MANDY + ONCE UPON A TIME IN IRAQ + THE YORKSHIRE JOBCENTRE

This article was originally published in The Courier on 8th August 2020.

NEXT WEEK’S TV

MANDY

Thursday, BBC Two, 9:30pm

Now this, at last, is a proper Diane Morgan vehicle. Hitherto best known as Philomena Cunk from those Charlie Brooker shows and their lacklustre spin-offs, Mandy is written and directed by Morgan. She plays a permanent jobseeker, an insecure working-class oddball with a fishhook grimace, but Mandy is such an exaggerated cartoon of an unemployable person (at one point she attempts to deny her prominent involvement in a series of online gambling adverts), it’s clearly not intended as reactionary social satire. Mandy idly flattening tarantulas on a banana conveyer belt. Mandy getting her skew-whiff bouffant caught in an extractor fan. Mandy and Maxine Peake as estranged Touch the Truck contestants. I laughed. Mandy plays to Morgan’s strengths. She’s a very funny person with an innate gift for silly, deadpan farce.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN IRAQ

Monday, BBC Two, 9pm

And so, this starkly illuminating series reaches its end. But the story remains open-ended. In 2011, the coalition forces finally left Iraq. Victory Day. Within a few months, sectarian tensions resurfaced, tensions stoked by Iraq’s new President. America shook his hand and turned a blind eye. Problem solved, nothing to see here. Enter ISIS. The catastrophic legacy of the Iraq war has, as far as I’m aware, never been essayed on British television in such acutely human detail. It revolves around a diverse array of talking heads, most of them exhausted, traumatised, by the sheer horror of it all. If you haven’t done so already, I urge you to watch the whole thing on iPlayer.

THE YORKSHIRE JOBCENTRE

Monday, Channel 4, 9pm

I have mixed feelings about this series. Filmed in a busy Leeds jobcentre just prior to the Covid crisis, it confronts Britain’s dire unemployment situation (there are 29,000 unemployed in Leeds alone). It follows claimants from various walks of life to illustrate the point that anyone can find themselves in need of benefits, a fact which shouldn’t need restating, but one which blinkered people find difficult to comprehend. It features sympathetic insight from jobcentre employees and vulnerable people living on a pittance. It highlights the chaotic injustice of Universal Credit. But… it also strikes a patronising tone: “Aww, these likeable claimants all get short-term happy endings!” I, Daniel Blake it ain’t. Well-meaning yet uneasily compromised.

GREAT CONTINENTAL RAILWAY JOURNEYS

Wednesday, BBC Two, 8pm

Michael Portillo is living proof that Tory politicians can always reinvent themselves, especially if they affect a sort of ersatz chumminess. If you didn’t know any better, you would assume – if you could even be bothered - that this primary coloured slab of uncooked giblets was a harmless train enthusiast; at worst, a tediously sensible village green Lib-Dem. Nah. He’s a voracious Thatcherite, a nasty piece of work. Do not trust him, don’t ever forget. And here he is again, for his umpteenth series of travelogues funded by the notoriously socialist BBC. This week he’s in Germany, where he waxes solemnly about the rise of fascism. It’s like being lectured on the dangers of smoking by Keith Richards.

LAST WEEK’S TV

PHIL SPENCER’S STATELY HOMES

Wednesday 5 August, Channel 4

Well this was just appalling. Phil Spencer, a blandly humanoid C-3P0 who makes his genuinely unpleasant Location, Location, Location (so bad, they named it thrice) co-star Kirstie Allsopp look like a fluorescent Mrs Claus riding a rocket full of sweets to the moon, presides over an offensive celebration of stupid old toffs and their ridiculous houses. Haven’t we suffered enough of late? Phil Spencer cooing over a gold-upholstered bath which was once soiled by King Ralph of Freedonia is volcanically insulting. I’m all for mindless escapism, I crave silliness and whimsy. Hell’s clanging bells, we don’t have to be angry all the time. Imagine how exhausting that would be. But programmes such as this are indicative of the rot at the heart of British society. Tug your forelock, know your place. We. Are. Doomed.     

MARY BEARD'S SHOCK OF THE NUDE + INSIDE NO. 9 + DOCTOR WHO

This article was originally published in The Courier on 1st February 2020.

NEXT WEEK’S TV

MARY BEARD’S SHOCK OF THE NUDE

Monday, BBC Two, 9pm

The history of Western art is crammed with naked bodies. Mary Beard casts her shrewd expert eye over this orgiastic obsession in a probing, irreverent and informative two-part series, wherein she grapples with “the problems, the anxieties and the scandals surrounding the image of the naked body ever since the Ancient Greeks.” The art establishment has always tried to defend itself from accusations of objectifying women, but Beard sees right through such mendacity, hypocrisy and gross oversimplification. She analyses problematic expressions of the erotic male gaze – many of them considered masterpieces – and looks at how female artists have responded to this fig-leafed tradition. She also traces the unusual history of idealised naked men in art.

