Background music can add to whatever TV show you’re watching, or take away from it if it’s not right.
For every Psycho there’s the recent Baz Luhrmann Great Gatsby movie, where Jay-Z rapped about hundred dollar billz, y’all, in the Roaring Twenties.
Roadkill, the BBC’s new glossy political thriller with Hugh Laurie, had a lot of moving parts which worked well, not least the star.
For some reason, the score appeared to be composed by a jazz trio plucked straight from a ’90s wine bar. Maybe that’s fitting.
The same repeated piano and clarinet riff burbled away underneath what seemed like a plot that perhaps belonged to a different time.
Laurie’s slick Tory government minister, Peter Laurence, manoeuvred his way around brewing scandals involving libel trials, financial irregularities and his chequered past as a lothario.
The action jumped between several loosely connected threads centring on Laurence’s ambitions and those who want to see him fail – from journalists to the Prime Minister.
However the idea a politician would fret about such things seems charmingly archaic at the moment. Perhaps this is the point. Peter Laurence may indeed be exposed as a vacuous cad and suffer no ill effects. Maybe then Roadkill will match the current mood music.
Roadkill, Sunday, BBC1, 9pm
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