Tedious masculinity: why I've had enough middle-aged men and machines on TV
Michael Portillo, Chris Tarrant The Grand Tour trio – will we ever see the end of middle-aged white blokes clogging up our screens, asks David Butcher
You’ll have noticed that masculinity has taken some dents lately. Men are getting clobbered in the culture wars: assailed by the #MeToo movement, called out for casual harassment, lectured by a recent Gillette advert on how to behave. Our very stuff, masculinity, routinely gets the qualifier “toxic”. We’re a hopeless bunch of jerks, let’s face it. I wish I could say television was doing its best to help us out. Instead, the objective on some channels seems to be to put as many middle-aged blokes on screen as possible. Ideally on trains. Very soon Tony Robinson starts a new series called The World by Train on Channel 5, shortly after Chris Tarrant: Extreme Railways hit the buffers. This Time with Alan Partridge – When is the new show on TV, what’s it about and who’s in the cast? Alan Partridge was an albatross around my neck says Steve Coogan How to watch Patrick Melrose, In the Long Run and Save Me FOR FRE with RadioTimes.com Obviously, Michael Portillo is on BBC2 most days, hopping onto or off a platform while wearing colour combinations inspired by a dream he once had about living in a house made of Smarties. It can’t be long before Griff Rhys Jones is back, gazing out of a carriage window again for our benefit. I like a railway doc as much as the next sad, middle-aged guy, but a TV version of the Beeching Report might be needed, to cut back on numbers. Or at least, book all the presenters onto the same service across Mongolia and when they start fighting, film it. The catch is, we’d still be left with the car shows. Top Gear returns with fresh tyres, while Christopher Timothy and Peter Davison are reliving the golden age of motoring in Great British Car Journeys. I could wheel out more examples, but you get the point. The problem isn’t toxic masculinity (a phrase that sets my teeth grinding, but that can wait), it’s something duller – tedious masculinity. It’s that tendency among men of a certain age to assume what they have to say is of wider interest and a tendency among TV executives to give them a vehicle – and it is usually a vehicle – to say it. A case in point is Amazon’s The Grand Tour, where Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond continue to lean on the bounds of good taste like buffers on the bar of a village pub. In their new series they try out a little light homophobia while motoring across Colombia: Jeremy’s car is a model popular with gay men, so Hammond calls him The Pet Shop Boy and Clarkson oh-so-amusingly tries to remember what LGBT stands for, and gets it wrong, ho ho. The antidote may be at hand. Soon, very soon, the king over the water will return… Alan Partridge will walk among us again in his new BBC1 series, which will, we can only hope, restore Steve Coogan’s creation to his rightful place spoofing self-deluded berks everywhere. Come back, Alan, we need you now more than ever.
The Repair Shop: How a show about fixing antiques became a national obsession
No wonder Stephen Fry calls this comforting BBC2 show the best programme on British television says David Butcher
You’d be surprised how often, when I meet someone socially and tell them where I work, their genuinely astonished response is, “Radio Times! Is that still going?” After grinding my jaw for a few seconds and salvaging a thin smile, I reply that yes, it is – and still thriving after 95 years, thanks for asking… It’s a comment I get mostly in London, to be fair: elsewhere people are more tuned in. I was at a do in the West Country recently and gathered that several fellow guests were not just RT readers but devoted, cover-to-cover, wouldn’t-be-without-it readers. And when they’d finished enthusing about the magazine, they started telling me about the TV show they adored more than any other. It was, of course, The Repair Shop on BBC2. Philip Pullman asks fans to help him find lost ballpoint he used to write His Dark Materials Meet the cast of His Dark Materials Stay up to date with the RadioTimes.com newsletter If you haven’t discovered The Repair Shop yet, you need to seek it out on iPlayer. You really should, it’s a treat. The whole production radiates care and skill and warmth, like an enchanted hot water bottle of loveliness. It’s perfectly formed TV, full of nice people doing nice things, nicely. (“Balm for a frazzled world,” as one fan sighed on Twitter.) View oEmbed on the source website I’ve liked it since previewing the very first episode, when I half-expected it to be another slightly contrived daytime-ish show mining a great British natural resource, antiques. What took me by surprise was how the show made a simple premise – people bringing their careworn family treasures to be fixed – into something ridiculously touching. Like a lot of viewers, I can’t help getting dewy-eyed when the “reveal” arrives. Why is there a lump in my throat watching a couple return to a thatched barn in Sussex to collect their old rocking horse, or carriage clock, or piano stool? They see it restored to its former glory and they’re visibly moved. And, regular as horologist Steve’s clockwork, so are we. View oEmbed on the source website View oEmbed on the source website Of course, a central plank of the show is the fact that the value of heirlooms is never mentioned – or even hinted at. This is not Antiques Roadshow, for heaven’s sake; these are not items anyone would sell. It’s a show about memories, not money. And the craftspeople give the same care to a magnificent antique sleigh as they would to a broken plate. Those experts (Will Kirk, the furniture restorer, Kirsten Ramsay, the ceramics whizz and the rest) are stars in their own right, the self-effacing surgeons of stuff, with manual skills learnt over decades. I doubt I’ll ever need to make, say, a brass ferrule to put on the handle of a Victorian toy, but I’m glad the series showed me how. It’s easy to see why The Repair Shop strikes a chord with people – a big, sweeping Elgar power-chord (though possibly played on an old accordion whose keys need fixing up). Loss and sadness colour everyone’s lives. Having objects that connect to our family history isn’t just nostalgia, it’s keeping the past warm, doing right by memories. And the “Workshop of Dreams” is more than an old barn down a dusty track. It’s a postcard from a world before digital technology and throwaway consumerism, where people are polite and meticulous and modest. No wonder Stephen Fry recently called it “the best programme on British television”. I know a lot of people who would agree. Catch up with The Repair Shop on BBC iPlayer here This article was originally published on 2 October 2018
The Handmaid’s Tale is a sublime drama – but do we really need 10 seasons?
The US drama has been captivating viewing, but giant plot arcs are a "sod you" to viewers, says David Butcher
My heart sank when I read that the showrunner on The Handmaid’s Tale had planned out ten series. Talk about “Blessed be the fruit”. I know it’s a hit but… ten? Really? Don’t get me wrong, I love the show, although I have some sympathy with people who feel the annals of a religious clique ruling America have become too heavy, too brutal. 21 behind the scenes facts about The Handmaid’s Tale Meet the cast of The Handmaid’s Tale series two RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox View oEmbed on the source website Season two ends this week with more woe for our captive heroine Offred (the extraordinary Elizabeth Moss), and although I watched the finale in an office on a computer screen, it still left me wrung out like a dishcloth. Good luck if you’re watching at home in a darkened room. But come on, if a show’s chief writer is planning ten seasons’ worth of plot, what does that say to those of us following a drama week-to-week? I think, broadly, it says “sod you”. If a great big plot arc is sketched out for 100-plus episodes, the writers’ priority is to eke it out. This has become, for me, a bit of a snag in the age of long-form television (see also Homeland, Lost). In any given episode, progress on the overall story has to be carefully rationed. So, generally, not much happens for a while, then there’s a nasty shock – in the world of The Handmaid’s Tale, that tends to mean a female character is beaten or maimed – and then things subside again. Shocks, often coming near the end of otherwise quiet episodes, take the place of plot, because plot is a currency the writers can’t afford to spend. The trouble is, that also means we can sense when they’re bluffing us. There was a key episode earlier in this run where a pregnant, vulnerable Offred found herself alone at a remote, snowy mansion, with no guards around. She found a car in a garage: she could make a break for the Canadian border and freedom! Except, we sort of knew she wouldn’t. Because that would short-circuit the bigger story, which requires that Offred be kept in captivity in the doom-filled household of Fred and Serena Waterford. Or at least, it has done until now… There are a rush of developments in Sunday’s finale that suggest the treading water we’ve seen through much of this season might be over. I hope so: the second series of a show that has been a huge hit can often be rocky (see Homeland again). For the latest news and expert tips on getting the best deals this year, take a look at our Black Friday 2021 and Cyber Monday 2021 And at its best The Handmaid’s Tale is a bit special. It stirs up a particular mix of emotions, a sort of dread/loathing/deep sadness at whatever the latest abomination is that Gilead’s misogynist masters have dreamt up. In one horrifying scene last week, Eden, the devout 15-year-old girl who had rebelled against her arranged marriage, was ritually drowned. It was incredibly powerful drama. But if the show keeps substituting set-piece horrors like that for progress in the main story, I’m not sure how much more I can take. The Handmaid’s Tale is on 9pm Sunday, C4 Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter
What went wrong with BBC2's Civilisations?
