INSIDE NO. 9 + ERIC BURDON: ROCK 'N' ROLL ANIMAL

This article was originally published in The Courier on 22nd February 2019.

NEXT WEEK’S TV

INSIDE NO. 9

Monday, BBC Two, 10pm

Reece Shearsmith indulges his passion for magic in this enjoyable episode about an arrogant and highly secretive illusionist whose murky past comes back to haunt him. Every instalment of Inside No. 9 involves a certain amount of ingenious sleight-of-hand – the episode title is Misdirection - so no wonder this milieu provides them with ample opportunity to wrong-foot the audience. Going into any more detail would, of course, spoil the macabre fun, but Misdirection is Shearsmith and Pemberton (who plays an older magician with a mind-melting trick up his sleeve) at their most Tales of the Unexpected-like. It’s a claustrophobic journey into the Magic Circle of Hell.

BACK IN TIME FOR THE CORNER SHOP

Tuesday, BBC Two, 8pm

A breezy piece of social history wedded to a simple, sure-fire formula, Back In Time… will doubtless still be running long after we’ve all become history ourselves. The latest series tasks a British family with running a traditional corner shop over several replicated decades (mother Jo’s great-grandparents ran one for real). It begins in the Victorian era, when this pillar of the community was born. Sara Cox and social historian Polly Russell guide the family through their never-ending daily chores; life for a Victorian shopkeeper involved churning butter, picking strawberries, slaving in the kitchen, making deliveries via horse and cart, and risking a hernia by carrying enormous bollards of cheese. As always, it’s a likeable, mildly diverting lesson.

HOSPITAL

Thursday, BBC Two, 9pm

With the NHS under increasing threat, this candid observational documentary carries a severely urgent weight. It was filmed a few months ago in seven Liverpool hospitals, where staff and patients struggle to cope within an overworked and cash-strapped system. Episode three unfolds in a unit devoted to cardiac disease. The waiting list presents an ethical and logistical nightmare; operations for patients at high risk are being constantly delayed. Everyone has to cope as best they can. There are, thank God, moments of hope amidst the overarching gloom, as we witness dedicated doctors, surgeons and nurses literally saving lives, but it’s hard to banish the dire feeling that Hospital is a document of a vital institution in terminal decline.

ERIC BURDON: ROCK ‘N’ ROLL ANIMAL

Friday, BBC Four, 9:30pm

He was the electrifying, lupine-lunged leader of The Animals, who fought hard and heavy during the British Invasion. He became a leading – if somewhat foolish – light in the flower power movement and scored hits with the multiracial funk band War. And yet Eric Burdon remains somewhat overlooked. This profile gives him his due. An engaging raconteur, Burdon rakes over his eventful life with support from admirers such as Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith and Sting. It’s the story of how a working-class Newcastle kid with a deep love of black American music made it, just about, in a poisonous industry. Burdon doesn’t hold back on his justifiable bitterness, and his once great voice is shot, but he’s no casualty. He survived.

LAST WEEK’S TV

DOCTOR WHO

Sunday 16th February, BBC One

This was, by some considerable margin, the best episode of Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who to date (he didn’t write it). A witty and atmospheric Gothic horror yarn in which the Doctor and co visited Mary Shelley on the dark and stormy night of her fateful Frankenstein nightmare, it encompassed an authentically disturbing half-formed Cyberman, plus hints towards whatever Chibnall has in store for the season finale. It was trad, dad, and all the better for it.

TV Review: BROADMOOR and FRANKENSTEIN AND THE VAMPYRE: A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT

A version of this article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 8th November 2014.

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

Broadmoor: Wednesday, STV

Frankenstein and The Vampyre: A Dark and Stormy Night: Saturday, BBC Two

Paul Whitelaw

Given what we now know about Jimmy Savile, ITV's claim that Broadmoor has “unprecedented access” to the high security psychiatric hospital feels like an unfortunate boast.

Nevertheless, it's true that, for the first time in its 150 year history, this secretive institution has allowed a documentary crew to film within its walls. Home to notorious serial murderers such as Peter Sutcliffe and Kenneth Erskine – neither of whom chose to participate, much to the surprise of no one – Broadmoor tends to be viewed in the popular imagination as a terrifying cauldron of criminal violence.

While this sobering two-part series doesn't quite seek to reverse that reputation, it succeeds in presenting a more balanced, responsible and humane view of Broadmoor's patients. The abiding theme of episode one was encapsulated by Clinical Director Dr Amlan Basu, who observed that, despite their horrendous crimes, these men are also victims.

“It's very easy to see somebody as either the perpetrator or the victim. It's much more difficult to understand that somebody might be both.” That the programme set out to do just that is hugely commendable.

We were introduced to patients, their identities concealed for obvious reasons, whose severe mental health disorders were the tragic by-product of childhoods scarred by repeated psychological and sexual abuse. One psychiatrist claimed, almost with a rueful smile, that he could easily identify future patients if he'd met them as children.

Eventually greenlit following five years of careful negotiation, Broadmoor is necessarily compromised at times. While the vigilant staff were candid to a point – for want of a quiet life, they rarely tell people where they work – certain subjects were firmly off limits. Forbidden from filming a restraint procedure on a patient who refused to return to his room, the crew were also banned from showing a reluctant patient being forcibly injected with anti-psychotic medication.

But rather than harm the programme's integrity, these enforced omissions actually heightened its carefully handled tone of detached compassion. Images of self-inflicted scars on a suicidal patient's arms were all we needed to see. Anything more would've been gratuitous. Wisely, the ever-present threat of violence against staff was implicit.

Graced with sensitive narration from actor Eddie Marsan, Broadmoor is neither prurient nor exploitative. Uncomfortable, sad and challenging, it offers no easy answers. It's intelligent enough to realise that life is too brutal, too complicated, for that.

Part of a BBC season devoted to all things Gothic, Frankenstein and The Vampyre: A Dark and Stormy Night was a suitably melodramatic documentary recounting the unusual circumstances which led to Mary Shelley creating her horror masterpiece.

Literally the stuff of nightmares, Frankenstein came to her one evening during a sensual lakeside holiday in Geneva with her bohemian husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, randy old Lord Byron, and an aspiring yet hapless writer named Polidori.

High on wine and ether, as freak storms raged outside, this tempestuous group challenged each other to write a ghost story. The twist in the tale was that the little known Polidori, belittled as a joke by Byron in particular, eventually wrote the first published modern vampire story. His fiendish inspiration? None other than that aristocratic rake, Lord Byron himself. It was revenge of sorts.

With articulate contributions from talking heads such as Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood, this handsome reconstruction of a weird, dazzling summit was a late Halloween treat.