TV Review: MUTINY + HOW'D YOU GET SO RICH?

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 11 March 2017.

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

MUTINY: Monday, Channel 4

HOW’D YOU GET SO RICH?: Monday, Channel 4

If Top Gear has taught us anything – and I hope for all our sakes it hasn’t - it’s that a certain type of man enjoys nothing more than indulging in utterly pointless masculine endeavours. MUTINY, a seasick documentary series in which nine ordinary blokes follow in the oar-strokes of Captain Bligh, is further proof of that.

The mutiny on the HMS Bounty in 1789 is one of the most notorious incidents in British maritime history. Together with a small band of loyal sailors, Bligh was abandoned in a tiny boat in the middle of the Pacific, but miraculously managed to survive a treacherous 4,000 mile voyage to safety.

238 years later, because Channel 4 have some airtime to fill, a group of strangers climbed aboard a purpose-built replica of Bligh’s escape vessel to mimic his epic ordeal.

Their combined skills include carpentry, medicine and dire banter. I’m no historian, but I daresay that when Bligh’s starving crew defecated over the side of his boat, their indignity wasn’t accompanied by hoots of laughter.

Should you wish to join in with this adventure at home, then drink a cup of salt water every time the words “mate”, “lads” and “boys” are uttered. You’ll be dangerously dehydrated and delirious within minutes.

Their leader is bearded Action Man/sober Captain Haddock Ant Middleton, a burly ex-soldier who could eat Bear Grylls for breakfast. Ant never feels more alive than when he’s scaling a volcano for six hours in search of coconuts, while urgently documenting his alpha-maleness down a camera lens.

Programmes such as this would be nothing without conflict, hence the involvement of crewmember Chris, a rebellious Liverpudlian who doesn’t take kindly to orders. He spent the first few days behaving like a petulant, foolhardy child, then complained when his captain and teammates treated him accordingly.

His ultimate ambition is to sail the world solo. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mutiny ends with him stealing the boat and doing just that. 

Chris would be a nightmare to deal with while filming an ostensibly dramatic documentary about the indomitable spirit of human endurance. That’s why I have grudging respect for him. He makes a mockery of the whole thing, which, for all his immaturity, seems entirely reasonable.

I really don’t give two hoots about this futile exercise in false peril and macho camaraderie. Shiver me timbers, it’s dull.

In HOW’D YOU GET SO RICH?, comedian Katherine Ryan gently poked the underbelly of four disparate millionaires.

The nice couple who founded Poundland were disappointingly normal and content – the notion that money actually does buy you happiness is the last thing most of us want to hear – but Ryan’s surface of detached irony couldn’t disguise her conflicted sympathy for one Danny Lambo, a self-described playboy leading a sad, lonely, aimless existence.

The next time you gaze despondently at your bank balance, spare a thought for Lambo – short for Lamborghini - who derives scant pleasure from judging vanity-funded beauty contests and filming inept music videos. When he inevitably makes a film about his life, he’ll probably cast himself. Matt Berry would be a better fit.

Ryan’s Hollywood encounter with a cosmetically-preserved septuagenarian plastic surgeon seemed to suggest that money can buy eternal youth. So why does Donald Trump look like a heaving colostomy bag?

Just one of many questions Ryan failed to address in this glib, if tacitly judgemental, holiday in other people’s immense wealth.

TV Review: DARK ANGEL & HUMANS

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 5 November 2016.

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

Dark Angel: Monday, STV

Humans: Sunday, Channel 4

ITV has dramatised so many real-life crime and murder cases over the years, it’s all but exhausted the 20^th century as a gruesome source of inspiration.

Hence, one presumes, the arrival of two-part death carnival Dark Angel, starring Joanne Froggatt (dutiful housemaid Anna from Downton Abbey) as 19^th century serial murderer Mary Ann Cotton. This is truly horrible history.

From 1865 to 1872, Cotton cut a poisonous swathe through the North East of England, murdering several husbands – and possibly eleven of her 13 children – for their life insurance policies.

In the hands of writer Gwyneth Hughes, she was initially portrayed as a sympathetic figure mired in poverty and struggling to raise a family while her first husband scraped a paltry living at sea.

But our sympathies soon waned when she discovered the swift and painful properties of arsenic.

A fine, intelligent actress, Froggatt pitched her performance astutely. The – to say the least – morally wayward nature of her character was rendered more chilling by her decision to adopt the gentle North East tones of Sarah Millican.

