Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Geraldine James, Fiona O’ Shaughnessy, Neil Maskell, Adel Akhtar, Paul Higgins, Alexandra Roach, Nathan Stewart-Jarratt, Oliver Woollford, Sylvestra Le Touzel, Ian McDiarmid, Paul Ready, Ruth Gemmel, Emilia Jones, Micah Blfour, Steven Robertson.
When the final curtain is raised or the apocalypse comes, just look for the person who has handed you their hat inside a fast food takeaway and shiver to the very core as they stops serving you, they smile and walk off with nothing more than the destruction of the Human Race in their head. Such is how Utopia will be achieved, not with the burst of an atomic weapon but within the mind of an employee who has just had enough of people asking if they do chocolate milkshakes in the value meal.
Utopia has all the way through been a programme of such hallucinogenic intoxication that it has to be seen as a marvel of British television but as it strides to the end of its second series, the pace has picked up and the mood has changed to one of severity and ruthlessness. Death is no stranger to Utopia, the idea of brutal murders, cover up, kidnaps with fatal endings are all par for the course but in a further damning statement on the way television viewers have become increasingly desensitised to violence on their screens. It is perhaps still shocking most of all when young Grant, played with utter conviction throughout both series by Oliver Woollford, finds it fulfilling to shoot from distance, as if playing a video game in which nothing real happens, and kills the woman who has been behind it all pulling the strings and yet cannot pull the trigger when up close to the man who manufactured the disease.
The desensitising effect has also been subtly handled in the way that the virus in the hands of one man has been overlooked as a true act of vengeance on a society that has often overlooked the way that the Roma were treated leading up to and during World War Two. At times perhaps they have been forgotten by those who count the millions who died in the rage of a mad despotic evil man, the cruelty that at times is still foisted upon their way of life. With Philip Carvell/Anton virus now programmed to attack all but the Roma race of people, perhaps arguably mirroring the dreadful and abhorrent use of force by Israel on the people of the Gaza Strip, it must beg the question, just how far does revenge go when plotting the death of all you perceive to be your enemy?
Utopia is only a fantasy, something dreamed up by a writer and yet it feels as compellingly truthful as watching somebody pour you a soft drink and smile as they wish you to “Have a nice day”, knowing full well that they could just be the instrument of your destruction.
Utopia concludes next Tuesday.
Ian D. Hall