MIRIAM'S BIG FAT ADVENTURE + FIVE GUYS A WEEK + DOCTOR WHO

A version of this article was originally published in The Courier on 7th March 2020.

NEXT WEEK’S TV

MIRIAM’S BIG FAT ADVENTURE

Monday and Tuesday, BBC Two, 9pm

The redoubtable Miriam Margolyes is, by her own admission, morbidly obese. She’s four foot eleven and weighs just over fourteen stone. In this frank report she attempts to come to terms with her weight while confronting the UK’s obesity problem. “I’m disgusted by my body,” she declares, “I loathe it.” Her first stop is a strict military-inspired health farm, where she meets people who’ve succeeded in changing their unhealthy lifestyles. But it’s not been easy for them. She also chats to a plus-size body confidence activist and a behavioural psychologist in charge of research into how being overweight can affect a person’s mental health. It’s a non-judgemental, ruminative essay delivered in Margolyes’ characteristically twinkly and erudite style.

JOANNA LUMLEY’S HIDDEN CARIBBEAN: HAVANA TO HAITI

Tuesday, STV, 9pm

La Lumley’s travelogues are usually a cut above most Famous Person Takes a Subsidised Holiday confections, and this series is no exception. Lumley is impeccably charming, genuinely inquisitive and entirely comfortable around people she’s only just met, hence why she’s a natural fit for this overpopulated subgenre. Her 15,000 mile Caribbean adventure begins, as per the title, in the Cuban capital of Havana. While admiring the architecture and vintage automobiles, she checks in with a traditional rhumba group, a tobacco farmer, a luxury hotel magnate, and an old lady who lives in a beautifully faded house frozen in time. It’s a picturesque programme driven by Lumley’s fundamentally sincere interest in finding out about the troubling complexities underpinning a society that's lived through six decades of Communist rule. Granted, it could hardly be mistaken for a probing political tract, but at least it actually bothers to engage with the issue.

FIVE GUYS A WEEK

Tuesday, Channel 4, 9:15pm

It’s a dating show, folks, but with a difference! Here’s the concept: a single woman invites five competing men into her home. Every day, one of them is asked to leave and never darken her towels again. In the end – voila – a couple finds everlasting happiness. Yes, it’s just another piece of voyeuristic Channel 4 nonsense, something to occupy your time while staring into the abyss: Big Brother meets First Dates. A bunch of men moving into a single woman’s house sounds dodgy in theory, but the results are harmless. It’s a fairly entertaining 'social experiment', vaguely embarrassing and sporadically funny. Channel 4 have got a minor cult hit on their hands here, i.e. it will trend on Twitter for an hour every week. Lightweight job done.

CHILD OF OUR TIME: TURNING 20

Wednesday, BBC Two, 9pm

In 1999 the BBC’s Horizon strand began an ambitious project: filming 25 children from birth to adulthood. The chosen ones came from all walks of life, the idea being to chart how their upbringings and social environments shaped them. Now young adults, they’ve invited the Child of Our Time team back into their lives to reveal what it’s like to be part of Britain’s first generation of the 21^st Century. They also reflect on the project itself while discussing the challenges they’ve faced throughout their lives so far. It is, in effect, a variation on Michael Apted’s seminal 7 Up endeavour, but undeniably interesting in its own right. A candid group of guinea pigs, they provide some valuable insight.

LAST WEEK’S TV

DOCTOR WHO

Sunday 1st March, BBC One

As expected, Chris Chibnall failed to adequately resolve his Timeless Child arc in this mechanically eventful finale, which was basically a 70-minute info dump. It contained some nice, nutty ideas – the Master creating a breed of Time Lord/Cybermen hybrids; the Doctor being revealed as the original Time Lord with an entire hidden lifecycle before the one she’s aware of – but it never scaled the dramatic heights you’d expect from such a continuity-warping episode.

However, it was superficially entertaining in the way that most wham-bam Chibnall episodes are, and I’ve come to terms with what this era of my favourite programme is: a deeply flawed, two-dimensional sideshow. Sigh.