Froggat’s Cotton wasn’t depicted as a leering maniac, but rather as a coldly pragmatic, manipulative killer who wasn’t beyond feeling guilt for her actions. However, those occasional pangs of conscience couldn’t dissuade her from a cruel and perverse mission to climb the social ladder.

No one suspected foul play when her family members coincidentally died in vomit and faeces-stained agony, because Victorian society couldn’t even begin to entertain the notion that a woman would be capable of such crimes.

By the end of episode one, she’d dispatched two hapless husbands, two children and her own mother. No wonder the blue-grey colour palette looked so depressed.

It may not be the most compelling study of a psychopath you’ll ever see, but Dark Angel is a suitably bleak and low-key account of an overlooked chapter in British criminal history. Seldom have the words “Let’s make you a nice cup of tea” been delivered with such an impending sense of doom.

A deserved hit for Channel 4, series one of Humans was one of the most thoughtful and intelligently-realised sci-fi dramas of recent years.

Based in a near-future Britain where lifelike androids – or synths – are employed as unquestioning slaves within the service industries, it managed to combine all the usual philosophical quandaries of A.I. fiction with an overarching conspiracy narrative and an effective domestic setting.

But where to go from there? In attempting to broaden the scope of this world, the first episode of series two was a globe-trotting muddle in which far too many strands competed for our attention.

The relatively small-scale drama of series one has been replaced by an overly busy stew of disjointed ideas. It’ll hopefully settle down and regain focus soon, but this was a textbook example of how not to begin a new series.

Or perhaps it’s because I’m beginning to suspect that I don’t particularly care about the fate of our rag-tag group of sentient synths and their voyage of self-discovery, and preferred Humans when it was the story of a dysfunctional family struggling to cope with the introduction of a synth into their lives. The scenes involving the Hawkins’ were more engaging than anything else in episode one.

I’ll gladly eat those words if Humans 2 matches the quality of its predecessor. Maybe, in its eagerness to grab our attention, it just got off to an awkward, malfunctioning start. 

TV Review: HUMANS and PRIZED APART

Humans: Sunday, Channel 4

Prized Apart: Saturday, BBC One

Paul Whitelaw

Set in a parallel present where lifelike synthetic humans are as commonplace as iPads, sci-fi drama Humans takes the bold – some might say foolhardy - step of exploring territory that many great writers have traversed before.

Yet while the questions it poses are familiar – is artificial intelligence capable of feeling? Do we have the right to create it? Are we in danger of being usurped by the technology we're increasingly reliant upon? - it handles them with care and, in terms of world-building, precise attention to detail. 

And while it's too early to say if Humans will add up to much, at least its influences are openly acknowledged in a rather playful way.

It began with a harassed husband and father purchasing an android servant – known colloquially as synths – to help around the home. His wife, Laura, is a busy lawyer beset with mid-life malaise (none of the humans in Humans are happy). She's grown distant from her family, a problem compounded – despite her husband's contrary intentions – by the arrival of Anita, a strikingly beautiful synth whose eerily perfect countenance sets Laura on edge.

A sly wrinkle on the notion of a spouse feeling threatened by a partner's interest in a younger model – a theme echoed by the sub-plot involving a detective and the hunky synth who cares for his sick wife - this dysfunctional domestic setting is a master-stroke. It grounds an essentially fantastical premise in plausible reality. Though we automatically feel sympathy for Anita – after all, she's only following pre-programmed orders – we regard her with suspicion when viewed through Laura's eyes.

Sure enough, Laura has reason to be paranoid. It gradually transpires that Anita belongs to a rogue group of synths who have somehow developed independent thoughts and feelings. She's merely pretending to be subservient. But why?

Meanwhile, her fellow sentient synths are on the run from scientists fearful of their advanced state. This conspiracy thriller element coexists smoothly with the claustrophobic unease of the suburbanite scenes and an intriguing strand involving a widowed scientist (William Hurt) and his malfunctioning synth/surrogate son.

A droll sense of humour also ensures that Humans never feels pompous, even when confronting its hefty moral quandaries head-on. With its chilly aesthetic and dry spurts of satire, it occasionally resembles one of the better Black Mirror episodes. I particularly like the way our world, with no cosmetic alterations at all, is depicted as a bland, cold, chrome and glass wasteland.

But Humans wouldn't work if it was wholly cynical. It succeeds in asking us to sympathise with Laura and invest in Hurt's Geppetto/Pinocchio plight. Plus the horrifying pathos of robots cursed with living souls haunts the show throughout; the scenes depicting a sentient synth sold into prostitution make their point with unsparing yet compassionate intensity.

