'The Politician's Husband' Review - David Tennant Proves 'Broadchurch' Was No Fluke

TV REVIEW: David Tennant Proves 'Broadchurch' Was No Fluke

If a mark of an actor is how quickly you forget he's played anything else, then David Tennant is up there with the greats.

Only a matter of hours after he'd dispensed with his grubby mac, greasy hair and anguished, eyeballed expression as DI Hardy in the hit drama 'Broadchurch', he was back on our screens last night as the equally demonised but far more articulate and ambitious politician Aiden Hoynes in BBC political drama 'The Politician's Husband'.

David Tennant's transformation is complete

And how he pulled it off. He was helped by a complete physical transformation - fair, spruced hair replacing Hardy's unwashed tresses, cleanshaven, moisturised skin where the detective's unslept pallor had been.

But he can take all credit for the voice, the body language, the look in his eye that marked Hoynes out as a very individual character, and proved once again that David Tennant has now completed his exodus from the Tardis, and is far more than a charismatic Time Lord.

He's making good choices, too. After the indisputedly excellent 'Broadchurch', 'The Politician's Husband' could have been a real anti-climax, but is already proving itself, in a completely different way. Set within the claustrophobic cloisters of Westminster and the Farrow and Ball idyll of a middle-class home, Part One of this three-parter put all parts of the drama in place.

Noone does an unflinching gaze like Emily Watson as devoted wife Freya, with her own agenda

We had a loving husband and wife of equal ambition, a parliamentary machine determined to divide them and rule both, and already hints of personal secrets behind the apparently marital devotion... culminating last night in wife Freya's as yet unexplained decision to turn against her husband, on national television, just when he needed her most. Leading to that most satisfying of televisual rages... his cracked wine glass.

Where Tennant had Olivia Colman to keep him company in 'Broadchurch', this time around he's matched at every turn by the ever-excellent Emily Watson. As she warned his arch-rival in last night's opener, so Aiden Hoynes should heed her words too, and "be very careful". While Colman is warm and passionate, nobody does cool and unflinching like Watson - she has the smiling face of a cherubic assassin.

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