Professor T
Rating: 
Blind Ambition
Rating:
One of the chief problems of being a serial killer must be that moving house is fraught with danger. You’d constantly be worrying the new owners might dig up the patio.
We don’t know if cranky Adelaide, the bohemian mother played by Frances de la Tour in Professor T (ITV), has murdered anyone — though it would hardly be a surprise. She’s certainly anxious at the prospect of her fastidious son Jasper (Ben Miller) getting stuck into the garden of their family home, the one where as a child he found his father’s body hanging.
The prospect that his menacingly eccentric mama might be concealing dark secrets would be intriguing, if this strange mystery serial didn’t keep contradicting itself. It’s only a couple of weeks ago, after all, that Adelaide was intent on putting the rambling Cambridge mansion on the market. She wasn’t concerned about over-enthusiastic gardeners then.
That’s the problem with Professor T. It’s full of clever inventions, but half of them seem to cancel out the rest. As crooks took a family hostage and demanded a ransom in diamonds, brainbox Jasper declared himself the country’s leading kidnap negotiator.
We don’t know if cranky Adelaide, the bohemian mother played by Frances de la Tour in Professor T (ITV), has murdered anyone — though it would hardly be a surprise
You might expect the expert drafted in by police, Ben Sparrow (Charlie Cattrall), to have heard of him — but he hadn’t, so never mind. Jasper announced there were three golden rules to ending a hostage stand-off.
Golden rule No 1 was to give in to the crooks’ demands immediately. That’s so stupid that even the Professor ignored it.
Golden rule No 2 was to ‘always tell the truth’. Golden rule No 3, on the other hand, was to bamboozle the kidnappers with lies until they gave up in despair.
Why everyone thinks Jasper’s a genius beats me. The man is clearly a blithering nitwit.
He took an arrogant pleasure in taunting Inspector Sparrow, calling him ‘Swallow’, ‘Parrot’ and ‘Tit’. Really, the greatest mystery, after three episodes, is that nobody yet has punched the Prof on the nose.
Perhaps he’ll thump himself. He keeps having out-of-body delusions, where he sees himself across a room and starts a conversation.
All this would be amusing, if the stories didn’t keep lurching into graphic violence. Previously we’ve seen women attacked and raped. This time, a child was held at gunpoint, a woman was beaten to the floor and her husband was run down by a speeding car.
The balance was all wrong in TV director Jamie O’Leary’s documentary about sightless artists, Blind Ambition (BBC2)
Professor T can’t make up its mind whether it’s thrilling or silly, frothy or dark. The writers should take a long look at Ben Miller’s first foray into crime, Death In Paradise, for lessons on how to get the balance right.
The balance was all wrong in TV director Jamie O’Leary’s documentary about sightless artists, Blind Ambition (BBC2).
‘You’ve got to have a sense of humour to deal with blindness,’ said photographer Ian Traherne, who has lost 95 per cent of his sight. Jamie took this too much to heart. He teamed up with blind Scottish comedian Jamie MacDonald to travel around in a minibus to meet an opera singer, a rapper and a wood turner — all visually impaired.
This should have been entertaining and informative, but the endless banter was exhausting. In places, it became unwatchable drivel. A stream of forced mateyness and disjointed quips left them unable to talk seriously about this difficult subject at any length.
The programme pulled itself together in the final ten minutes, with an art exhibition and an explanation in verse by a gifted blind rapper from Reading, called Stoner. The producers should have kept the last segment, edited out the nonsense and started again.