Regardless of noble intentions, the whole enterprise would capsize completely were it not for an utterly convincing performance from Gemma Chan as Anita. Mercifully free of the body-popping tics which often blight actors playing robots, her subtly precise, blandly benign demeanour is unsettling and – given what we know of her true nature – ineffably sad.

By sheer coincidence, Prized Apart marks the first instance of a quiz show devised and fronted by robots. A conceptually flawed bore, it sends members of the public on a Moroccan quest to win £100,000 via harness-enhanced stunts. Meanwhile, their loved ones back home in the studio provide half-hearted commentary in a sterile hangar commandeered by chief Auton Emma Watson.

None of it makes sense. The location segments don't gel with the stilted studio diversions – they're clearly not happening simultaneously - and there's never any sense of genuine peril, triumph or momentum. Imagine I'm A Celebrity... without the celebrities. Or Bake Off without the baking. Or life without meaning. That still doesn't come close to the echoing pointlessness of Prized Apart.

TV Review: IN THE CLUB and SIBLINGS

This article was originally published in The Courier on 9th August 2014.

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/lifestyle

In the Club: Tuesday, BBC One

Siblings: Thursday, BBC Three

Paul Whitelaw

Even without seeing her name in the credits, loyal TV hounds would've recognised In the Club as the work of Kay Mellor. From Band of Gold to Fat Friends and The Syndicate, her signature style runs as follows: assemble a group of predominantly female characters in an enclosed environment – a red-light district, a slimming club etc. - and trace their various ups and downs.

You could probably suggest any group setting to Mellor – a sewage farm, a terrorist cell, a UKIP sex cult – and she'd conjure a bittersweet ensemble drama around it. Not that she's a hack by any means. Her formula could easily come across as cynical were it not for her obvious gifts as a dramatist.

As evinced by episode one of this engaging drama, she has a knack for creating empathetic characters struggling with dire and unusual circumstances. That's more or less the essence of all drama, but Mellor harnesses it skilfully (for the most part: more on this later).

Her protagonists in this case are a group of pregnant women from different walks of life who come together via their weekly antenatal class. They include Katherine Parkinson as Kim, a gay woman carrying the child of a man who artificially inseminated her partner 15 years ago (a surprise twist revealed that Kim was actually impregnated by more traditional, furtive means), and Rosie, a bullied teenage girl who's been hiding her pregnancy from her widowed dad.

After seeking motherly advice via Kim's pregnancy blog, Rosie burst into the class having gone into labour. Despite her trauma, she gave birth to a healthy baby as kindly Kim leant support. So far, so acceptably dramatic.

Unfortunately, Mellor – who also directs – spiralled into inadvertent camp during a climactic, winsomely-scored montage in which Rosie's dad crashed his van as his daughter nurtured her newborn in hospital. Have this poor family not suffered enough? Apparently not, reckons Mellor. Despite its obvious sincerity, her writing is often clumsily schematic.

I also wasn't entirely convinced by the central thread of Diane's secretly unemployed, debt-ridden husband, Rick, deciding on a whim to rob a bank. Desperate men are often driven to extreme measures, but posing as a bomb-toting bank robber to buy your children pizza stretched credulity.

It's fortunate, then, that Rick is portrayed by the excellent Will Mellor (no relation), who radiates everyman pathos without ever overdoing it. The scene in which he begged, with shades of Boys from the Blackstuff, for work on a building site was particularly touching. Likewise, his sincere, almost tearful apologies to the terrified bank teller were affectingly played.

It's frustrating, as these smaller moments have far more emotional impact than La Mellor's more melodramatic flourishes. Nevertheless, I'll be back for more. Daft, cloying overindulgences aside, she's a propulsive storyteller.

Similarly promising is Siblings, a sharp new sitcom about a dysfunctional brother and sister duo. Fresh Meat writer Keith Akushie takes a gilded leaf from Seinfeld's book by miring his characters in selfishness and idiocy. 

Like George Costanza, Hannah, played by Fresh Meat star Charlotte Ritchie, puts Herculean effort into her lazy self-interest, while oblivious Dan is more of an overbearing, bumblingly needy type: imagine a slightly nicer cousin of Jez from Peep Show.

These obvious influences mesh rather nicely. This first episode, as predictable though some of it was, suggested Akushie has a neat grasp of escalating farce, and the two leads fill their roles with just the right amount of warped likeability. Their flailing misfortune may grow on you.