On the plus side, at least Jodie Whittaker has been allowed to show off her acting chops this year – it’s as if Chibnall suddenly remembered that the Doctor is supposed to get angry sometimes - and Sacha Dhawan makes for an entertainingly berserk Master. It’s testament to his abilities that he managed to pull off the utterly thankless task of standing around and explaining the plot for half an episode.

McDONALD & DODDS

Sunday 1st March, STV

                                                                                                

Who devised this, Alan Partridge? An odd-couple detective drama starring Jason Watkins and Tala Gouveia – good actors both, they deserve better – McDonald & Dodds is an absurdly generic stockpile of nothing; Sunday night clue-sniffing futility incarnate. It’s whimsical, arch and soporific. TV Horlicks, the drug of a nation.

TV Review: PETER KAY'S CAR SHARE + BUCKET

This article was originally published in The Courier on 15 April 2017.

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

PETER KAY’S CAR SHARE: Tuesday, BBC One

BUCKET: Thursday, BBC Four

Like a great phoenix night rising from the ashes of obsolescence, the artistic rebirth of Peter Kay has been something to behold.

Despite his continued draw as a stand-up, his reputation as a great observational character comedian had become tarnished – seemingly forever – by years of cynically repackaged DVDs, slapdash memoirs, self-serving chat show appearances and turkeys such as Max & Paddy’s Road to Nowhere and that mirthless X Factor parody.

Even previously loyal fans had begun to regard him as a lazy sell-out.

But then – as Adam Curtis would say – something happened that nobody expected. In 2015, Kay returned with two delightful hit comedies.

In Danny Baker’s Cradle to Grave, he focused solely on acting to marvellous effect. Even more impressively, the BAFTA-winning PETER KAY’S CAR SHARE proved that Kay could still co-create a warm, rich, laugh-out-loud sitcom.

Any concerns that he couldn’t sustain this comeback were cheerfully vanquished by Car Share’s return. It’s just as charming and funny as before.

Picking up where series one left off, it gently toyed with the burgeoning romance between bumptious supermarket manager John (Kay) and his sweetly daft, naïve employee Kayleigh (Sian Gibson, who co-writes with Kay and Paul Coleman).

Though set almost entirely within the confines of John’s car, the series occasionally finds new wrinkles in its premise. So, John and Keyleigh spent most of episode one chatting via phone on their respective journeys to work. These subtle difference are seismic in Car Share’s little world.

Kayleigh’s new digs might’ve scuppered their old routine, but they clearly can’t live without their daily conversations.

John was reticent to admit that his heart was lifted by Kayleigh’s gift of a Now 48 CD – only Kay could derive cockle-warming mileage from Pure and Simple by Hear’Say – but that didn’t dent their natural chemistry. It was like being reunited with two old friends.

And that’s the modest magic of Car Share, it’s a pure and simple comedy about two likeable characters shooting the breeze.

Even the broader sitcom twist of John’s altercation with a belligerent cyclist going viral on YouTube didn’t feel out of place, as it supported the show’s basic humanity: in its unfussy way, it showed how innocent people can become internet villains/laughing stocks by being subjected to duplicitous editing.

If Kay and Gibson make it look easy, new sitcom BUCKET proves just how hard it is to get laughs from two people talking almost uninterrupted.

Writer Frog Stone co-stars as Fran, the reserved, virginal daughter of Mim, a septuagenarian free-spirited hippie played by Miriam Margolyes, an actress upon whom the euphemistic terms “irrepressible” and “redoubtable” are permanently affixed like warning signs.

Their dysfunctional relationship is driven by one joke, hammered into the ground: Mim won’t stop talking frankly about sex, much to Fran’s understandable exasperation.

Old women saying “hilariously” inappropriate things is one of the laziest comedy clichés, but I suppose we should be grateful that she didn’t get high or do a rap. Not yet anyway.

Another insurmountable problem: their nasty bickering is depressing, and no amount of laboured, unconvincing, last-minute pathos can atone for that.

