THE WORST WING (COBRA)

On paper 'Cobra' must have seemed like a really good idea.

A cast that includes Robert Carlyle as the Prime Minister? Interesting.

Richard Dormer playing a fixer in the Civil Service? I could live with that.

David Haig as Home Secretary? Ok. Let's see how that goes.

Victoria Hamilton as 10 Downing Street's Chief of Staff?

You all know what's coming.

I have a simple question: how can a TV drama with a cast like that be so poor?

'Cobra' is Sky 1's attempt to come up with a fusion of 'The West Wing' and 'Designated Survivor' with 'House of Cards' and the BBC's homegrown hit 'Bodyguard' thrown in for good measure.

However, the concoction they come up with makes about as much sense as a maggot pizza.

Carlyle is hopelessly miscast as a beleaguered Conservative Prime Minister, Robert Sutherland whose downfall is being plotted by Haig's scheming Home Secretary Archie Glover-Morgan.

Archie is so openly devious, he might as well wander around the corridors of Westminster with a sandwich board emblazoned with 'Not to Be Trusted'.

Sutherland is plunged into the first of many crises by a solar flare that hits the UK and takes out the electricity network, threatening hospitals, street lights and the latest episode of 'Homes Under The Hammer'.

Gathering the Government's top advisers in the civil service, police, MI5 and the military for an emergency Cobra meeting, the Prime Minister suddenly realises he is about to face a wave of angry Geordies as it will take weeks to restore electricity to the north east.

A plane dramatically crashes on a motorway as a result of the solar flare.

The people of Hexham are revolting - insert a Mel Brooks joke here.

Fortunately, Dormer's Fraser Walker, the director of the rather sexily titled Civil Contingencies Secretariat is there to dash into a helicopter any time there is a detention centre riot to witness or a massive generator has to be driven over a crumbling motorway bridge.

Stevenson is also juggling a brewing scandal over his university graduate daughter Marisa Abela's Ellie's ill advised experimentation with drugs that kills a close friend.

It doesn't help that his wife, Lucy Cohu's Rachel and his press secretary, Edward Bennett's Peter Mott are engaged in a cover up.

And, of course, Archie smells a rat.

Meanwhile amid all the brouhaha over solar flares, Victoria Hamilton's Downing Street chief of staff Anna Marshall hooks up with an old flame Alexandre Wilmaume's mysterious Bosnian War survivor Edin Tosumvegovic and forgets about her family and the chaos unfolding in Northumbria.

She implausibly ends up trying to rescue people in a burning hotel but when she is working, she is trying to coax Marsha Thomason's former Labour MP Francine Bridge into becoming a policy adviser to the Tories.

And - quelle suprise - she is forever battling the always devious Archie.

The Geordie uprising comes to pass, led by Charlie Carrick's angry ex-soldier Scott Minnet and is exploited by Con O'Neill's Communist head of the Lorry Drivers Union, Harry Rowntree - a character that is so lazily sketched, you are surprised every other word he utters isn't either "comrade" or "proletariat".

Thank God, not everything is left to Fraser, though, to sort out because Steven Cree's Tyneside police chief Stuart Collier is also on hand to race around the north east of England.

He's always in the thick of the action, whether it is being first on the scene of the plane crash or a riot.

The poor man doesn't even seem to have an office like the rest of the UK's Chief Constables, so he spends an awful lot of time in his car with no other senior officer in sight.

Ben Richards' Sky One drama has the same addiction to high octane thrills and spills that affected 'Bodyguard'.

And like that show it stretches everything beyond credulity.

But at least what 'Bodyguard' had going for it was a budget that made it look slick, even if Jed Mercurio's drama was about as realistic as West Ham's dreams of winning the Champions League (and I write that as a West Ham fan).  

If you think that is bad, 'Cobra' is probably about as realistic as Yeovil Town winning the Champions League and its budget is marginally higher than Yeovil's.

And yet, despite this, Sky One has amazingly recommissioned a second series.

Surely an actor as astute as Robert Carlyle must have thought Richards' storylines were not bordering on the ridiculous but were fully submerged in shrill nonsense?

The Glaswegian seems terribly ill at ease and constrained as Prime Minister Sutherland, while Haig is just in panto territory.

Dormer tries to make a decent fist of an implausibly written role but as the series wears on, it is distressing to watch him and fellow cast members, including Ellie Kendrick, floundering in a preposterous drama.

  

'Cobra' is at its most gauche when Richards tries to tap into more weighty, contemporary themes.

The emergence of Carrick's character as a voice for the disaffected is a cackhanded attempt to reflect the rise of populist movements across the West.

Archie and Rowntree's exploitation of Minette's Geordie uprising is a poorly executed attempt to show how public disaffection with the status quo often ends up exploited by the extreme right or left.

The next series will apparently deal with an assassination.

But it would be better right now if Sky 1 would just reach for its pistol and put Richards' series out of its misery.

('Cobra' was broadcast on Sky 1 from January 17-February 21, 2020)