ITALY'S FRONTLINE: A DOCTOR'S DIARY + THE LUMINARIES

This article was originally published in The Courier on 27th June 2020.

NEXT WEEK’S TV

ITALY’S FRONTLINE: A DOCTOR’S DIARY

Monday, BBC Two, 9pm

This stark documentary was filmed inside an overstretched hospital at the height of the coronavirus crisis in Italy. It follows A&E doctor Francesca Mangiatordi as she struggles to care for an escalating influx of infected patients. A shortage of beds has left staff with no choice but to park patients in corridors, sometimes for days. Mangiatordi is exhausted, candid and eloquent. She repeatedly questions the worth of her role in the face of such overwhelming suffering: “When you remove someone’s dignity, you leave them with nothing.” Gradually, some of her colleagues succumb to the virus. Their experience of treating Covid patients naturally makes them more fearful about their own chances of survival. Meanwhile, Mangiatordi frets about the prospect of a devastating second wave.

THE HIDDEN WILD OF THE MOTORWAY

Tuesday, BBC Four, 9pm

Britain’s busiest road, the M25, is a vast loop of soulless concrete. But look closer and you’ll find that the natural world has adapted to coexist around it. Inspired by J.G. Ballard and Joseph Conrad, naturalist Helen Macdonald takes a thoughtful stroll around the M25’s perimeter in this hauntological documentary. She discovers pretty woodlands and waterways scored to a background roar of traffic; some songbirds have had to alter the pitch of their calls in order to be heard. She also reveals how fungi studies could help to solve the problem of traffic congestion. An enthusiastic, softly-spoken scholar finding hidden wonders in mundane areas we take for granted, this is a quintessential BBC Four joint. We’ll miss it when it’s gone.

THE SECRET MEDITERRANEAN WITH TREVOR McDONALD

Tuesday, STV, 9pm

You could argue that sunny foreign TV travelogues are the last thing we need to see at the moment. They’re a cruel reminder of an increasingly distant time when, finances permitting, we could hop on a plane and relax our blues away on holiday. On the other hand, the sight of genial Sir Trev in sunglasses and an open-necked shirt might provide a fleeting distraction from the misery of life as we currently know it. Which sounds fine in theory, but according to the synopsis – preview copies weren’t available – episode one involves Trev boarding a superyacht once owned by Aristotle Onassis and later witnessing a bout of camel wrestling. That doesn’t sound like fun to me. Tastes may vary.

HUEY MORGAN’S LATIN AMERICAN ADVENTURE

Friday, BBC Four, 9:30pm

In this vibrant new series, the BBC 6 Music DJ drops his usual tiresome wise-guy act to engage sincerely with the turbulent history of Latin American popular music. His perspiring odyssey begins in Brazil, where ecstatic Samba rhythms continue to represent the defiant voice of oppressed working-class people (Brazil is currently governed by ‘the Trump of the Tropics’). This is protest music in its purest most transcendent form; grooving community action. He also covers the bossa nova boom and examines the anti-capitalist politics of the tropicalia movement via interviews with the great Gilberto Gil and, from the magnificently far-out Os Mutantes, Arnaldo Baptista. These musicians challenged the jackboot status quo with some the greatest music ever made.

LAST WEEK’S TV

THE LUMINARIES

Sunday 21st and Monday 22^nd June, BBC One

This turgid adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel (which I’ve never read and never will) succeeds only as a showcase for some decent production design. It looks good, but the story, the characters, don’t engage at all. It’s set on New Zealand’s South Island in 1866. Various folk converge to pan for gold. It glistens with a hallucinatory sheen of opiated sweat and grime. The performances are fine and the setting is potentially interesting. There’s something to be said here about colonialism, racism, misogyny and greed. The Luminaries somehow manages to crush that potential into mulch with its awkward pacing and structure. An alienating mess.

