La Brea review – this sinkhole drama is gloriously, brazenly bad. I love it

An instantly annoying family fall into a sinkhole and find themselves trapped in prehistoric times with sabre-toothed tigers after them. To say the plot is by numbers is to slander numbers

It’s good to be reminded, sometimes, how rare talent is and how hard art of all kinds is. Why we reward it, why we have always venerated it even though it doesn’t fill our bellies, give us warmth or provide shelter. Why we have been mesmerised by storytellers round the fire since time immemorial and remain glued to this day to the painters, sculptors, potters, calligraphers and anyone else who can produce something beautiful from nothing, out of some ineffable alchemy between mind and hand.

See too much of this cleverness uninterrupted and you begin to take it for granted. It loses the scarcity value it should always have and becomes commonplace instead of revered. That is why we should be glad a drama like La Brea (Channel 5) exists. This new miniseries launches with a fantastic, in every sense, premise: what if a giant sinkhole opened up in Los Angeles, a shedload of people fell through it, and down there was LA 10,000 years ago? And that’s it. That’s your lot for good things about this programme. After that it’s tremendously, gloriously, educationally bad.

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