Joan review – Sophie Turner sparkles in this wild true story of a rags-to-riches jewel thief | Television & radio

Joan Hannington’s story makes you ask what on earth you have got been doing together with your time. How does somebody handle to beat a loveless childhood, an abusive marriage and penurious single parenthood to turn out to be a profitable jewel thief after which an influential participant within the legal underworld identified because the Godmother? It’s all I can do to handle a bathe 3 times every week.

Hannington informed her story in her 2002 autobiography, I Am What I Am (since republished as Joan), which has been was this six-part drama. At coronary heart, the difference is a criminal offense caper, however with sufficient of the protagonist’s background sketched in – together with Joan’s want to supply for her daughter, Kelly (Mia Millichamp-Lengthy) – to maintain you emotionally invested. The stolen jewelry is beautiful, although. Joan’s adventures start within the Nineteen Eighties, when greed was good and we knew the way to flaunt it.

The programme opens with Joan (Recreation of Thrones’ Sophie Turner, proving herself with an element she will be able to get her enamel into, in addition to nailing a variety of accents) sitting at her dressing desk in an opulent resort room. Her again is roofed in scars that talk of childhood abuse, however she is busy dressing in designer garb, festooning herself with flashing gems and zipping rolls of money into her self-importance case, earlier than sashaying forth in a pink wig and extra furs than Sansa Stark, confidence oozing out of each pore. We then flash again 4 months. It’s apparent our Joan has come a good distance in a quick time.

In speedy succession – the hallmark of caper – we see Joan fleeing her violent boyfriend, Gary; the thugs who threaten to kill her and her daughter in revenge for his newest miscalculation; and the police, who need her to grass on the lot of them. She places Kelly into take care of the kid’s safety, on the understanding that she’s going to get her again when she has discovered a brand new residence and a brand new job. Then Joan throws herself on the mercy of her sister, Nancy (Kirsty J Curtis). Nancy reluctantly agrees to let her keep on the couch for a number of nights and provides her a job in her hair salon, with a caveat: “None of your bloody chaos.”

Chaos duly ensues and Joan is quickly in one other job, this time at a jewellers owned by a creep known as Bernard (Alex Blake, who makes you shudder each time he slithers right into a scene). His not-so-novel strategy to after-hours stocktaking has her fleeing once more for security, however not earlier than swallowing a handful of free diamonds on the best way out. I do typically marvel, in idle moments, what number of tales there could be to inform if males knew the way to behave and will preserve their arms and fists to themselves.

One cautious sieving later – after an opportunity encounter in a pub with a shady antiques seller and former jailbird known as Boisie (Frank Dillane) – and we’re away. “Only one job” for Boisie turns into a lot, way more (maybe due to Joan’s insistence on getting a good reduce). Her chutzpah and intelligence – and the readiness of males and marks to underestimate her – imply she is about honest for a profitable profession and the gradual garnering of the respect she has all the time been denied by respectable society.

It’s nice enjoyable, holding the real grief and fears behind Joan’s braveness properly in stress with the fantastic adrenaline rushes and addictive glamour of the heists and Spanish smuggling jaunts. Turner – at the very least within the two episodes accessible for assessment – by no means lets us lose sight of the anxious mom within the legal, nor the core of desperation that drives her.

Cracks begin to present by the top of the second episode, when Joan declares that she shall be going all in with Boisie – in love and labour – to make the cash that might “show myself to the social”. If bravado, high-quality. If a straight line, it doesn’t jibe with the impetuous however finally canny lady of the previous couple of hours. I’d additionally prefer to know if a savvy lady within the 80s would use social providers as an emergency creche with out suspecting that issues would unfold exactly as they do for Kelly, however that’s a minor quibble.

The serviceable script doesn’t ask an excessive amount of of the sturdy solid (together with Gershwyn Eustache Jr as Albie, Boisie’s warmly menacing greatest pal and fence), however they produce as strong a chunk of leisure as you could possibly ask for, providing a bit little bit of escapism and a soupcon of suspense. It’s sufficient to whereas away an autumnal night or six.