"I have loved it (in parts) and been infuriated by it (in larger parts)": David Butcher on why the BBC's landmark series just hasn't worked
So how was it for you? BBC2’s Civilisations ends tonight and if you’re one of the hardy, arty souls who stuck with it all the way, you deserve some kind of medal. Possibly a bronze Etruscan medal with an exquisite relief on it of a kind Mary Beard could enthuse about. But let’s face it, for such a whopping series, Civilisations was a whopping let-down. I have loved it (in parts) and been infuriated by it (in larger parts). Some criticism of the show has been daft and wrong-headed, but the trouble is, so were many of the editorial decisions that went into it. The whole affair left presenters Beard, Simon Schama and David Olusoga looking like they were unsteadily perched atop the broadcasting world’s most well-intentioned white elephant. David Olusoga is the new face of BBC history – but as a kid he was driven out of his home by racists Civilisations: BBC presenters pick their cultural highlights Civilisations presenter Mary Beard: I'm really glad I didn't do TV until I was 50 View oEmbed on the source website But let’s start with the one thing that wasn't wrong with Civilisations – the thing conservative critics complained of – that it was wrong to include so much art from around the world: 'Kenneth Clarke, in his original 1960s series, never climbed Inca statues or tried to interest us in Maori portraits!' 'It’s multiculturalism run riot!' 'It’s tired BBC political correctness!' 'Sack the DG!' Nonsense, of course. The idea that you could do a landmark cultural history series in 2018 and only talk about canonical artworks from Western Europe, maybe with a nod to North America, would never wash. Going global isn’t an excess of PC, it’s getting real. No, that wasn’t what was wrong with the series. But plenty of other things were. For brevity’s sake, let’s have a numbered summary… 1. The slow beginning It started badly: the first two programmes were the weakest. Things got better, with Olusoga (when he finally turned up) delivering sharp programmes and Schama hitting peak form. But by then half the audience had left. You can’t afford to open a series this important on a low. 2. The patchwork of presenters It was bizarre to shuffle presenters. In the end Civilisations was mainly Schama’s show, with guest spots from Beard and Olusoga. But why? If you must share it around, at least give them each the same number of episodes, or have them take turns. This felt like an all-star art-history tag-team. Who’s up this week? Who knows? 3. The overwhelming volume They tried to cram waaaay too much into each edition, making it dense and stodgy as a viewing experience. There was no light and shade, just one gorgeous thing after another: “Behold this exquisite artefact from Venice…Behold this exquisite artefact from India… Behold this exquisite artefact from Delft…” and so on for an hour, until we felt like geese force-fed a glut of aesthetic goodies, or tourists on the world’s most exhausting gallery tour. 4. The pitch The producers were so keen to defend against possible charges of dumbing down, they made the show high-minded and serious to the point of being a turn-off. I love nothing better than a highbrow doc, but Civilisations started to feel like a lecture, like we should take notes and think of smart questions to ask. 5. The obvious omissions Ranging across cultures and continents was essential; digging out gems most viewers would never have seen before – bronzes from Benin, Japanese erotica, Bavarian ceilings – was great. But the programme wilfully ignored the obvious. OK, so you might feel Constable is a cliché but not to mention him at all in a British programme about landscape art felt perverse. 6. The grandiosity The series trumpeted that it was all about “the best things our species is capable of creating” and “the light from humanity’s vital spark”. No, it was about a part of that: art and architecture. There’s no mention of music, literature, theatre, poetry, dance – also some of the best things people create – which would be fine if the series made clear what its scope was and didn’t claim to be about the whole span of, ah yes, civilisation. I could go on. But the series has taken enough of a kicking – not least in the ratings, which have declined to around 700,000 viewers. For a series that took four years to come to the screen and burnt through a very thick wad of BBC budget, that’s not enough. I loved Kenneth Clarke’s original series and was hugely looking forward to this sequel. And for all its failings, I’d still recommend watching tonight’s finale on art in the contemporary world. It’s flawed and frustating, but one brilliant scene where Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang creates a new work using coloured gunpowder makes it all worth it. In the end only the BBC could create a televisual folly on quite the scale of Civilisations because only the BBC would try. Maybe we should be glad it still does. Civilisations concludes on Thursday 26th April at 9pm on BBC2. Civilisations on Your Doorstep – a companion programme hosted by Mary Beard – airs on Saturday 28th April, also at 9pm on BBC2
The problem with Civilisations? Too many words, not enough structure
The BBC documentary series needs to cut the volleys of verbiage and find a story, says Radio Times deputy TV editor David Butcher
There’s a scene in episode three of Civilisations when the great Simon Schama stands in front of an ancient Chinese painting and worries aloud: “When you’re in the presence of a bona fide masterpiece, which this is, words somehow struggle to be formed.” Oh, do give over. Schama isn’t someone whose words ever struggle to form. He’s a gushing font of ideas, and always has been. When Schama addresses the camera, he speaks in those exquisite paragraphs that are laid out like formal gardens for us to stroll through and admire. (I met him once and he was much the same in person, I’m glad to say.) Civilisations presenter Mary Beard: “I’m really glad I didn’t do TV until I was 50” Civilisations: BBC presenters pick their cultural high points No, the problem here is anything but words struggling to form. They’re forming all over the place, filling the programme from start to finish. Great big ones come flying at us like shells from a howitzer: “equipoise”, “algorithmic”, “superabundance”. Chains of adjectives rain down: “ecstatic, radiant, mystical, passionate…” Stop! It’s too much! Bear in mind, I love this stuff. I was massively looking forward to Civilisations. But in practice I’m finding it heavy-going. Lovely, obviously, and very high-minded, but it feels like eating old-school porridge – good for you but not a treat. Even typing those words makes me feel sad and slightly disloyal to a BBC that is clearly going the extra mile to “dumb up”. View oEmbed on the source website The catch is: yes, the programmes are terrifically edifying and easy on the eye but… there’s no life to them. They’re like extracts from classy gallery tours cut and pasted together. (I don’t think it’s Schama’s fault, by the way; Mary Beard’s episode last week had the same problem.) What’s the structure supposed to be? In each programme we see great cultural gems arrayed before us like a string of pearls, except there’s no thread, no story, just one thing after another. So this week, Schama enthuses about the landscapes of Chinese master Wang Meng; then he enthuses about Islamic garden carpets; then he enthuses about Veronese frescoes; then Brueghel, Jan van Goyen, Winslow Homer, Ansel Adams... (Interestingly for a programme on landscape, there’s no mention of Constable or Turner, which may be a deliberate bid to avoid obviousness but seems odd in a British series.) Normally, I tend to switch off during the bits of TV filler in docs. You know, the scenes where they show the presenter strolling thoughtfully down a street or up some temple steps, or a superfluous shot of sunlight glinting on a river. But in Civilisations I was dying for some of that, anything to break up the volleys of verbiage. Few people on the planet enthuse more persuasively about art than Schama and Beard, but if that’s all they do for an hour solidly, this viewer starts to wilt. It’s meant to be TV, not a lantern lecture. I hate to say it, but as missed opportunities go, this looks like a whopper. Civilisations continues Thursday at 9pm on BBC1 This article was originally published in the 10-16 March 2018 issue of Radio Times magazine View oEmbed on the source website
Why TV heroes shouldn’t turn to violence
“I find it hard identifying with heroes when they burn people with cigarettes, waterboard them, pretend to execute their children and so forth,” writes David Butcher
I blame Jack Bauer. He made torture acceptable on TV. The counterterrorism agent played by Kiefer Sutherland in 24 would routinely torture suspects – including, in one case, his own brother. There were more than 60 scenes (someone counted) involving torture in that drama’s many, overheated series. But that was the noughties – surely we’ve moved on? Well, apparently not. Judging by recent thrillers, it remains artistically kosher for a TV protagonist to torture people further down the cast list when they want information. New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Why do we love crime dramas on TV so much? View oEmbed on the source website And bear in mind, I’m not talking about the baddies here, I’m talking about the good guys, the heroes of series such as Deep State (Thursday 9pm Fox) and Strike Back (Sky 1). These are the characters we’re meant to be rooting for. I don’t know about you, but I find it hard identifying with heroes when they burn people with cigarettes, waterboard them, pretend to execute their children and so forth. You see them in a different light. To me, the whole issue feels like an odd anomaly, a time warp. Television has grown up. Writers have realised rape shouldn’t be used lightly as a plot device. TV cops no longer leer at schoolgirls, as they did in the 70s. You wouldn’t expect a lead character now to spout casual racism or homophobia. If they did, you’d know they were a villain. But torture, oh that’s fine. Take a recent example: in Deep State, our hero Max Easton, suavely played by Mark Strong, is looking for two missing British agents in Beirut. His friend there finds a fixer called Hassan whom the agents might have contacted. Note: might have. So Max and his mate kidnap Hassan, take him to a workshop and tie him to a chair. Max brandishes some rusty pliers: “I don’t know if I’ve got this in me any more, but we’re going to find out!” he jokes. And then, to cut a long story short, Max pulls one of Hassan’s fingernails out, threatens to pull out the rest then smash his teeth with a hammer, and Hassan, in agony, spills some information. All of which is presented, within the story, as very much a step in the right direction. Bear in mind, Hassan has done nothing wrong to Max or anyone else. It’s a painful scene to watch but it’s of a piece with the kind of thing we’ve seen elsewhere. I know it’s only TV entertainment and maybe I shouldn’t take it too seriously but… isn’t that the point? Why are we being offered torture scenes for entertainment, as primetime TV fodder? The makers of Deep State claim the series has important political themes. They don’t seem to have noticed that by writing in torture they’re sending out a message that it’s kind of OK. But it isn’t. And it’s time TV made tacitly approved torture scenes a thing of the past. Deep State airs on Thursday at 9pm on Fox
Macbeth review: Mad Max with machetes ★★★
Unfolding in a drab dystopia, Rufus Norris’s new production of Macbeth has a cutting edge but no dark heart
