CORONATION STREET ICONS + THE AUSTRALIAN DREAM

This article was originally published in The Courier on 15th August 2020.

NEXT WEEK’S TV

CORONATION STREET ICONS

Wednesday, STV, 8:30pm

And here we go again, yet another piece of emergency Covid schedule filler. Still, archive clips of Corrie are always a fun distraction. Episode one pays tribute to Ken Barlow, the longest-serving character in TV soap history. It reminds us that Ken, the street’s resident Guardian-reading paragon of righteous sense and virtue, a soft leather elbow patch in human form, has actually experienced his fair share of brawls and romantic entanglements over the years. No one who's never seen Corrie before will watch this programme, but if they do they'll be left with the impression that Ken has spent the last six decades embroiled in a never-ending orgy of mindless sex and violence, alleviated only by the occasional slapstick scrape. A lord of chaos living on the edge of reason.

AFRICAN RENAISSANCE: WHEN ART MEETS POWER

Monday, BBC Four, 9pm

Africa is one of the fastest-growing regions in the world. It’s also demographically the youngest continent, with six in every ten people being under the age of 25, and far more culturally diverse than anywhere else on Earth. In this enlightening new series, British journalist Afua Hirsch visits three African countries - Ethiopia, Senegal and Kenya – to examine the ways in which they’ve reasserted their identities as leading cultural lights. The through-line in her opening essay is the extraordinary story of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, a powerful yet complex symbol of the country’s proud history of fierce independence. Hirsch also meets renowned artists who are keeping Ethiopia’s fecund cultural legacy and defiant spirit alive in the 21^st century.

MANCTOPIA: BILLION POUND PROPERTY BOOM

Tuesday, BBC Two, 9pm

The Manchester skyline is in a state of flux. Expensive high-rise homes are popping up with such velocity, the city centre looks nothing like it did just a few years ago. Manchester’s population is set to double in the next few years. Manctopia, an incisive four-part series, examines the drastic impact this unprecedented regeneration is having on existing residents. We meet a local millionaire property developer, a man with a vested financial interest in eradicating homelessness, who plans to transform the red light district into a luxury residential hub, and a single working mum who can no longer afford to stay in the increasingly gentrified area she’s lived in all her life. The free market in action, folks.

UNREPORTED WORLD

Friday, Channel 4, 7:30pm

As you read this, billions of locusts are devouring crops and vegetation all across Kenya. As a result, farming families are starving and destitute. If this devastating plague continues, Kenya will be brought to its knees. The Covid-19 pandemic has compounded the catastrophe. In the latest edition of this august foreign affairs series, reporter Sahar Zand travels to a country where agriculture provides a livelihood for more than 80% of the population. She hitches an urgent ride with one of the teams responsible for spraying infested areas with pesticide. Seeing as most areas in Kenya appear to be infested – in one particularly horrifying scene, Zand visits a town where the walls are caked with locusts – their task is Herculean.

LAST WEEK’S TV

THE AUSTRALIAN DREAM

Sunday 9th August, BBC Two

The indigenous Australian football star Adam Goodes never set out to be an inspirational spokesperson for racial equality. All he ever wanted to do was play his beloved sport at a professional level. But as a prominent black public figure who has experienced blatant and casual racism throughout his life, he felt he had to make a brave stand and speak out. This intensely angering documentary examined the backlash he faced after forcing white football fans to confront the toxic vein of racism that has coursed through Australian society for centuries. And you don’t need me to tell you that institutional racism isn’t a problem specific to Australia. It’s all around us right now. Goodes’ message was clear: we need to talk, listen and learn. That’s our only hope of ever developing more empathy and understanding of what racism actually means. The film is still on iPlayer, I highly recommend it.

HOW TO BEAT… PAIN

Tuesday 11th August, Channel 4

Do you remember that late ‘80s/early ‘90s vogue for splicing kitschy old clips of public domain American films into contemporary TV documentaries? The geniuses behind this otherwise blandly presented health series certainly do. It’s as tiresomely unfunny now as it was then, a literally cheap trick.

 

 

TV Review: FROM THERE TO HERE

This article was originally published in The Courier on 24th May 2014.

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

From There to Here: Thursday, BBC One

Paul Whitelaw

If he has any sense, then Philip Glenister has no doubt long since accepted his professional destiny of playing taciturn, dry-witted men from Manchester. But typecasting isn’t necessarily a curse: never out of work, Glenister is the go-to guy for roles which require a certain amount of gruff, vinegary charm.

He delivered yet another variation on his usual shtick in From There to Here, in which he plays Daniel, a happily married businessman whose life is sent into tailspin following the IRA’s attack on central Manchester in 1996. Using a real-life event such as this to trigger fictional drama could easily come across as insensitive, but writer Peter Bowker obviously has a great deal of affection for the city.

It’s a tale of transformation, both physically and emotionally. Manchester underwent major redevelopment following the bombing: the notion of a city and nation being on the cusp of seismic change is one of Bowker’s underlying themes. Not that he explored it with much subtlety. Daniel’s father and son are depicted as capitalist caricatures, whose money-grabbing avarice are emblematic of the Thatcher/Major era that, in theory at least, is about to be undermined by the initial optimism of the New Labour years.

Set against the galvanising backdrop of Euro ’96, From There to Here is full of characters in search of meaning and stability. When the bomb went off, Daniel was trying in vain to reconcile his domineering father and black sheep brother. Following the blast, he had a chance encounter with Joanne, a female cleaner (Glenister’s Life on Mars co-star Liz White) who lives in the working-class area in which he spent the first few years of his life.

It transpired that Daniel was adopted when he was five, which has left him with the nagging feeling that he doesn’t truly belong anywhere. When he drove Joanne home, he impetuously decided to pose as a single man in need of companionship. Could this be the life he was destined to live all along?

Despite the fact that Daniel was effectively trying to start an extramarital affair, he still came across as fairly sympathetic. Glenister always tends to play outwardly confident characters with an underlying layer of vulnerability.

There was scope here for some thoughtful ruminations on the nature of identity, but Bowker undermined its promise with blatantly on-the-nose dialogue. Was it really necessary to have characters spelling out their inner thoughts and motivations with such clarity? Bowker is usually a safe pair of hands, but here he displayed an unfortunate disinclination to let the audience work things out for themselves.

We know he wants to make a point about how lives can change in an instant, and how a brush with death will put things in perspective, because Daniel and co kept reminding us. 

Furthermore, the attempts at creating tension in the last few minutes just didn’t work at all. Even a football novice such as myself knows that England were knocked out following their penalty shoot-out against Germany, and there’s just no way that Daniel was killed in the bomb blast at his brother’s club. Or is that really the last we’ve seen of the star of TV’s latest Philip Glenister vehicle? I’m all for suspending disbelief, but you can’t mount a cliff-hanger on such an unlikely proposition.

In any case, what the hell was he doing with the bomb in his lap? Had he suddenly developed a death wish? It made not a jot of sense. 

Laboured and unconvincing, From There to Here is a hefty disappointment.