According to legend – or Popbitch, the showbiz gossip newsletter – Nick Cave once entered the fathers’ race at his children’s prep school sports day. When the starting pistol fired, the other dads charged off. Cave, dressed in a black suit and suede Gucci loafers, took a final drag on his cigarette, ground the butt into the dirt and then strolled to the finish line. “A glorious last place, to much yummy mummy swooning,” apparently. All this is to say that The Death of Bunny Munro (Sky Atlantic), an adaptation of Cave’s 2009 novel, is supposed to be as impossibly cool as him. And I hated almost every sleazy minute of it.
I imagine some people will love it, because the novel has its fans. Each to their own. The eponymous anti-hero is a cosmetics salesman and sex addict who plies his wares among the women of Brighton. He is a seducer, despite being staggeringly unpleasant. Bunny is played by Matt Smith, and it’s difficult to tell if Smith is trying to imbue the character with charm or not. If he is, he fails.
We begin with Bunny cheating on his wife (Sarah Greene) as Brighton Pier burns down in the background. This pinpoints the year as 2003, although the time period adds little except Bunny’s Vauxhall Cavalier Cabriolet. His wife is mentally fragile, and he returns home the next morning to find she has killed herself. The discovery of her body is witnessed by the couple’s nine-year-old son. Bunny is now a single dad, having taken a hands-off approach to fatherhood thus far, and at the end of episode one, he takes Bunny Jr on the run to escape the attentions of concerned social workers.
