ITV’s new drama about notorious 1980s jewel thief Joan Hannington has been heavily trailed as one of the small screen highlights of the autumn. There are reasons for excitement: Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner takes the lead role, her first since true crime thriller The Staircase in 2022. There’s a glorious Eighties soundtrack, spanning Soft Cell to “Club Tropicana”. And there are oh so many fabulous, flammable-looking wigs, not to mention all the shimmering diamonds. So why does it often feel as middle-of-the-road as a Sunday morning stroll around H Samuel?
The opening moments tell us that Joan is a trickster, but one who has weathered trauma: she sits in a swanky hotel in her bra, glamming herself up, her back covered in scars. Peering at a jewellery box chock-full of rolled-up banknotes, she answers the phone in a classy American accent, then drops a sparkly gem on the floor. “F***’s sake, where did that go?” Joan mutters, suddenly revealing herself to be unaffectedly cockney. It’s an introductory mise-en-scene that suggests twists and turns, but Joan quickly settles into something less surprising and more soap opera-ish.
From here, the timeline skips back to Joan at her pokey flat on the Kent coast, looking after her daughter Kelly while her deadbeat criminal husband Gary behaves erratically. One minute he’s turning up in a sports car with gifts such as a fancy fur coat, the next he’s gone awol and Joan has shifty blokes turning up at her house in the middle of the night asking where he is. (Lots of scenes are VERY dark, and by that I literally just mean the lighting.) Quickly Joan realises she needs to make a dash for it, with Gary’s dodgy dealings endangering her and their daughter: she drops Kelly off at social services – a system that played a large part in her own childhood – and heads to London to try to find a job and somewhere else to live.
Soon she’s found a gig at a jeweller’s, where her sleazy boss is very keen to do a “stock take” in a room with no cameras. Instead, this becomes the scene of Joan’s first act of thievery: she gollops a bunch of expensive jewels, before later heading to the ladies with a crystal bowl full of gin ready to sterilise them. You’ll never look at Bombay Sapphire the same way again. In the interval in which she’s waiting for nature to do its course, Joan meets Boise (Frank Dillane), an antiques dealer with a side gig in stealing: he takes a shine to her and recruits her as a sidekick.
The team behind the drama – it is written by creator Anna Symon and Helen Black, and directed by Richard Laxton – have already made it clear in interviews that they felt a duty to the real-life Hannington in telling her story. And the show does have good intentions. By showing Joan’s love for her daughter to be her central motivation, the drama points to a fundamental desperation beneath her criminal activities. It also underlines how it is the unpleasant men around her – from the abusive husband to the pervy boss – who push her further into taking matters into her own hands, in the only way that seems available to her.
But there’s a pedestrian tone to the script that makes this all less compelling than it should be. “What do you want, Joan?” one cipher-like male character asks her. “You’ve got some balls, gewl,” Boise declares. Turner brings warmth to the main role, and a poignancy to Joan’s devotion to her daughter, but it’s also a curiously humourless performance. The star is unable to locate the magnetism that would make the role truly memorable.
Only the first two episodes were available to reviewers, but from a quick Google it’s clear that Hannington’s life didn’t get any easier or less dramatic. She is obviously a fascinating figure, with the kind of life that makes a TV commissioner’s eyes light up. It’s a shame, then, that the nuances of her story sometimes feel lost here, with a portrait that falls between “victim” and “girl boss” without the gritty grey areas in between. It could have been 10 carat, but the result is something more cubic zirconia.
‘Joan’ is on ITV1 and ITVX