“Is it set in the future?” a colleague asked mockingly of the National Theatre’s new Macbeth. To which the answer is yes, kind of. A near future, possibly, or an alternative present: set designer Rae Smith has created a post-apocalyptic wasteland of concrete and metal, where thanes fight in grey jeans, and battle armour consists of slabs of tin held on with parcel tape. It’s Mad Max with machetes. But it works. Thrusting onto the stage is a hefty metal ramp, down which Macbeth charges in the opening scene. His first act is to hack off the rebel Macdonwald’s head, shove it in a carrier bag and hang it from a pole (neatly prefiguring his own fate much later). That sets the tone for a production full of jagged edges and raw set pieces. Dunsinane resembles the ruined corner of a housing estate. The banquet scene involves six guests gathered in what could be a bus shelter. Banquo’s ghost, when he appears, staggers and jerks like a zombie. This is a hellish world where “Nothing is but what is not.” The trouble is, bold production design is no good if your leads don’t fill it. On that front Rory Kinnear and Anne-Marie Duff give intelligent, angst-ridden performances. But they never convince you they’re Alpha overlords bent on a bloody coup d’état. Or that they’re haunted by horrors. In the aftermath of Duncan’s murder, they have more the air of a middle-class couple whose weekend house party has gone frightfully wrong. Look –blood everywhere! Coming from Kinnear, Macbeth’s anguished speeches sound less like moans of despair than so much hand-wringing rhetoric. We see pained regret at a botched piece of statecraft, rather than a soul in torment. Kinnear is an actor who can make eloquent sense of a line, but we don’t get the feeling here that his Macbeth is a great soul laid low by baser instincts, more an exasperated middle manager. In a different production, one set in a contemporary corporate world, say, these Macbeths could make sense, but they feel cut adrift in the Olivier’s grim, post-industrial dystopia. Having said that, the production produces moments of grim magic. The scene where Macbeth cradles his wife’s dead body (“Out, out brief candle”) is powerfully awful, as is the ghostly parade of future kings the witches show him – shuffling figures with faces on the backs of their heads. Best of all, director Rufus Norris has found a way to reinvent the Porter – often a mood-wrecking comic interloper – as a central figure. By melding him with other attendants the Porter becomes a chorus figure who alone witnesses the chain of deaths, and as played here by Trevor Fox with a wry Geordie accent, a distant relative, perhaps, of the Fool in King Lear. Overall the story has a properly nightmarish mood – helped by deft touches in the costumes: dolls’ limbs hang from the witches’ clothes and Duncan wears a blood-red kingly suit. If it rarely reaches the kind of visceral horror you hope for, there’s still plenty to dread, and clarity of delivery and line-reading that makes the text sing. Also, it’s worth noting that if you can’t make it to the Olivier, the production will be broadcast to cinemas by National Theatre Live on 10 May. Macbeth is at the National's Oliver Theatre until 23 June Book theatre tickets from the Radio Times Box Office
Frozen review: Jason Watkins is horribly convincing as a serial killer ★★★
Not to be confused with the Disney movie, this chilling play about paedophilia also stars Suranne Jones as a grieving mother
Audiences may come to this production drawn by the star power of Suranne Jones but they will leave talking about Jason Watkins. His performance as Ralph, a serial killer and paedophile who abducts children, is strikingly sinister, a creepy tour de force. The curious thing is that Jones, playing the mother of his latest victim, never reaches the same pitch. In TV dramas from Unforgiven to Doctor Foster, Jones has done soulful suffering better than anyone. On the small screen, her resonant voice and those doom-filled eyes get you every time. Here, she doesn’t find the tragic register, so we understand the suffering of Nancy, the grieving mother, but we never quite feel it. It doesn’t help that the play unfolds initially as a series of monologues, giving us carved-off slices of story. Nancy addresses the audience, describing the day she sent her ten-year-old daughter on a fateful errand, delivering garden shears to her gran. Book tickets for Frozen Then Ralph talks us through his methodical approach to abduction and murder, breezily proud of how organised he is – “You’ve got to wake up very early to get ahead of me…” – and showing off his suitcase full of kiddie-porn videos as if it were a family album. The third point of a tragic triangle is Agnetha (Nina Sosanya), the American criminal psychiatrist who comes to Britain to interview Ralph, and has her own theory about serial murderers: they’re not evil but sick, she argues, and their crimes are symptoms. Agnetha tries to make sense of the senseless, and so does the play, peering hard into the mindset of a monster. On marbled grey screens that hang around the stage we see brain scans projected, and what could be neural patterns. The significance of the title is that Agnetha wants to explore “The Arctic Sea that is the criminal brain.” It’s clear that the real crime is to let your emotions ice over, to freeze out feeling – which, it must be said, sounds like the message of a certain Disney film of the same name. When, as Nancy confronts him, Ralph briefly un-freezes and registers the terrible harm he has done, the play has its most piercing moment. It was written by Bryony Lavery in 1998 at a time when paedophile-related dramas had not yet become a staple. Then it must have felt like a bold departure, staring into a heart of darkness. Now it’s well worth seeing for Watkins’ performance alone, a shifty take on the banality of evil that will be hard to forget. Frozen is at Theatre Royal Haymarket until 5 May Book tickets for Frozen from the Radio Times Box Office
Beginning review: A modern classic of love and loneliness ★★★★★
David Eldridge's hilarious, bittersweet rom-com lands in the West End
Boy meets girl. Except boy is 42 and girl is 38, and they’re both a little drunk in the aftermath of her housewarming party in north London. Both, it’s fair to say, have baggage. And both Danny and Laura have a special, almost pathological, talent for throwing said baggage in the path of them ever actually getting it on. That’s the gist of David Eldridge’s rueful romantic comedy, which was a sell-out at the National’s Dorfman Theatre and now transfers to the Ambassadors for a limited run. The Ambassadors is a smallish space and the flirty awkwardness between the two leads was often so tangible it felt as if it swelled to fill the auditorium. As did the laughs. It’s a production rich in belly-laughs, from the moment early on when Danny confesses to having “no radar” and then proceeds to ignore or skirt around Laura’s blatant come-ons. “You need a woman to tell you when to shut the f*** up,” she groans. But bizarrely, it seems he’ll do almost anything to avoid the witty, sexy woman right in front of him, who appears to be smitten. By him – a rumpled recruitment consultant with a paunch and a ketchup stain on his shirt. What’s going on? Finding that out is the fun of the plot. Sam Troughton as Danny and Justine Mitchell as Laura make what could easily be an exasperating series of non-clinches and displacement activities (“Shall we have a bit of a tidy up?” he suggests at just the wrong moment) into something believable, funny and sad. Book tickets for Beginning Meanwhile, the script gradually unpacks the pair’s backstories in what becomes a tender two-step of loneliness. In between the bouts of physical comedy (Troughton does Danny’s symbolic wrestling with a corkscrew beautifully) and banter about Strictly and scotch eggs, there’s a real well of heartache. ‘If you knew everything about my life, you wouldn’t like me,” sighs Laura at one point and Danny replies, “I don’t think there’s a person in this world you could say any different about.” That feels like the nub of their problem: too much information. “I wish I’d met you online. Everything would be so much easier,” argues Danny, as their flirtation founders on another shelf of embarrassment. But online is the issue: in a landscape of social media, they keep no secrets and hold no mystery. Instead their honesty and oversharing keep scuppering any chance of intimacy, let alone love, heaven forbid sex. By the end of the play you start to wonder if the whole thing is the best advert yet for arranged marriage. Certainly, as a gift box of insights on the torments of 2010s romance, it’s hard to beat. Modern love has never looked harder. Beginning is at London's Ambassadors Theatre until 24 March Book tickets for Beginning and other West End shows from Radio Times Box Office
Why senseless drama finales could be VERY bad for broadcasters
Liar, Safe House, Rellik, Doctor Foster: all of their final moments contained little logic. And that could lead viewers away from the BBC and ITV, argues David Butcher
We need to talk about endings. Specifically, about why they keep going so wrong, mostly in promising dramas that jog along for weeks and then, when they should be crossing the finishing line, trip over their laces. It has happened a lot lately. We’re almost starting to expect the kind of two-fingers-toviewers dénouement that we got from Paula and The Replacement – the kind that that leaves you thinking “What?” and “Eh?” and, mostly, “Why did I bother?” Take a series like ITV’s Safe House, where the baddie played by Jason Watkins abducted Zoë Tapper’s character in the boot of his car – but then what became of her? We were left hanging. (“Why have I wasted four hours of my life for something to end without explaining anything?” one viewer tweeted.) The conclusion of Liar (also ITV) will no doubt spark similar rage, as it cheekily confronted viewers with a whole new mystery. It feels as if the writers aren’t just failing to tie up loose ends, they’re perversely untying them, deliberately fraying the plot into rags that flutter dismally over the end credits. View oEmbed on the source website The ending of BBC1’s Rellik wasn’t much better. After six hours of (more or less deranged) drama, it played the dog-eared get-out-of-jail-free card TV writers use when they need a reason behind serial killings: it was all down to sexual abuse at a care home where the killer suffered as a child. Where have we seen that before? In every low-rent crime drama ever. Unlike many, I did like the final twist of Doctor Foster (BBC1). It was a neat idea to make us realise the story was really about a teenage runaway – Gemma and Simon’s put-upon son Tom. Yes, there were absurdities in that last episode (don’t get me started on the syringes...) but I was fine with the ending itself until – until! – that supremely naff closing shot. You remember, the one where Gemma is standing outside her front door and looks straight at the camera for her last line, breaking the fourth wall and the patience of eight million viewers. What is this – a public information film? In that final flourish Mike Bartlett undermined the rest of his marital melodrama for the sake of sticking an indulgent cherry on top. In the film business they know how vital endings are. That’s why Hollywood studios spend millions, if necessary, to reshoot them. Because movies live or die on word of mouth and if punters leave a cinema short-changed, the word of mouth will be “Meh”. Not so in TV, where dramas can string millions of us along, make us give hours of our time to their plots, seduce us with their stars – then in the last episode abandon us at the altar, clueless. But here’s the thing: the more that broadcast dramas break viewers’ trust with shoddy plots that fall apart in your hands like wet newspaper, the more likely viewers are to defect. The next time a young couple are sitting down with an evening together to burn, they won’t risk starting an ITV six-parter. They’ll stream something off Netflix instead. And once that becomes the default across the land, then for broadcasters, the end is nigh.
