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: ODYSSEY + ARENA: NICOLAS ROEG... IT'S ABOUT TIME + NOT SAFE FOR WORK

Odyssey: Sunday, BBC Two

Arena: Nicolas Roeg… It's About Time: Sunday, BBC Four

Not Safe For Work: Tuesday, Channel 4

Paul Whitelaw

Having spied Channel 4's success with Homeland, BBC Two is presumably hoping to grab some of that US import thriller action with Odyssey. But on the evidence of its opening double-bill, this 13-part series is possibly too sprawling, laboured and muddled to capture a comparable audience.

Set in the US and Africa, it tries to tackle all the major geopolitical issues of the day – war, terrorism, corporate corruption, grass-roots protest, media hysteria and the financial crisis – in pursuit of a supposedly grand statement about the interconnectedness of our global catastrophe.

Unfortunately, these noble ambitions are scuppered by an uneven patchwork narrative involving a drab homeland conspiracy and a Mali-based strand in which Anna Friel's

US army officer makes a dangerous trek across the desert. This latter strand is far more engaging and suspenseful than anything else in Odyssey; it flags drastically whenever Friel isn't on screen.

Her impressive performance is matched by Omar Ghazaoui as the Malian teenager who becomes her unlikely ally. Mercifully free of mawkishness, their relationship is the only interesting aspect of the show.

To carry off something on this scale requires depth, focus and precision; Odyssey is a hectic splurge. One might charitably defend its approach as an intentional attempt at reflecting the complexity of the issues at hand. But really it's just sloppy story-telling. While I'm glad that American TV dramas are gradually trying to explore geopolitics in a relatively thoughtful way, Odyssey' is less than the sum of its parts.

It's surprising to learn that, during its 40 years on air, cerebral arts strand Arena has never crossed paths with visionary British film director Nicolas Roeg. After all, they're a perfect match. But not only was Nicolas Roeg... It's About Time his first Arena profile, it was also the first time he's participated in a documentary about his work.

A suitably elliptical tribute to his unique vision, it was more interested in exploring Roeg's thematic obsessions than providing standard biographical details. Famed for his non-linear narratives and emphasis on psychological displacement, it wove thoughtful analysis of his films – including obvious touchstones such as Performance and The Man Who Fell To Earth – with quietly revealing, twinkly pronouncements from the man himself.

It was, in typical Arena style, an attempt to capture the spirit of the artist. While newcomers to Roeg's work may have preferred a more conventional approach, that woud've missed the point of this masterful impressionist. And at least it didn't ruin the ending of Don't Look Now.

More bleak than funny, comedy-drama Not Safe For Work is nevertheless an intriguing howl of anguish about a dysfunctional bunch of misfits working at a moribund immigration department.

Hitherto best known for her role as deadpan hedonist Vod in student comedy Fresh Meat, the excellent Zawe Ashton stars as a recently divorced civil servant who reluctantly relocates to Northampton from London due to budget cuts.

She's dismayed to discover that her new manager is a former underling who only got the job after pretending to be a devout Muslim. A befuddled, work-shy, drug-guzzling mess, Danny's inspirational motto is “work hard or go home.” He's also played, not as a wacky grotesque, but as a pathetically vulnerable soul by another highly promising young actor, Sacha Dhawan.

Seemingly written from a place of genuine pain and offbeat compassion, Not Safe For Work is full of bracing, downbeat promise.