Karen Gillan is all kinds of icily brilliant in Steven Moffat’s smartly conceived Douglas is Cancelled
“There’s been a tweet”
It’s a title designed to raise the hackles, whether through the idea of people being cancelled or the frequent misuse of the term as if no-one should ever face consequences for their offensive behaviour. And in the earlier episodes of Steven Moffat’s Douglas is Cancelled, you do get the sense that he’s ticking off a list of (what he wouldn’t call) low-hanging fruit. Greta Thunberg, lefty students, the freedom to tell risqué jokes…all and more come in for pointed jabs but it is the latter that becomes the focus.
Hugh Bonneville plays Douglas, 50% of a beloved TV presenting couple with Karen Gillan’s Madeline, who gets in a spot of trouble when a random account on Twitter accuses him of telling a sexist joke at a family wedding. Douglas saus he can’t remember the joke and as crisis management kicks into gear, with Ben Miles’ producer Toby, Alex Kingston’s wife Sheila and Simon Russell Beale’s agent Bently all helping or hindering with this modern sort of problem, the tweet goes from Twitterstorm to full-on furore in pursuit of the truth.
The high quality cast – you can throw Nick Mohammed, Joe Wilkinson and Patrick Baladi into the mix as well – means that even at its weaker moments, Douglas in Cancelled is highly watchable as it skirts around the power of social media to dictate actions and the uncomfortable truth about sexual dynamics in the workplace, particularly once Gillan’s Madeline retweets the original message with a statement of ambiguous support. It’s all rather manic and then a swerve happens to recalibrate everything that gone before.
It is a very well executed twist in the tale that does much to deepen the questions that are being asked and the presumptions being made. Douglas sees himself as the perfect family man through in his conversations with tabloid editor wife Sheila (Kingston in gloriously shouty form) and student daughter Claudia (Madeleine Power), we see more of the web of hypocrisy he relies upon. Russell Beale’s Bently also fits in beautifully here, his old-school agent not quite equipped to deal with a world that has moved on somewhat. A strong drama from ITV.