Girl from the North Country review: This Bob Dylan musical will leave his fans in raptures ★★★★
Come gather 'round people – the Old Vic's freewheelin' play set to Dylan's songs is a beauty
You don’t need to be into Bob Dylan’s music to get bursts of pleasure from Conor McPherson’s new play. But if you do happen to be a Dylan fan, boy are you in for a treat. Set among the transient guests at a depression-era boarding house in Minnesota, Girl from the North Country is sparsely plotted, a group of lightly drawn character sketches that drift by, offering hints of more tragedy than we see. There’s a boxer on the run from trouble, a dodgy bible salesman, a widow waiting for her inheritance, a couple whose simple-minded son is more than they can handle, a kindly doctor, an elderly shoe-shop owner, and so on. We could gladly spend a whole, binge-worthy Netflix series with these people, but instead we just see glimpses of their longings and disappointments, lit up gorgeously by Dylan’s songs. Presiding over the action are Nick, the debt-ridden owner of the flophouse (Ciaran Hinds), and his wife Elizabeth, who is succumbing to dementia (though in Shirley Henderson’s hands, it’s the sexiest, cheekiest dementia you’ll ever come across.) Shirley Henderson and Michael Shaeffer (photos by Manuel Harlan) Their no-good son Gene is a would-be writer with a drink problem. Their adopted daughter Marianne is pregnant but without a partner, leading to a rendition of Tight Connection to My Heart in which Sheila Atim keens the refrain, “Has anybody seen my love?” to devastating effect. That’s the show’s first heart-melting high point but there are more. The story goes that Dylan’s record company approached McPherson with the idea of a show using the songs and the playwright declined. When he eventually agreed, a package containing 40 albums arrived at his door: he could use whatever he liked, however he liked. What he chose comes mostly from the 1970s and 80s, often with two or three songs merged together. The boxer sings Hurricane (as you might expect); Gene sings I Want You – one of the all-time great songs of yearning – to his girlfriend, who is moving on to better things. But mostly the links between songs and story are oblique – they don’t move the action along so much as comment on it, like reveries the characters are dreaming. Jokerman is used twice to haunting effect. Henderson, radiant in orange dress and period shades, delivers a thoroughly belting version of Like A Rolling Stone - though how it relates to her story is anyone’s guess.And towards the end the sweet, skipping Duquesne Whistle becomes almost a revivalist anthem then slips into a reading of Is Your Love in Vain that is wonderfully re-figured by Stanley Townsend’s bass. Book tickets for Girl from the North Country from Radio Times Box Office If I have one cavil, it’s in the surface appearance of the show. The characters talk about being poor but never look it. It’s hard to buy into the idea of 1930s hardscrabble poverty when the denizens of Nick’s place look so groomed and dapper, like a well-heeled literary gathering. But the music, ah the music. The arrangements and the on-stage band are impeccable, giving well-worn songs a shot of soulful energy. Cut loose from Dylan’s treatments, they take on a life of their own, as standards of the future and worthy part of the great American songbook. Having seen Dylan live this year, I can vouch for how maddeningly slapdash his own renditions can be. So instead of shelling out for his next hit-or-miss tour, get a ticket for Girl from the North Country – and if they release a cast album, buy that too. Girl from the North Country is at the Old Vic until 7 October Book tickets from Radio Times Box Office
If The Handmaid’s Tale makes you despair of religion, try Broken
Sean Bean’s turn as a troubled priest in the BBC drama celebrates the best of religion while acknowledging the worst, says David Butcher
In its way, Broken is the most radical drama of the year so far. Why? Because it offers something you hardly ever see on TV outside of Easter week – a story that’s as religious as a stained glass window. And unlike The Handmaid’s Tale (very unlike The Handmaid’s Tale), it comes with a broadly positive take on Christianity. The story of a troubled Catholic priest, played with heart and soul by Sean Bean, does something vanishingly rare in the schedules: it celebrates the best of religion while acknowledging the worst. In the end, though, this Tuesday's finale couldn’t have been a better advertisement for the priesthood if it had come with a blessing from Pope Francis himself. Maybe that shouldn’t feel so shocking. But invariably, films and dramas portray Catholicism as a strange and suspect business – all bells, smells and weirdos. View oEmbed on the source website As a very lapsed Catholic myself, I can well understand that. I went to a Jesuit boarding school in the 1970s and 80s and heaven knows, it was an eccentric, archaic kind of place. So I can well see why, for directors and writers, it’s irresistible to film church locations as shadowy and sinister, with a priest who is a creepy hypocrite at best, and a child abuser at worst. How many crime dramas over the years have used an abusive Catholic priest as a plot point? You can’t blame them. The fact a top Vatican cardinal was recently charged by an Australian court with multiple sexual offences suggests the extent of the possible skeletons the Church may still have in its sacristy cupboard. It’s a scandal that could take decades, perhaps generations, to recover from. In his scripts for Broken, Jimmy McGovern doesn’t shy away from that ugly history, not a bit. The main character, Fr Michael, is haunted by memories of being bullied and abused at the hands of a grubby priest who taught him at school. The flashbacks keep assailing him just as he is at the most solemn part of Mass, the consecration of the bread and wine, making him stumble and freeze. He is assailed by doubts: “I’m not a priest, I’m an imposter,” he groaned in the final episode. The irony is that we know, from everything we’ve seen him do over the series, that Fr Michael is in fact as terrific a priest as any community could hope to have. One of McGovern’s achievements (and Bean’s) is to give us that rare thing, a genuinely kind and selfless protagonist – who is at the same time conflicted and flawed (or else there would be no drama at all…) He also has the hardest working conscience in Liverpool. What’s the right response if you discover one of your poorest parishioners (Anna Friel) has concealed her mother’s death in order to keep claiming her pension – a victimless crime if ever there was one? Fr Michael works it out. If a woman comes to you and calmly confesses she plans to take her own life, how do you react? Should you break the bond of the confessional to save her? Again, he steers a compassionate course through choppy ethical waters. Not that he’s anyone’s clerical goody-goody. The scene where Fr Michael lays into local betting shops from the pulpit, condemning the fact that they install machines to prey on the city’s poorest, is full of the righteous anger that McGovern dishes out better than anyone. (It can make him preachy at times, but not here.) The scene that follows, where locals go out with baseball bats to solemnly smash in the machines has a real moral clout to it. McGovern clearly respects religion – even fusty, dusty Catholicism – because he sees it bringing a moral yardstick to things. He values the way religion holds us to account, the way it offers ideals, however tarnished, and solace in tough times. He knows the sins of organised Christianity – and attacks them mercilessly in a way TV might shy away from with other religions – but in the end he draws a sympathetic picture. All this is clearly at the opposite end of the spectrum from The Handmaid’s Tale, with its bitter portrait of a society ruled by evangelical thugs. That’s a brilliant piece of television – and with the kind of American budget and production values McGovern could only dream of. But in its way Broken offers a good counterweight. And if Bean isn’t nominated for a Bafta next spring, it’ll be the devil’s work.
Instant news doesn't de-sensitize us, it forces us to face reality
From cameraphone footage of the Grenfell Tower fire to helmet cams on soldiers in Afghanistan – David Butcher explores the rise of in-the-moment broadcasting
On the day after the Grenfell Tower fire, Sky News aired grainy cameraphone footage that had been filmed the night before by a woman trapped in her flat. With remarkable presence of mind – or unaware of the full seriousness of what was happening – she had live-streamed her ordeal via Facebook. She and a neighbour were shown trying to escape via their smoke-filled landing, then calling for help from their balcony. While the woman with the phone prayed, the neighbour shouted, “We’re stuck on the 23rd floor. Hello? There’s too many people stuck upstairs!” The report then cut to news footage viewed from the ground, showing fire spreading up the tower at around the same time. It left us to draw our own conclusions as to what became of those poor women, along with scores of other residents, and the result for viewers was shattering, a sense of the subjective horror of the fire being not an “unimaginable tragedy” (as the cliché often puts it) but very imaginable, painfully so. We’re now used to the fact that the awfulness of what television news brings us keeps escalating. The immediacy of coverage means we’re brought up against incidents as they unfold. More than any previous generation, we take on board disasters, famine, war and terrorism, wherever they occur. Technology keeps narrowing the perspective: helmet cams on soldiers in Afghanistan have taken us inside the moment of an IED explosion. Mobile-phone images showed the events at the Bataclan in Paris, as gunfire rattled in the background and concertgoers hung from window ledges. Live streaming brings a new level of intimacy. The received wisdom is that this risks de-sensitising us, that the parade of painful truths on rolling-news channels can induce compassion fatigue, as Melvyn Bragg suggests in his excellent TV history The Box That Changed the World (Saturday BBC2). It doesn’t feel that way to me, and it certainly didn’t watching those images from Grenfell Tower. Sometimes unfolding, unfiltered coverage can jolt us from our comfort zone and make us connect with the experience of others. After all, the history of TV news is the story of filters falling away. When Michael Buerk reported on the Ethiopian famine in 1984 he had to fly back with cans of film and edit them. Today there would be a live satellite link. Yes, we very much need the perspective that a correspondent’s considered take on events can bring. But the game has changed: now, as Bragg puts it, “Everyone can be a camera,” and we’re still learning what that will mean.