THE CHOIR: SINGING FOR BRITAIN

Tuesday 23^rd June, BBC Two

Gareth Malone is a smarmy little creep, a tweedy child with an orchard full of apples for teacher. Hats off to every frontline worker involved in this experiment, you’re all brilliant, lovely people, but keep a close eye on Malone. He’s a government-sanctioned Minister of Music in waiting who can barely disguise his contempt for pop music behind that faux-groovy piano teacher facade. He makes Gary Barlow look like Che Guevara.

TV Review: PITCH BATTLE + THE CRYSTAL MAZE

This article was originally published in The Courier on 24 June 2017.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

PITCH BATTLE: Saturday, BBC One

THE CRYSTAL MAZE: Friday, Channel 4

A new definition of TV Hell: when Gareth Malone, an odious narcissist with no shame whatsoever, feels desperately compelled to defend an embarrassing musical performance as “not embarrassing”.

Malone is one of the judges in PITCH BATTLE, a punishingly formulaic singing competition in which 30 amateur vocal harmony groups compete for a cash prize of £50,000. Given the size of most of these groups, that’s about a fiver between them.

The aforementioned performance, so toe-curling it made even Malone look askance, epitomised the, ah, fundamental conceptual flaws of this show.

A group of nice older women, sensibly clad in black evening gowns, unleashed a shrill version of I’m Too Sexy while their immediate rivals, a young gospel group, responded with No Scrubs.

This mystifying display of vocal combat climaxed with the supposedly humorous spectacle of a woman resembling Gloria Hunniford dropping her mic to the floor, diva style. How delightfully incongruous!

There, in a curdled nutshell, was the indefensible problem with, not only Pitch Battle, but that whole cosy, condescending, Middle England miasma of light-entertainment whimsy spearheaded by The Great British Bake Off (the host of Pitch Battle is, of course, Mel Giedroyc, a robotic mother hen who emits manufactured enthusiasm like the paid-up company gal she is).

Malone, the nation’s self-appointed teacher’s pet, is the featureless face of this virulent pandemic, so no wonder he’s involved.

Shamelessly indebted to the success of Glee and the Pitch Perfect film franchise, the pitifully unoriginal Pitch Battle is so half-baked it barely has enough energy to sustain 10 minutes, let alone its interminable 90 minute running time.

Disingenuously marketed as an A Capella singing contest, it actually features groups performing to instrumental backing tracks. The supposed tension and spontaneity of the “Riff Off” round – a concept stolen wholesale from Pitch Perfect – is fatally undermined by the blatantly rehearsed medleys which ensue from a “random” selection of themes (one of which, incidentally, is ‘Fire’, hence why the first episode was rescheduled in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy).

It is, like all of these increasingly redundant post-Cowell talent shows, a facile celebration of bland competency; a dispiriting facsimile of the uplifting power of the human voice.

However, it did force me to access previously untapped reservoirs of sympathy for Malone’s fellow judge, Will Young. Dressed, for some reason, like a Nazi dentist, the affable former pop idol looked understandably lost as he struggled to say something meaningful about the forgettable acts paraded before him.

Look into his tired eyes, and his pleading message is poignantly clear: Be careful what you wish for, pop kids. This is the fate that awaits you.

A fondly-remembered ‘90s sensation, adventure game show THE CRYSTAL MAZE has returned under the auspices of new host Richard Ayoade. Wisely, the format hasn’t been tinkered with. The various worlds within the maze look superb. Ayoade’s trademark shtick of detached irony and semi-benign sarcasm is a natural fit. It should, in theory, work a treat.

Unfortunately, this revival kicked off with a minor celebrity edition in which they struggled at length to solve even the most rudimentary puzzles. Quick-witted Ayoade’s increasingly exasperated, apologetic asides to the audience could barely disguise his genuine disdain for this edition’s lack of entertainment value.

Hopefully, when actual members of the public get involved, the show will regain its lustre. Or will they, in this post-reality TV age, also be a bunch of attention-seeking idiots? 

If so, Ayoade’s inevitable despair should at least prove amusing.