Monday 11 November 2019

TV Column: GOLD DIGGER + HIS DARK MATERIALS


A version of this article was originally published in The Courier on 9th November 2019.


NEXT WEEK’S TV

GOLD DIGGER
Tuesday, BBC One, 9pm


When Julia (Julia Ormond), a lonely divorcee and mother of three, turns 60, she books herself into a swanky London hotel. While pottering around an art gallery, she bumps into a handsome young man. Sparks fly and before you know it, she’s introducing this mysterious stranger to her understandably sceptical children (Julia is beautiful, but she’s also rich). Are they right to doubt him? Julia’s eldest son, Patrick, suffers from childhood flashbacks which suggest that history may be repeating itself in some sinister way. Gold Digger is an enjoyably melodramatic potboiler buoyed by a sensitive performance from Ormond and a standout turn from Sebastian Armesto as Patrick, who comes across as a knife-edge hybrid of Michael Shannon and Reece Shearsmith.

GARY LINEKER: MY GRANDDAD’S WAR
Monday, BBC One, 9pm


Gary Winston Lineker’s granddad, who is no longer with us, served in the British army during World War Two. He was part of a platoon informally known, with the utmost disrespect and unfairness, as ‘D-Day Dodgers’. In this Who Do You Think You Are?-esque programme, football’s numero uno left-wing groovy nice guy announces, “They haven’t had the credit they deserve, and if I can make a slight difference to that, that will make me feel proud.” Stanley Abbs served as a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps during the vital WW2 Italian campaign. Gary, with Stanley’s detailed war diary in hand, mounts a powerful case in favour of the contribution they made to the war effort.

THE YOUNG OFFENDERS
Monday, BBC One, 11:35pm


Gawd, please, spare us from these try-hard, frantically-edited edge-coms about loveable recidivists. Trainspotting erupted 23 years ago, we should’ve got over it by now. Young Offenders follows two teenagers from Cork as they attempt, for a potentially lucrative bet, to stay on the straight and narrow. Their greasy, shaved mushroom haircuts are supposedly a joke in themselves, a lazy stab at instant iconography. The people behind this utterly charmless, witless rubbish presumably won a barely applied-for competition. I’m only recommending it as an example of how not to write a sitcom. We all deserve better than this.

CLIMATEGATE: SCIENCE OF A SCANDAL
Thursday, BBC Four, 9pm

The cataclysmic effects of global warming are an actual fact, as all rational people agree. Ten years ago, however, a cabal of climate change deniers hacked into the emails of several leading scientists with the express purpose of distorting and misrepresenting their views: an insidious campaign of damaging misinformation. Donald Trump fully got behind those spurious findings. Of course he did. Fake news only suits Trump when it plumps up his cushions of malodorous self-interest. This grave, intense, jaw-dropping documentary gathers together many of the scientists who were supposedly exposed during that concerted barrage of lies. These people actually received death threats. Good luck, humanity. Tune in, grit your teeth and weep.

LAST WEEK’S TV

HIS DARK MATERIALS
Sunday 3rd November, BBC One


This adaptation of Philip Pullman’s richly acclaimed fantasy novels (which I haven’t read) began with a patience-testing volley of clunky exposition. Writer Jack Thorne had a lot to get through in terms of world-building, but he appeared to be overwhelmed by the task at hand.

Thorne failed to establish any reason to invest in the relationship between Lyra, the 12-year-old protagonist, and her maverick uncle (James McAvoy), a relationship which must surely be crucial to the saga’s appeal.

Lyra, though capably performed by Dafne Keen, came across as Just Another Kid in an expensively oak-panelled fantasia haunted by familiar British character actors.

Fairly impressive production design and seamlessly integrated CGI animals are all very well, but episode one was little more than a poorly paced, fatally muddled compendium of portentous proclamations. Thin gruel on an epic scale.

INSIDE THE SUPERMARKET
Thursday 7th November, BBC Two

Meanwhile, back in the real world, this series wandered the aisles of Sainsbury’s during a challenging year in which it celebrated its 150th birthday. We met busy shop floor staffers and cappuccino-quaffing execs as they struggled to overcome increasing competition from their rivals. The black cloud of Brexit loomed large: panicky, cash-strapped consumers fled to M&S and Waitrose instead. 

One day, in the far-distant future, an alien race may discover an ash-covered tape of this programme, the last remaining trace of our existence, and wonder what the point of it all was.

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