Farewell to New Tricks: "Grumpy Old Men with dead bodies - and the BBC's secret weapon"
As the uncool detectives return for a final series, David Butcher hails the hugely popular cop show that apparently embarrassed the BBC
Hold on, this isn’t right. Series 12 starts with an episode very much not from the New Tricks playbook. It’s got snappy lines, a feisty plot and plenty at stake for a main character. What’s going on? We know what to expect from this show. It used to get nine million viewers at its height, and it didn’t do that by frightening the horses. It did it by serving up straight-ahead, join-the-dots crime drama with the twist that our heroes were all over 50. That meant they could tackle unsolved murders while grousing about political correctness or police computer systems or whatever bugbears might chime with the audience. It was Grumpy Old Men with dead bodies. At its height it became an unlikely cause célèbre, the BBC success the corporation was ashamed of, or so some newspapers claimed. The tastemakers of the BBC were said to be embarrassed by a middlebrow procedural that played it safe and catered to an uncool demographic – but proved a monster hit. It soon became the schedulers’ secret weapon. If the BBC ever needed to torpedo a new ITV drama – without sending a fresh offering of their own into battle – they would counter-schedule with a New Tricks repeat knowing their bunch of out-of-retirement coppers would nobble the ratings for them. Then came the cast changes and a slow decline. First James Bolam left, then Alun Armstrong, then Amanda Redman. Decent replacements (Lawson, Lyndhurst, Outhwaite) couldn’t hide that this was a team of invincibles no longer. View oEmbed on the source website And now the last of the original Tricksters has his testimonial. Dennis Waterman’s ageing swordsman Gerry was never the strongest link in the cast, but this two-parter (written and directed by Julian Simpson) comes up with some believable back-story for him, fleshing out the character in ways that would have been good to see about eight series ago. And in the flashback opening scene there’s a nice throwaway moment when the young Gerry is caught flirting with Sandra – one day to be his boss. The plot revolves around the bad old days of 1980s policing when Gerry’s colleagues were on the take from gangsters. The body of his then-DCI is found in a basement with its skull caved in and Gerry is looking shifty about the whole thing. “The lines were blurred back then,” he blusters. “It was hard to tell who was properly dodgy and who just had a few tasty mates.” It’s to the credit of the script that as it unfolds, we’re never entirely sure which side of the line Gerry himself sat. And I’ll be forever grateful to Simpson for devising a scene where Gerry’s daughter, handing over his grandson for babysitting, urges her dad “Oh for God’s sake, don’t sing to him.” David Butcher is deputy TV editor of Radio Times New Tricks returns tonight (Tuesday 4th August), 9pm on BBC1
Why television must learn from Michael Palin
When it comes to comedy, there seems to be a crisis of confidence and a dread of taking risks, says David Butcher
My personal highlight of the recent BFI & Radio Times Television Festival was getting to meet a comedy hero – the fish-slappingly wonderful Michael Palin. As a child, I would listen to my older brothers’ Monty Python albums (remember when comedy came on LPs?) via an old mono record player, and used to laugh helplessly while never quite knowing why – probably because my brothers did. I was about eight and too young to grasp why “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise etc” was so funny, but I knew it was something powerful – and barking mad. Cut to 2017 and I’m meeting Cardinal Ximenez in the flesh – and the cheese shop owner and the parrot vendor and the world’s greatest lumberjack. I’d love to tell you that in person, Palin was tetchy and difficult and smelt strongly of rum, but no, he was charming – and full of shrewd insights. Among other things he told us how straightforward it was to get the first series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus commissioned. The relevant BBC department head simply told them, “I’ll give you 13 shows, and that’s all,” then left them to it. In conversation with Eddie Mair at the Radio Times festival Hard to imagine today. Creative types always whinge about the indecision and control-freakery of TV executives: it’s like farmers talking about the weather. But when it comes to comedy, there does seem to be a crisis of confidence right now, a dread of taking risks. “They want to know what you’ll do before you’ve done it,” Palin observed. Hence, while British TV drama bestrides the world, our comedy wallows in a lull. The thin trickle of new sitcoms and sketch shows coming through – particularly at the BBC – is starting to be an embarrassment. There’s the odd mega-hit like Mrs Brown’s Boys and currently there’s the warm and wonderful Car Share. (You might think a Peter Kay sitcom was a safe bet for whoever commissioned it, but as Sian Gibson has pointed out, a story set mostly in one car, and co-starring an unknown like her, was a gamble.) Monty Python Shows like Car Share and the less trumpeted but equally fab This Country are lighting the way, but you could argue the sign of the system working is the unsuccessful sitcom. For instance, I don’t think Hospital People (Fridays BBC1) is terribly good, but I’m delighted it exists. Its mix of broad character comedy and mockumentary never quite gels, but the fact that it got made at all means someone was prepared to take a punt. Commissioning new comedy is a leap of faith – like a bungee jump where the elastic of the audience’s goodwill can easily snap. Unless comedy departments step into the unknown more often and risk the kind of uniquely bitter criticism new comedy gets from people who don’t like it, we’ll never enjoy the spark of the new. And the potential Pythons of tomorrow will busy themselves doing panel shows and stand-up tours instead.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead review: Daniel Radcliffe stars in a sparkling revival ★★★★
Tom Stoppard's existential comedy is still going strong after 50 years
“Incidents! All we get is incidents! Dear God, is it too much too expect a little sustained action?” So says a character late on in Tom Stoppard’s philosophical comedy and it’s one of many knowing winks that bait the audience with the fact that, well, so little really happens on stage here (and what does comes from Shakespeare). So are we left equally narked by Stoppard toying with us? Not a bit of it. A sparkling revival to mark the play’s 50th anniversary doesn’t need the superstar casting of Daniel Radclffe as Rosencrantz to make it fizz – but if you come to see Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Moan, you’ll stay for a production that has plenty more up its Elizabethan sleeve. Our heroes are a pair of minor characters from Hamlet, forever fretting about what roles they’re meant to fill in the greater scheme of things. Bewildered bystanders in their own story, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play word-games, toss coins, trade one-liners and muse on death while occasionally (and hilariously) getting sucked into the tragic events unfolding in Elsinore. It’s a delicious premise, summed up when the Player – leader of a raggedly menacing band of actor/musicians – says at one point, “We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else…” David Haig as The Player and The Players (photos by Manuel Harlan) Obviously much of the focus here is on Radcliffe, and he makes a delightful, droll Rosencrantz, playing him as a sweet but slightly dozy sounding-board to the more uptight Guildenstern (Joshua McGuire). So sweet and clueless, in fact, that with his pursed mouth and raised eyebrows you could be reminded of Stan Laurel, with McGuire as the slightly tubbier Hardy side of the double act. But it’s David Haig as the wild-haired, scarlet-coated Player who very nearly runs away with the show by sheer force of comic energy. Haig is often cast as strait-laced types but as a flamboyantly disreputable ham, forever hinting that his troupe can offer other, er, services, he provides the perfect counterpoint to our uncertain heroes. Thanks to restrained but deft direction from David Leveaux, what can be a slightly maddening play, full of meta-moments and clever flourishes, becomes instead a sort of absurdist panto. In one scene, Polonius (William Chubb) delivers an aside to the audience during which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern notice us for the first time and gaze in wonder over a laughing auditorium. It’s an enjoyable moment in a night of theatrical sleight of hand that transcends the wattage of its star. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is at the Old Vic until 29 April Book tickets for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead from Radio Times Box Office Theatre and dinner package: Package includes a great seat for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and two courses from a set menu
Why you should be watching BBC2 documentary Hospital
"No other series I’ve seen about the health service has captured the operational, skin-of-the-teeth side of it so well," says David Butcher
“We cope, somehow, that’s what we do,” says a consultant at one point in tonight’s second episode of Hospital. Later, there’s a weary aside from a passing a surgeon: “At some point, somebody will be telling us whether we're allowed to do any work…." he sighs. This, it turns out, is what it’s like in the NHS now: philosophical staff, wishing they were able to do their jobs. Instead, they’re hamstrung by the fact that their hospital (in this case, St Mary’s in Paddington, west London) is full to bursting. There are no spare beds, just a kind of clinical traffic jam. The system is more clogged up than the arteries of an overweight smoker. What makes Hospital such a gripping series to watch – in an awful, tragic sort of way – is that we see the human cost of that chronic overstretch. In last week’s opener we saw an awful situation unfold as Simon, who urgently needed an operation for his cancer of the oesophagus, sat around in limbo. His entire surgical team waited too – surgeon, anaesthetists, nurses, and so on. An operating theatre sat in readiness. But for Simon to start his seven-hour operation, the hospital would have to be sure there was an intensive care bed to put him in afterwards. And that was a problem, because at that very moment a retired teacher was being rushed by ambulance from Norfolk with an aneurysm in her chest that could burst at any moment. She needed an op and an intensive care bed too. Being closer to possible death, her need trumped his, and there was only one bed spare – or there might be, in a few hours, with luck and a bit of nip and tuck from the relevant departments. So eventually, after much to-ing and fro-ing, Simon’s operation was cancelled (for the second time), he and his wife went home, and the disconsolate surgical team stood down. Fascinatingly, the programme’s cameras and microphones captured all the gentle argy-bargy of the situation, the expert-to-expert negotiations, the polite wheedling between eminent professors of surgery – and above, all the frustration. It’s at once brilliantly skilled observational film making (so a pleasure to watch) and evocative of the many problems in the NHS (so quite depressing.) No other series I’ve seen about the health service – and there have been plenty over the last few years – has captured this operational, skin-of-the-teeth side of it so well. Some commentators have suggested that lately, hospital trusts have become more honest about their difficulties, less defensive, because resources have reached snapping point. In this case, the openness has paid dividends. Over two million viewers saw the first episode – an amazing number for a BBC2 documentary on a thorny subject. That’s heartening, and given recent headlines, joining them feels like the least we can do. Hospital continues on Wednesdays at 9pm on BBC2. Catch up on episode one on BBC iPlayer
Art review: Sharp comedy starring Rufus Sewell ★★★★
Friday Night Dinner's Paul Ritter and Peep Show's Tim Key also star in this superb revival at the Old Vic
