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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