Joan Hannington’s story makes you ask what on earth you have been doing with your time. How does someone manage to overcome a loveless childhood, an abusive marriage and penurious single parenthood to become a successful jewel thief and then an influential player in the criminal underworld known as the Godmother? It’s all I can do to manage a shower three times a week.
Hannington told her tale in her 2002 autobiography, I Am What I Am (since republished as Joan), which has been turned into this six-part drama. At heart, the adaptation is a crime caper, but with enough of the protagonist’s background sketched in – including Joan’s need to provide for her daughter, Kelly (Mia Millichamp-Long) – to keep you emotionally invested. The stolen jewellery is gorgeous, though. Joan’s adventures begin in the 1980s, when greed was good and we knew how to flaunt it.
The programme opens with Joan (Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner, proving herself with a part she can get her teeth into, as well as nailing a number of accents) sitting at her dressing table in an opulent hotel room. Her back is covered in scars that speak of childhood abuse, but she is busy dressing in designer garb, festooning herself with flashing gems and zipping rolls of cash into her vanity case, before sashaying forth in a red wig and more furs than Sansa Stark, confidence oozing out of every pore. We then flash back four months. It is obvious our Joan has come a long way in a short time.
In rapid succession – the hallmark of a good caper – we see Joan fleeing her violent boyfriend, Gary; the thugs who threaten to kill her and her daughter in revenge for his latest miscalculation; and the police, who want her to grass on the lot of them. She puts Kelly into care for the child’s protection, on the understanding that she will get her back when she has found a new home and a new job. Then Joan throws herself on the mercy of her sister, Nancy (Kirsty J Curtis). Nancy reluctantly agrees to let her stay on the sofa for a few nights and give her a job in her hair salon, with a caveat: “None of your bloody chaos.”
Chaos duly ensues and Joan is soon in another job, this time at a jewellers owned by a creep called Bernard (Alex Blake, who makes you shudder every time he slithers into a scene). His not-so-novel approach to after-hours stocktaking has her fleeing again for safety, but not before swallowing a handful of loose diamonds on the way out. I do sometimes wonder, in idle moments, how many stories there would be to tell if men knew how to behave and could keep their hands and fists to themselves.
One careful sieving later – after a chance encounter in a pub with a shady antiques dealer and former jailbird called Boisie (Frank Dillane) – and we are away. “Just one job” for Boisie becomes much, much more (perhaps because of Joan’s insistence on getting a fair cut). Her chutzpah and intelligence – and the readiness of men and marks to underestimate her – mean she is set fair for a lucrative career and the gradual garnering of the respect she has always been denied by respectable society.
It’s great fun, holding the genuine grief and fears behind Joan’s courage nicely in tension with the glorious adrenaline rushes and addictive glamour of the heists and Spanish smuggling jaunts. Turner – at least in the two episodes available for review – never lets us lose sight of the anxious mother in the criminal, nor the core of desperation that drives her.
Cracks start to show by the end of the second episode, when Joan declares that she will be going all in with Boisie – in love and labour – to make the money that would “prove myself to the social”. If bravado, fine. If a straight line, it doesn’t jibe with the impetuous but ultimately canny woman of the preceding couple of hours. I would also like to know if a savvy woman in the 80s would use social services as an emergency creche without suspecting that things would unfold precisely as they do for Kelly, but that is a minor quibble.
The serviceable script doesn’t ask too much of the strong cast (including Gershwyn Eustache Jr as Albie, Boisie’s warmly menacing best friend and fence), but they produce as solid a piece of entertainment as you could ask for, offering a little bit of escapism and a soupcon of suspense. It’s enough to while away an autumnal evening or six.
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