Yasmena Reza’s Art was the highbrow hit of the nineties. It ran for eight years in the West End. It conquered Broadway, where it won a Tony for Best Play. And it perfected the production flourish of using fresh, big-name re-casting to persuade punters back for a second – or third – viewing. So a hit, yes, and a touring success ever since; but has this Art stood the test of time? Twenty years on, director Matthew Warchus has revived his original, minimal production at the Old Vic and the tug of the play’s premise remains as sharp as ever. Three friends meet over a period of weeks. One of them, Serge (Rufus Sewell) has bought a painting at great expense that is entirely white: a white canvas with diagonal white stripes. His old friend Marc (Paul Ritter) is appalled. “You paid €100,000 for this shit?” he scoffs, triggering a rift in their friendship that the emollient Yvan (Tim Key) does his best to heal. Rufus Sewell as Serge and Tim Key as Yvan; above: Paul Ritter as Marc) and Sewell (photos by Manuel Harlan) What unfolds from there is a sharp study in character and ego (or the lack of it) with ideas about modern art fizzing through it and – crucially – big laughs. From the moment the painting was revealed the Old Vic audience were chuckling in anticipation and the cast (Key started out as a comedian, Ritter is best known for TV sitcom roles) rode the comedy all the way. There is simply nobody better than Ritter at doing exasperation and he threatens to steal the show as the embittered traditionalist Marc, ranting at Serge’s folly. When he turns his fire on people-pleaser Yvan, infuriated by the latter’s “lack of substance” Ritter’s voice takes on a new register of fury and we realise that what started as a play about art becomes about how adult friendship can curdle and split. Then at the end, the play shifts once again: the line “Nothing great or beautiful in this world was ever born out of rational argument” makes us rethink what has gone before. Some of those deeper currents of the play go under-explored in this revival but the beautifully barbed comedy is irresistible. Art is at the Old Vic, London, until 18 February Book tickets for Art from the Radio Times Box Office
Unromance is everywhere on TV at the moment – and that’s a good thing
Sometimes you need to see the flipside of love to enjoy the soppy stuff
Romance is alive and well. There’s plenty of good television around to fill our hearts with sighs and strew rose petals around the sofa. But without sounding like a heartless brute, I want to look the other way for a bit. So let’s wipe the Vaseline off the lens, tear the needle off the record and celebrate the opposite, the unromantic television out there. Because we’re currently seeing a mini-boom in unromance. By which I mean shows that aren’t boy-meets-girl so much as man-splits-with-woman-and-they-mud-wrestle-through-the-aftermath. Take Divorce (Tuesday Sky Atlantic), Sharon Horgan’s sitcom with Sarah Jessica Parker and Thomas Haden Church on killer form as Frances and Robert, a New York couple whose marriage has run out of road. The picture it paints of marriage (and parenthood) is enough to put a generation off pair-bonding. But although it’s unflinching and unfluffy, Divorce is not by any means cynical, it just notes the painful ways a husband and wife end up seeing things differently – and does so with a sparky edge that reminds you of Woody Allen, back when he was good. In one scene this week, Frances and Robert are at a session with their marriage counsellor. Their break-up is driven by the fact that Frances had an affair, and as Robert explains in high dudgeon, he could have had an affair with a friend he got very close to, but although they discussed it, he resisted the temptation to go further. At this point, it’s Frances’s turn to be outraged: “So basically, you had an emotional affair?” Robert’s horror that this “emotional affair” is then held in the balance against her physical one (“What are you talking about?”) becomes hilariously desperate and etches another crack in their union. Maybe I’m a bad person but I find something cruelly funny about two people looking back on their shared, now ruined, past and competing over whose lumps of rubble matter more. A similar idea fuelled a terrific sitcom pilot on BBC2 last month called Our Ex-Wife, written with 90mph wit by Julie Thacker Scully, formerly of The Simpsons. It opened by cutting straight from a shot of newlyweds Jack and Hillary being showered with confetti... to the pair ten years later fighting in their front room with broken wine bottles. Nope, no misty-eyed romance there. I know dwelling on this kind of break-up TV looks a little sour, but in an odd way these un-romantic highlights do celebrate love, just from an awkward angle, from the opposite of the Richard Curtis angle. From the far end, if you like. And there’s a lot of it about. As it happens, this week’s Ordinary Lies(Tuesday BBC1) dwells on the ruins of a relationship, too, this time between office-worker Holly (the always good Kimberley Nixon) and an ex-boyfriend who split from her seven years ago. When Holly learns he’s back in town she takes to stalking him and starts living a lie in the hope of winning him back. We know this will end badly, but the scene where it does took me by surprise with how throat-constrictingly sad it was. There are similar threads elsewhere. In fact, once you start to look, unromance is everywhere – in Cold Feet recently for instance. We wouldn’t want a diet only of bitter break-up-type stories, God forbid, but a scattering of them is, I reckon, healthy. Then, hopefully, after a slap-in-the-face of realism, we can enjoy the tender, feel-good stuff all the more.
QI with Sandi Toksvig: Stephen Fry may be gone, but the series is in the safest of hands
"Toksvig takes over the reins just as deftly and seamlessly as you would expect" says David Butcher. The new series airs at 10pm on BBC2
There are batons and there are batons. And as passing the baton goes, Stephen Fry handing over QI after 13 years in charge is a big, chunky baton with splinters sticking out for whoever grabs it. Fry was QI. The show is so steeped in his love of obscure knowledge and naughty humour that when it was announced last year he was stepping down after 13 series, it felt like one of those wrong-answer klaxon-blaring moments. But it was fine, because Sandi Toksvig was taking over and that made perfect sense. Toksvig has appeared on the show as a guest (16 times) and knows its foibles. What’s more, she is also large of brain and naughty of humour. So the good news is that in tonight’s first episode, Toksvig takes over the reins just as deftly and seamlessly as you would expect of someone with her experience (she chaired The News Quiz for nearly a decade on Radio 4.) It’s true, the show feels the tiniest bit strained to begin with, not surprisingly. But with the help of some comedy bird-whistles they soon break the ice, and Phill Jupitus, Cariad Lloyd and Romesh Ranganathan get into their stride talking about ‘chimney-sweep’s scrotum’ (a genuine disease, apparently) the origins of the word ‘quiz’ and who exactly it was who sold seashells on the seashore. Toksvig has something else in common with Fry: he could sometimes project the air of a schoolmaster – benign but occasionally disappointed in his unruly pupils – and Toksvig is much the same. In the second episode of this series, things start to get out of hand between Rhod Gilbert and Alan Davies and Toksvig gets very slightly stern and headmistressy. (It doesn’t help that Gilbert keeps getting Denmark and Norway mixed up: Toksvig is Danish) A panel show presenter can’t let a show run away from them and she knows when to give her charges a comic clip round the ear. The trouble is, if pushed, I would say – and this is not sacrilege, bear with me – that in recent series, even under Fry’s tutelage, QI has gone very slightly off the boil, as long-running panel games will. A slight shake-up to the format might be just what it needs. Bear in mind the current format wasn’t the first idea anyway. Originally it was pitched as a show with Fry and Davies as captains of rival teams (the Cleverclogs and the Dunderheads) with Michael Palin as the chairman. What a different show that might have been. QI with Sandi Toksvig begins Friday 21 October at 10pm on BBC2
TV needs to start gambling to create new classics
Good news: ITV has commissioned a prequel to Prime Suspect. Filming started recently on a new series called Tennison, which will focus on Jane Tennison’s early career as a WPC in 1970s Hackney, north-east London, years before she became one of the Met’s first female DCIs – so before she became Helen Mirren, essentially. This is good news, isn’t it? I mean, Endeavour found a place in our hearts as a worthy prequel to Morse. And the young Jane Tennison they have cast – Stefanie Martini – is a good screen presence, as she showed in Doctor Thorne, quite apart from having the sort of alluring showbiz name I look forward to seeing in lights any time, any place, anywhere... So why does the idea of the new series bother me? I’m sure it’s not only me: most of us who loved Prime Suspect back in the day will feel torn, because that wasn’t just another gritty police procedural. It was a bit special – perhaps the best drama about sexism in the workplace ever – and we’re worried that a new take on it will sully its memory. It’s like the moment you first heard that someone had uncovered an unreleased Beatles demo or an unpublished first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, and you wished they would put it back on the dusty shelf or in the basement filing cabinet, and tiptoe away. But that is not television’s way. Not at the moment, anyway, when the urge to dust off classics is everywhere. Soon, we’ll see revamps of Porridge and Up Pompeii! and a sequel to Cold Feet. There has been talk for years of a Generation Game reboot to lift BBC1’s Saturday nights. Perhaps this is the equivalent of populist political movements – a sort of “We want our television back!” cry that leans on the idea that things used to be better before someone or something spoiled them... More likely, it’s simply creative caution from those who decide our viewing. Sure, you and I would like it if TV executives took a few risks and tried new ideas, bold dramas, fresh comedies, but it’s not our necks on the line if the gambles backfire, is it? Much safer for them to trade on the familiar or fondly remembered. It didn’t work out badly for Poldark. Or, for that matter, House of Cards. If revamps and reimaginings have a creative mainspring of their own, and if they’re good enough to make us forget their forerunners, then all power to them. But what I’ll be scanning the autumn schedules for are the series that could be the classics of tomorrow: the next Prime Suspect or Porridge. Because if TV keeps living in the past, its future will be bleak.
We love the bad guys, but not when they're the go-to drama property developers
What on earth have our TV scriptwriters got against property developers? It’s starting to look like an obsession. I can only assume that at some point the offices of every channel’s drama department have had their sunlight blocked out by new tower blocks. Maybe that’s why they have sleazy property moguls as go-to baddies in series after series. Marcella, Doctor Foster and New Blood (Thursday BBC1) are recent examples, but really there are dozens. Just think how many times you’ve watched that scene where a smart-suited businessman pitches his new development to a room full of applauding investors... I know they make easy hate figures, but it’s so blooming lazy. And it’s part of a wider problem: we need better baddies. Alfred Hitchcock reck- oned, “The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.” And for “picture” read drama series, because goodness knows, too many small-screen baddies are cardboard-cutout bogeymen who have all the menace of a paper napkin with “Boo!” written on it. There are the dodgy developers, yes, but also, time after time (including in New Blood), the big, bad drugs company developing a new drug whose side effects it needs to cover up; or of course the corrupt politician (New Blood had one of these, too). Yes, politicians... Recent events – let’s just say “recent events” and move on – have meant we’ve had no shortage of real or perceived villains on the national stage. As birds fall from the economic skies and stormclouds swirl, people on all sides have cast around for who to blame. It’s an instinct – we point the finger and hiss. You may reserve your hatred for Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson, while someone else blames Jean-Claude Juncker or Nigel Farage, but we all need a bogeyman. And in real life, such hate figures are at least complicated, three-dimensional and interesting. So why are fictional villains mostly so flimsy? Not always, of course. Sometimes a TV drama will throw up a baddie Hitchcock might have liked. Nobody could see the first series of Happy Valley without contracting a mortal terror of Tommy Lee Royce or the second without getting caught in the nightmare of that craven cop who killed his mistress. Part of the reason The Night Manager captivated us was that in suave arms dealer Richard Roper it had a major-league monster. (And all right, it had the Hiddleston fellow, too, but stick to the point...) Sky Atlantic’s Billions (Thursday) features a cracking bad guy in Damian Lewis’s Bobby “Axe” Axelrod, an all-conquering New York hedge-fund manager. Axe is brilliant, because although he is a snake – insider trading, sabotaging rivals and so on – he’s such a cool, charismatic snake we can’t help the unworthy part of us rooting for him a little bit. That’s the secret of decent villains: at some level, we feel for them. They’re complicated. They’re not just someone sleazy and rich we’re invited to hiss at. So come on, drama writers, let’s put an end to bland baddies, let’s fight for the right to have proper, grown-up hate figures. Never mind Bonnie Tyler holding out for a hero. I’m holding out for a half-decent villain – and who isn’t a property developer.
