbrass’s Guy and the pasty-loving crime lord, but also Pat’s son Ben (Ethan Lawrence, After Life), a classic comedy foil who isn’t as stupid as he looks – offer multiple surprises, and the plot keeps morphing to accommodate their off-kilter personalities.
The frequent violence throws you too, since there’s more of it and to a more explicit degree than you might think, even if that, too, has an underlying air of over-the-top silliness just like everything else.
Despite the weirdness, Boat Story somehow works
It takes a while, and it’ll certainly put off some viewers along the way, but eventually, all the things that seem strange and ill-advised about Boat Story become the best bits. There’s still plenty of traditional craft behind it, especially the performances, but its driving force is an escalating ridiculousness and surprisingly touching undercurrent that’ll have you rooting for a tidier everyone-benefits conclusion than you’re realistically going to get.
Sure, I could have done without some of the more glib stylistic stuff, and there’s a chance I like it more than most will because I’m from West Yorkshire and find the tone comforting and enjoyed Daisy Haggard so much in Breeders. But that’s neither here nor there. Boat Story deserves some credit for its devotion to making TV’s most played-out genre as wacky as humanly possible, and if nobody else is going to provide it, then it’ll just have to be me.
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