I’m all for black comedy, but Bucket reminded me of how much Steptoe and Son made us care about those characters, even when they were behaving despicably to each other.

We’re supposed to find Mim charmingly eccentric, but she just comes across as an unbearable nuisance. Bucket is inept, a clumsy stab at rude, broad comedy with delusions of depth.

TV Review: THE REAL MARIGOLD HOTEL + CHILDREN SAVED FROM THE NAZIS + THE DAY HITLER DIED

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 30th January 2016

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

The Real Marigold Hotel: Tuesday, BBC Two

Children Saved from the Nazis: The Story of Sir Nicholas Winton: Wednesday, BBC One

The Day Hitler Died: Sunday, STV

Paul Whitelaw

A comfortably middle-class take on I'm A Celebrity, The Real Marigold Hotel is an easygoing travelogue in which a group of well-known senior citizens arrive in India to test its reputation as an ideal retirement destination.

There is no competitive element and everyone, from Sylvester McCoy to Miriam Margoyles, Wayne Sleep and Jan Leeming, gets on. On television in this day and age? How novel.

It's inspired by – but not officially based on, as an amusingly defensive caption was legally obliged to state – the dreary Brit-flick starring Maggie Smith, Judi Dench et al. It therefore conjures uncomfortable echoes of Empire by depicting India as a colourful playground for rich white westerners. But it also, in its polite British way, confronts the injustice of India's caste system and its rank extremes of wealth and poverty.

This was particularly evident when our cuddly grey-hairs met – in McCoy's unimpressed words - “some Maharajah”. His regal wife tried to justify the disparity between her riches and the suffering outside as part of the Karmic cycle of life. You keep telling yourself that, your Maj. Whatever helps you sleep at night.

Despite their anger – and I'm sure they feel just as righteous about Britain's own shameful equality gap - the team had nothing but praise for the warmth and generosity of their Indian hosts. Mrs Maharajah aside, no one came out of this badly.

Disgusting cynic that I am, I was looking forward to making merry fun of Wayne Sleep for his woolly spiritual quest, until he revealed that he'd been musing on mortality after recently recovering from prostate cancer. His desire to reconnect with his latent religiosity was entirely sincere.

Meanwhile, Margoyles proved reliably eccentric as she vented her obsession with base bodily functions, spoke of her total lack of interest in house work, and struggled with her “scorn for the upper classes”. Inevitably, she was favoured in the edit above everyone else (the likes of Roy “Catchphrase” Walker and singer Patti Boulaye barely featured at all).

However, my favourite moment had nothing to do with social injustice, spiritual awakenings or flatulent actresses. It was when McCoy's avuncular mask slipped briefly after a local innocently asked what Doctor Who was. “It's a television programme that's been running for 50 years,” he mumbled pointedly. Simmer down, Sylv, the Doctor clearly hasn't conquered Jaipur yet. The locals have more pressing things to think about.

A moving tribute to an unsung British hero, Children Saved from the Nazis: The Story of Sir Nicholas Winton showed how an unassuming London stockbroker took it upon himself to rescue over 600 Czechoslovakian children on the eve of WWII. The definition of humility, Winton's selfless act would've remained secret had his wife not stumbled across the truth 50 years later while rummaging through their attic. It was a reminder that life-affirming triumphs can often flourish in the tide of abject horror.

Der Führer's death aside, there wasn't a trace of light amid the darkness in The Day Hitler Died. Although the dismal details of his final days in a bunker beneath war-torn Berlin are widely known, this rigorous documentary had a fascinating ace up its sleeve: previously unseen archive footage, filmed for the Nuremberg Trials, of Hitler's bunker-dwelling cohorts confirming his death.

The most morbidly compelling contribution came from the soldier tasked with standing guard over Hitler's funeral pyre as Russian bombardment raged overhead. When this personification of evil was finally reduced to ash, the young man gave a Nazi salute and retreated. A miasma of insanity, right to the end.