Born on the Same Day: a smart approach to exploring the extraordinary in every life story
Sir Ranulph Fiennes was born on the same day in 1944 as Frances Kelly and Ewart Rennalls – here their life stories are played out in tandem...
Do you remember the first time you watched Who Do You Think You Are? or Long Lost Family? They always strike me as examples of a rare thing – perfectly formed, emotionally irresistible television. The premise in each case is one-sentence simple, but as they unfold on screen, you can’t help getting drawn in, gripped, given a history lesson and moved – as the subjects are – to tears. A good trick, and one that Born on The Same Day tries to pull off. Again, it’s a simple concept (devised in Norway, apparently) the kind of thing that must have development executives at production companies screaming at their staff, “Why didn’t we think of that?” The idea is: take one celebrity and have them tell their life story in potted form. In parallel with that, tell the stories of two non-famous people who happen to have the same date of birth. Don’t force comparisons, or imply that one is a somebody and the others nobodies: let the personal stories and the family snapshots and the archive footage of the era (inevitably, post-war Britain) weave a spell. And it works. For the first programme the famous contributor is Sir Ranulph Fiennes. I have never much warmed to the polar explorer but he won me over early in this programme by making an admission you hardly ever hear: “I think I was just born fairly unintelligent and still am,” he tells us, bluntly. He says this while reflecting on why he failed his A-levels and therefore couldn’t get a place at Sandhurst. He had wanted to follow his father’s footsteps and become Colonel of the same regiment. When that avenue was closed he decided to become an explorer instead – and found his calling. And on the same day, 7 Match 1944, that Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes was born (a distant cousin of the king , we learn) in a Windsor maternity ward, over in Jamaica, Ewart Rennalls was born onto his family’s farm. And in Leeds, Frances Kelly was born to parents who ran a corner shop. Both, we gather as the programme goes on, were and are quietly impressive. Ewart arrived in Britain from Jamaica as a teenager and describes vividly his shock at seeing the small, terraced house in Birmingham he was to live in: “When I stepped out of the van with my brothers, I thought, ‘I can’t believe this. What we have left behind, the space! And now this little slice is all we have?’ My heart sank.” He went on to a career in the RAF and later as a businessman. Nothing so extraordinary there, but the programme does a great job of making his story interesting in itself and also as a slice of social history. In the end, though, it’s Leeds-born Frances Kelly whose story will tear at your heart. She describes the emotionally closed life she knew growing up (‘I don’t remember feeling any love.’) and the appalling childhood accident that left her badly scarred – and how it was treated by her family as something never to be spoken of, as if it were a source of terrible shame. The three lives proceed in tandem. Marriages, jobs, families, setbacks. For Fiennes the setbacks were more public and in one case shockingly grisly. Look out for one of 2016’s stranger TV sequences, in which Fiennes demonstrates how after a punishing polar expedition he had to saw off the ends of his own frostbitten fingers. He then produces said fingertips from a small tin. It’s such a peculiar moment it almost unbalances the programme, but not quite. Born on The Same Day may not have quite the impact of Who Do You Think You Are? but it is a smart and touching approach to getting at what is extraordinary about every life story. Born on the Same Day is on tonight at 9pm on Channel 4
Tim Rhys-Evans opens up about mental illness
The powerful documentary Tim Rhys-Evans: All in the Mind reveals what it's like to live with anxiety and depression
Mental illness can ambush anyone. That’s the message you take away from tonight’s powerful documentary about Tim Rhys-Evans, the choirmaster who achieved national success with Only Men Aloud. In 2013 Tim’s career was on a high and he was awarded an MBE by the Queen. But on the inside, he was crumbling. In Tim Rhys-Evans: All in The Mind (shown earlier in the year on BBC Wales) he gives a movingly honest account of his depression and suicide attempts. His testimony makes for the sort of programme that sends you away wanting to check your friends are OK, because one of its lessons is that people can be on the point of suicide while hiding the crisis they’re in from everyone around them. “The thing about mental illness is that it’s a devious little shit,” Tim says frankly. “It sits there and it knows exactly how to get into these dark places that can really mess with your head…like this ugly destructive, clever creature.” The fact that the person we see saying these words appears articulate and a picture of sanity adds to their weight. Only Men Aloud reinvented the idea of male voice choirs and won the BBC’s Last Choir Standing talent show in 2008. They went on to critical acclaim and commercial success - spearheaded by Rhys-Evans. “Tim sprinkles the stardust,” a friend says. But he was also, by his own admission, a perfectionist who worked tirelessly in his desire to drive the choir on. They got a record deal; they sang at Buckingham Palace; they appeared on the Royal Variety Show. But while outwardly at the height of his success, internally Tim succumbed to depression. “I’d been asking too much of myself. I’d become used to feeling exhausted.” As a child he had been given a hard time at school in Wales. He had tried not to let his more flamboyant side show, he says, but he was bullied and it left scars. “A lifetime of telling yourself you’re rubbish and you believe it.” One of the striking quotes in the film comes when Tim talks about why, as his demons started to take over, he dismissed his own suspicion that he might be depressed. “I don’t feel sad or tearful,” he thought at the time - the received idea of depression. “I just don’t went to live.” It’s Tim’s testimony and films like this that can, hopefully, help brush away the remnants of a stiff-upper-lip view of psychology. We all know it - the view that likes to confuse clinical depression with feeling down, or sees anxiety disorders as about being high maintenance or “neurotic”. For that reason alone the programme is worth watching, but also for Tim’s insights on how it feels to have your sense of self implode and to keep that a secret. He reads from his 15-page suicide note (“I’m sorry that I’ve abdicated the responsibility but… I can see no other way.”) He tells how he gave his less healthy mind the nickname Derek, the devious creature that was undermining his sanity. And he tells too of how a superb mental health crisis unit of the NHS saved his life more than once. They are the heroes of the film, and a gentle reminder that mental health services are no luxury. When the Dereks within us ambush out of a clear blue sky, any of us could need services like those that saved Tim.
Children on the Frontline: The Escape – an extraordinary film that goes beyond the "bang bang" of news
After five years of news reports tied to fighting in Syria, David Butcher applauds a family-focused documentary
You could be forgiven for not rushing to see Marcel Mettelsiefen’s latest documentary. It sounds on the face of it like the kind of tough, harrowing TV many of us know we really ought to watch but, well, it’s easy not to get round to. Make the effort, because it’s an extraordinary film. Called Children on the Frontline: the Escape (tonight at 10pm on Channel 4), the documentary follows the fortunes of a single Syrian family as their world in Aleppo crumbles and they go in search of a better life in Europe. We’ve been watching news reports of the Syrian war for five years – the fighting, the ebb and flow of territory, the devastation, the hollowing out of a nation. This feels different because it’s not a film about fighting. Mettelsiefen’s previous film about the same family in 2013 won a string of awards including two Baftas, an Emmy and the Prix d’Italia, partly because it made what could have been a gruelling tale an unexpected joy to watch. What makes the story itself special? In one sense, nothing. Hala, Abu Ali and their four children live like any number of Syrian families: amid shattered housing blocks, rubble and government bombardment. The children have no schooling other than what eldest daughter Helen can teach the youngsters. Fun is throwing bits of rubble at a basketball hoop. But in the face of the blows that rain down on them, the children remain sweet, funny and tough. Their father is the local rebel leader, commanding a unit of the Free Syria Army. In 2014, Isis flooded the area and changed the balance of power. One night they abducted Abu Ali from his HQ. His family has not seen him since. Hala and the children are on their own. Eldest daughter Helen is philosophical: “I’m not scared of anything any more,” she tells the camera. “There’s no need to be scared of anything because there’s nothing left in our lives.” They decide to leave Aleppo. On the eve of their departure, five-year-old Sara draws a simple sketch on a notepad. Why? “So Dad sees it and comes to us in Germany,” she explains. As they drive away, one of the girls says simply: “We love you, Syria. Forgive us.” View oEmbed on the source website This is a story of a kind news bulletins rarely deliver. Mettelsiefen himself believes that may be because of the demand for what he calls “bang bang”, the need for explosions to justify a slot on a news bulletin. “A lot of journalists stayed with Abu Ali and his troops for many weeks and none of them realised his family was the most incredible family and the most amazing story,” he recalls. “Sometimes news focuses too much on exciting pictures of ‘bang-bang’, but I think people have started to get sick of seeing so much fighting,” he argues. “If you are able to make an emotional story of one family, a microcosm where everybody can identify with them, the impact is so much stronger.” It’s an approach that has met with opposition. “I was cutting a version for German TV and I had a lot of ‘bang bang’ footage... The producer said, ‘You have to put all this in’ and I said, ‘No. I’m doing war without showing war.’ He said that was like doing a film about football and not showing the ball. I said that was exactly what I wanted! War without showing war.” Children on the Frontline: The Escape is on Channel 4 tonight (Tuesday 10th May) at 10.00pm
Don't let on-demand distract you from this mini golden age of BBC drama
You don't have to be like Bob the Binge...
