A holiday to die for

You may have seen the massive posters plastered across the sides of buses showing Philip Glenister, Marc Warren, John Simm and Max Beesley buried up to their rugged, unshaven necks in sand. This brilliant piece of advertising heralds the start of the second series of Mad Dogs, showing on Thursdays at 9pm on Sky1. For those of you who were unfortunate enough to miss the first series last year, Mad Dogs is on one hand a sinister suspense thriller, but on the other a harrowingly accurate psychological analysis of male mid-life insecurities and regrets. It is centred on four blokey forty-something year old friends who come together on a carefree laddish holiday to Mallorca, to celebrate the early retirement of Alvo (Ben Chaplin), an English businessman living a lavish lifestyle in an idyllic and isolated villa.

If you managed to stick with it past the swagger, bravado and man-hugs in the first half hour, then viewers were rewarded by seeing our protagonists catapulted into a sun-scorched world of dead goats in the swimming pool, dealings with Mafia-esque drug dealers, questionable swimwear, a gun-wielding dwarf wearing a sinister Tony Blair rubber mask, and a spot of ‘nautical joy-riding’. In short, ordinary guys faced with extraordinary circumstances.

The first thing to note about Mad Dogs is the inspired casting. The first series saw the first on-screen reunion of Simm and Glenister since Life on Mars, together with that cheeky chappy from Hustle and the guy from Hotel Babylon. With a cast as strong and as talented as this, you pretty much expect the show to impress. These four men consist of a divorced employee, an adulterer, one who is in love with another one’s wife, and one who is a drug-addicted alcoholic widower. Heavy stuff, eh? They may have been best mates once upon a time, but they’re all much different people now, and what trust they have left is splintering. All four actors portray their characters’ angst-ridden back-stories with such intrigue and depth that the viewer is at times left with a lingering sombreness about the reality of life’s trials. “You go from thinking you’re going to live forever,” complained Glenister’s character, “to thinking you’ve got a brain tumour every time you’ve got a headache.”

Alongside the acting and the script, Mad Dogs certainly succeeded in creating a balance between marvellously sinister and comically surreal. Who would have thought that the frantic dismemberment of a corpse could be so funny?

This somewhat engaging sense of the absurd, as our characters find themselves in more and more of a pickle, comes to a climax in a bizarre Lord of the Flies-esque scene in the series 1 finale, involving tribal face paints and a lot of yelling. Having said this, a stand-out moment for me was the awkward burial of the goat. A very simple scene, but perfectly timed, it neatly summed up the mysteriously dreamlike atmosphere of the whole series.

I must admit, the fact that Sky has commissioned a second series of Mad Dogs has made me put a slightly more positive spin on this review than I otherwise would have done. Whilst the mounting tensions and shocking cliff-hangers at the end of each episode were very gripping, I was left with a disappointing sense of frustration at the number of loose ends and unanswered questions as the credits rolled up after the finale. It seemed the perfect set-up for a second series.

Philip Glenister himself said, “Everyone seems to be remaking something or doing costume drama, and it is really quite stifling,” and he’s spot on. It seems as though we are all getting a little bored of the BBC’s endless Dickens dramas and period remakes. Mad Dogs is a refreshing remedy, if only for the blue skies, tropical azure waters and the glorious sunshine that we are so very much lacking as we soldier on through January.

If the trailers are anything to go by, then we are in for ‘a bit of a road movie’ which includes that 3 million euros of drug money, an exploding caravan, and an eccentric new character called ‘Wheezy’ – described in the press as an “obsessive, oxygen tank carrying OAP.” Now why wouldn’t you want to watch this?