A version of this article was originally published in The Courier on 15th May 2021.
NEXT WEEK’S TV
Inside No. 9 – Monday, BBC Two, 9:30pm
And they’re back. I didn’t enjoy last week’s tiresomely meta series opener at all, but this episode is very good indeed.
Steve Pemberton stars as the multi-award-winning creator of a Game of Thrones-esque fantasy series. Reece Shearsmith plays an obsessed fan who blackmails his hero into rewriting the show’s unpopular finale. Loosely inspired by Stephen King’s Misery, it’s a witty, deftly-plotted comment on the way a certain type of entitled fan feels they have the right to dictate how their favourite shows should be written.
Pemberton and Shearsmith couldn’t have known this at the time, but it ties in neatly with the recent – and entirely warranted - disappointment surrounding the Line of Duty finale.
The Pact – Monday and Tuesday, BBC One, 9pm
Laura Fraser and Julie Hesmondhalgh star in this fairly enjoyable twist-strewn thriller about a close-knit group of Welsh brewery workers whose lives go horribly wrong during a drunken work’s night out.
They decide to exact some playful revenge on an obnoxious colleague. In the panicked aftermath of this prank, a desperate pact of silence is formed.
To say any more would spoil the fun, but writer Pete McTighe – whose credits include Doctor Who and the Prisoner Cell Block H reboot Wentworth - does a pretty good job of exploiting the fraught ramifications of his premise. The solid cast also includes Eddie Marsan and Adrian Edmondson.
Innocent – Monday to Thursday, STV, 9pm
Stripped throughout the week, Innocent is an utterly generic ITV crime drama elevated somewhat by sensitive performances from Katherine Kelly and Shaun Dooley.
Kelly stars as a schoolteacher accused of murdering one of her pupils. After serving five years in prison, she wins an appeal and returns home to a less than welcoming reception. Determined to prove her innocence, she offers her assistance to a police officer (Dooley) who is heading up a re-investigation. Innocent wants to make a serious point about how people deserve the right to a second chance in life, but it gets bogged down in all the usual tired tropes.
The dialogue is laughable. Sample: “I want
my job back, or I’m going to get seriously legal on your arse!” I mean, really.
Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer – Tuesday, BBC Four, 10:05pm
In this timely new series, historian David Olusoga and popular science author Steven Johnson celebrate the unsung heroes of global healthcare while asking what we can learn from previous global pandemics.
They begin with the fascinating history of vaccinations, which naturally feeds directly into our current situation. It’s an episode populated by various pioneering medical scientists, whose bold experiments resulted in the eradication of formerly fatal diseases and an increase in life expectancy around the world.
Olusoga and Johnson are clear-eyed guides, they knit the whole saga together with quiet authority. Their interviewees include Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci never expected to become famous, that's not why he took the gig, but 2020 changed everything.
Escape to the Farm with Kate Humble – Thursday, Channel 5, 8pm
The latest episode of this green and pleasant series gets up at the crack of dawn to bask in birdsong. Humble teams up with an ornithologist neighbour to explain what those delightful chirrups and tweets actually mean: in short, sex and violence. No joke.
She also visits one of her most cherished hidden spots on the farm, a wild garlic patch, looks on proudly as her favourite pig gives birth for the first time, and, as usual, gets busy in her farmhouse kitchen. This week, our genial host rustles up a lamb broth and “a proper British pesto.”
Humble comes across as such a nice person, it’s impossible to resent this cosy celebration of her seemingly perfect life.
Subnormal: A British Scandal – Thursday, BBC One, 9pm
This damning documentary exposes a shameful chapter in British history.
In the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of black Caribbean children were officially categorised as ‘educationally subnormal’ and sent to schools for pupils deemed to have low intelligence. A blatant case of institutional racism, it was a concerted effort to remove black children from the mainstream education system.
The programme features devastating contributions from some of the people who were cruelly mis-labelled. They talk about how the whole experience instilled within them deep-seated feelings of shame and a terrible lack of self-esteem. They have struggled with that pain for decades.
And this scandalous practice
isn’t a relic from the past, it’s still happening now. Prepare to be appalled.
LAST WEEK’S TV
The Pursuit of Love – Sunday 9th May, BBC One
Based on the novel by Nancy Mitford, this self-consciously hip and stylised period drama is supposedly a wry satire on the sheer weirdness of insular upper-class English families. But writer/director Emily Mortimer also expects us to care about these people, who are just too exhausting to engage with.
You don’t necessarily have to like characters in a drama, but you do have to find them interesting on some level. This lot are ghastly bores.
It focuses on the intense relationship between teenage cousins Linda and Fanny as they fantasise about love and escaping from the patriarchy. Dominic West has a ball as the appallingly bigoted king of the castle, but his scenery-chewing performance fails to rescue a fundamentally alienating and aggravating production.
Gods of Snooker – Sunday 9th May, BBC Two
Now this is television. Executive-produced by Louis Theroux, it’s a hugely entertaining and lovingly-curated tribute to the dickie-bowed heroes who transformed snooker into a national obsession in the 1980s. Snooker loopy nuts were we (we were snooker loopy).
Naturally it began with Alex Higgins, the rebellious working-class hero and people’s champion who was pretty much solely responsible for killing off snooker’s hitherto staid and gentlemanly image (the octogenarian Ray Reardon couldn't hide his understandable bitterness during his interview). Higgins was a wayward genius; the footage of him in mind-bogglingly audacious action was hilarious.
But the programme didn’t romanticise him unduly – he was, after all, a troubled and difficult character.
Suffused with wit and warmth, Gods of Snooker perfectly encapsulates
the cultural impact of that most beautiful of games. Highly recommended.
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