Do you have one of those friends who likes to buttonhole you at social occasions to rave about the amazing TV they’re watching? I’ve got several, but we’ll amalgamate them into one – let’s call him Bob the Binge (because that’s how he watches), a man who proclaims his love for his latest on-demand drama with evangelical zeal. It’s almost as if Bob created the series himself, as if his life-changing appreciation for Narcos or Kabul Kitchen or Mr Robot or whatever is down to the fact that he “gets it” uniquely and specially. It is his. Bob will catch you in the pub, wanting to know if you’ve seen whatever he’s raving about. And if not, he insists you must catch it because You. Will. Love it. (Some people love telling you how much you’ll love things, I’ve no idea why.) But the interesting thing is how often Bob is floored if you ask him, “So have you seen this week’s Happy Valley?” or “What about The Night Manager, eh?” His sails deflate and his attention wanders, because that stuff is, well, a bit obvious. It’s available to everyone. There’s no rarity value, no street cred. Bob didn’t bother with War and Peace and will probably skip Line of Duty. The A Word – which starts on Tuesday – will barely register. Which is a shame, because these are the top-notch series the BBC currently turns out like loaves of bread from an oven. They’re part of the hottest streak in mainstream drama I can remember, in two decades of writing about TV. Bob hasn’t noticed, but we’re in a mini golden age for big, classy dramas. So far 2016 has been thick with them, culminating in nine million people watching Call the Midwife and over six million sticking with The Night Manager and Happy Valley. And the latter wasn’t some crowd-pleasing romp, remember, but tough, painful stuff that nobody could deny was – to use the word currently deployed as a yardstick for the BBC – distinctive. Plus, it wasn’t about Colombian criminals or hackers or zombies, it was about an embattled policewoman in Yorkshire. This week’s newcomer The A Word is also set in a recognisable contemporary Britain – the Lake District. It’s not as intense as Happy Valley (very little is) or as enjoyable as The Night Manager (ditto), but it does a sensitive job of showing how a rural family handles discovering that their five-year-old has autism. Not an easy subject, and I don’t suppose The A Word will break any ratings records or tempt Bob away from his binges. But it’s another hot, nourishing drama loaf rolling out of the BBC oven. We’d better hope these creative fires keep burning – and the present culture secretary doesn’t, as it were, shut the bakery down for making loaves too many people like. If that happens, we’ll look back on today’s boom in quality drama in a few years’ time and wonder why on earth we took it for Sunday-night ￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼granted.
The best comedy ensemble since Dad's army
In the United States, this is huge. Never mind Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad, Modern Family has won the Emmy for outstanding comedy series four years in a row along with crates of other awards and audiences of 15 million. On this side of the Atlantic it remains a minor Sky1 cult. More people here — far, far more people — tune in to watch a repeat of Outnumbered. The curious thing about the show, created by two former Frasier writers in 2009, is it’s so simple. The premise is: a family. That’s it. To make it interesting, the family is an extended one, split between patriarch Jay’s household (ruled by his curvaceous Colombian second wife), his daughter Claire’s brood and his son Mitchell’s relationship. About the only angle is that Mitchell is gay and soon (in the finale of season 5, in fact) to be married to his partner Cameron. So, there you have it. On paper, nothing fancy. But not since Dad’s Army has a comic ensemble worked so perfectly, so adorably, together. There are ten main characters and any one, kids included, would have enough comedy juice to power a series of their own. If it were up to me, any spin-off would revolve around Claire’s husband Phil, the try-hard, doofus dad always wanting to be cool to his kids. He’s trying to be cool because he’s so uncool: a former high-school cheerleader (yes, a male one) and gadgets nerd who now works as an over-eager estate agent and pulls off more pratfalls than a silent movie star. But Phil is merely one cog in a precision-tooled comedy machine. There isn’t room to go into the joys of all the other characters: dry, put-upon Jay; absurdly refined kid Manny; clenched mum Claire. Give Modern Family a go and soon enough, you’ll love them all.
What The Thick of It did next - laugh at Americans
Veep really shouldn’t have worked. The idea that a group of British writers, led by Armando Iannucci, would take the style they’d developed on The Thick of It to a US sitcom set in the vice-president’s office looked crazy. Or at best, what another political comedy would have called “courageous”. But it worked. It won plaudits. It won Emmys. In fact, it proved more popular in America than here, even though the serrated style and cynical characters of Veep seem resoundingly un-American, and all the better for it. The show’s heroes are the aides and underlings of Selina Meyer, a female vice-president who chafes against the pointlessness of her role. Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Selina (brilliantly) as a sort of porcelain monster: part spoilt child, part world-class charmer, with a repertoire of insincere smiles. She can be touchingly kind, but when a rage takes her (generally because yet another political manoeuvre has spectacularly backfired), the bully in Selina bursts through the chic exterior to vaporise anyone in sight. It’s in these acid moments that Veep is at its best. Everyone abuses everyone else, and like Malcolm Tucker’s sweary outbursts, Veep’s rapid-fire putdowns have become an art form. One politico stands up to Selina’s PA with: “Sue, don’t talk to me that way. You’re the secretary to the vice-president. That’s like being Garfunkel’s roadie.” A numbers wonk is “the Pol Pot of pie charts”. The unique hit Veep offers is this classy (and usually filthy) vitriol. It gives us top-class sniping and political pratfalls at the pace of a 1930s screwball comedy. Plus the satisfaction that, yes, a bunch of limeys can mock America’s politics and get away with it.
BBC2 conspiracy thriller Odyssey: "More Poundland than Homeland"
It's perfectly serviceable, undemanding drama but with too much exposition, "glove-puppet plotting" and the strange casting of Anna Friel it's far from the gritty drama it was aiming for, says David Butcher
A waif-like heroine fighting terrorists. Corruption in high places. Lots of shouting in Arabic. Parts of Odyssey may remind you dimly of Homeland. Its American network NBC probably hoped to create a down-and-dirty version of the Claire Danes thriller, but what we end up with is more Poundland than Homeland. Which is fine; we like the odd trip to Poundland. But don’t come to Odyssey expecting deep characters or multi-layered plots. Our heroine is Sgt Odelle Ballard, played by Anna Friel. Of all the parts I expected Friel to play in her career, a special forces US Army sergeant wasn’t one of them. She does a good job but it’s like seeing Keira Knightley play a bouncer – you’re starting at a disadvantage. So, the premise: Odelle’s elite US army unit are on a mission in Mali when they kill the leader of Al Qaeda. On his laptop, Odelle finds documents showing the terrorist boss received a transfer of $30million from a big US corporation. That’s odd, she thinks, and like any good thriller protagonist, puts the incriminating data on a memory stick, moments before some shadowy US private militia types arrive and take control. From there on, it’s a familiar tale of conspiracy and cover-up. In case we’re confused, now and then someone will say something on-the-nose like ‘This whole thing is a cover up!’ or ‘They won’t stop until they find me and they kill me!’ That’s an occupational hazard of Odyssey: nothing is left for viewers to piece together; all story dots are visibly joined and then one character will explain to another that they’re joined. It gets worse for Odelle. She survives a friendly-fire drone strike that kills the rest of her unit, but is forced to go on the run across the desert, while back home she is reported dead. The catch is, she has to pose as a man to pass as a Touareg pilgrim (or something), but even when every inch of her body is covered and you can only see her eyes, Anna Friel does not look like a wizened tribesman, she looks like Anna Friel on a fashion shoot. There are other plot strands – characters in New York who rumble the cover-up – but nothing that you would for a moment mistake for realism. It’s full of what you might call glove-puppet plotting: characters pop up to do a job – evil corporate boss, wild-eyed hacker and so on – but they’re only there to lay another tile of the 2D story, which so far has made not one unexpected or intriguing turn. Never mind, it’s perfectly serviceable, undemanding drama, with a bit of (not nearly enough) action here and there. But Homeland it ain’t. Odyssey begins with a double bill at 9:15pm on Sunday 28th June on BBC2
Why tired TV formats should be scrapped for more silliness on screen
This weekend's TV schedule features hypnotism and fluffy animal costumes. David Butcher hails a new slew of silly shows...
Good news. Two promisingly mad entertainment shows start this week. In one, members of the public complete daft tasks while hypnotised (You’re Back in the Room, Saturday, 8:20pm, ITV, seen below). In the other, contestants play slapstick games in a forest while dressed in big fluffy animal costumes they can’t see out of (Wild Things, Sunday, 7pm, Sky1). I mean, what’s not to like? Just typing out those one-line descriptions made me smile more than entire episodes of last year’s re-booted Celebrity Squares. I grant you they sound thoroughly childish and ridiculous. But ridiculous ideas aren’t bad ideas. Ridiculous ideas are great! We need more of them! For years we’ve had the same fleet of big shows, the same entertainment hulks sailing through our living rooms. The X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing, Britain’s Got Talent, I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, Big Brother...Children born when this lot were first broadcast are now at secondary school. We need new blood. The trouble is, it’s fiendishly hard to find new entertainment ideas. (If you don’t believe me, you try thinking of one.) And when you’ve found a promising format, there’s no guarantee it’ll work by the time it gets on screen – so much can go wrong (remember Reflex, an entire game show in slow motion?). So the temptation is to play safe and resurrect a hit from years gone by. On that basis, whoever pitched the concept of Harry Hill reviving Stars in Their Eyes (above) must have thought they were home and dry. It looked like a match made in heaven. Except... it ended in ratings hell. Similarly, when ITV paid a reported £1 million last year for a talent-show format where viewers could vote for or against singers in real time, as they sang, it sounded like a no-brainer. Sadly, it was a no-goer: the channel axed Rising Star pre-launch after it flopped in America. Sometimes a me-too version of previous hits won’t do the job. With the death of Rising Star, church bells should have been rung across the kingdom. Right there we could draw a line in the sand: no more wishful-thinking talent shows. No more “Call now if you want to vote for...” and “You made that song your own” shows. What we need instead, TV people, is new, brave, bold, stupid ideas. By definition more of these risky shows will flop, but that’s no bad thing. It’s better than safe photocopies of old favourites, which can flop anyway. And at least I can’t remember the last hypnosis-based game show, or another show where a confused giant mole gets hit on the head with a baseball bat by an angry giant duck. It’s possible, of course, that both of this week’s newcomers will end up like BBC1’s 2011 Don’t Scare the Hare – as amusing footnotes in TV history. But I hope not. After all, the best entertainment ideas sounded iffy when you first heard them. A talent search where the judges can’t see the singers? Actors and athletes trying to ballroom dance? Competitive cake baking in a tent? Ridiculous.