INSIDE NO. 9

Monday, BBC Two, 10pm

All good people agree that Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s darkly comic anthology series is one of the best and most consistently inventive television shows of recent years. Series 5 kicks off in a football referee’s changing room before, during and after a fraught match. David Morrissey plays a consummately professional ref on the verge of retirement, with Pemberton, Shearsmith and Ralf Little as his temperamentally mismatched linesmen. Although it’s not one of the strongest episodes – it feels quite slight by Pemberton and Shearsmith’s usual standards – it still displays their impressive ability to weave comedy, drama and rounded characters into a single 30 minute narrative. They’re masters of the form, Rod Serling by way of Victoria Wood and Alan Bennett.

UNIVERSAL CREDIT: INSIDE THE WELFARE STATE

Tuesday, BBC Two, 9pm

Universal Credit is the biggest and most controversial (i.e. catastrophic) overhaul of the welfare state in a generation. The government insists that it was supposed to simplify the benefits system and encourage the unemployed back into work, but instead it has caused chaos and suffering for the millions of people who rely on it to survive. It has driven claimants further into poverty. People are dying as a result. This sobering series gains access to the much-maligned Department of Work and Pensions. We also meet sympathetic jobcentre employees and claimants, including a desperate middle-aged man who’s recently been made homeless, and a single mother of two who struggles with depression and anxiety caused by her dire situation.

BARRYMORE: THE BODY IN THE POOL

Thursday, Channel 4, 9pm

In March 2001, Stuart Lubbock died at a drug-fuelled party held at Michael Barrymore’s home. To this day the case remains unsolved. This research-heavy, 90-minute documentary attempts to examine the full, murky story. Preview copies weren’t available at the time of writing – possibly for sensitive legal reasons – but it sounds potentially fascinating. The Lubbock case is rife with unanswered questions, as no one has ever spoken openly about what happened that night. We do know that Barrymore denies any involvement and that his once successful career has, for obvious reasons, never recovered. The film features contributions from members of the Lubbock family, as well as eyewitnesses, detectives and forensic pathologists. Barrymore himself appears only in archive footage.

LAST WEEK’S TV

DOCTOR WHO

Sunday 26th January, BBC One

Fair play to Chris Chibnall, he managed to keep the grin-inducing return of good old Captain Jack (the effervescent John Barrowman, having a ball as usual) under wraps; a welcome rarity in this spoilerific age. Also, in another fine twist, this enjoyably berserk episode introduced the first person of colour (Jo Martin, pictured) to play the Doctor. Or did it? I don’t trust Chibnall to satisfactorily conclude his intriguing story arc, but I’ll gladly eat humble P if I'm wrong.

 

TV Column: GROWING UP POOR: BRITAIN'S BREADLINE KIDS

This article was originally published in The Courier on 30th November 2019.

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

NEXT WEEK’S TV

GROWING UP POOR: BRITAIN’S BREADLINE KIDS

Monday, Channel 4, 10pm

As we inch ever closer to the most important General Election in years, Channel 4’s Dispatches team present this vital, devastating report on poverty. More than four million British children are growing up hungry. Unforeseen circumstances can send families into tailspin. We meet a mother of two who was forced into emergency accommodation after fleeing from an abusive partner. She’s struggling to support her kids via the catastrophic Universal Credit system. They couldn’t survive without access to one of the many food banks that exist in this great unequal nation of ours. No one should have to live like that. Meanwhile, a depressed teenager who lives with her family in sheltered accommodation struggles with suicidal thoughts. Watch and weep.

HOW TO SAVE £1000 ONLINE

Tuesday, Channel 4, 8pm

Hey, we all love shopping, right? Of course we do! But did you know that online retailers use mendacious techniques to strip you of your hard-earned cash? Don’t worry, though, as here come a pair of breezy experts to tell you how to avoid being ripped off. The immediate beneficiaries of their valuable teachings are two shopaholic families who waste thousands of pounds every year on expensive clothes and holidays. You’ll be forgiven for struggling to care about the overwhelming plight of these poor, beleaguered people. It beggars belief that Channel 4 would show this programme just 24 hours after the transmission of Growing Up Poor: Britain’s Breadline Kids, but I don’t suppose the contrast ever occurred to them.

MY GRANDPARENTS’ WAR

Wednesday, Channel 4, 9pm

As if to apologise for the previous evening’s blundering transgression, Channel 4 get back on track with part two of this compelling WWII history series. This week’s famous guide is anti-war campaigner and one of the world’s greatest living actors, Mark Rylance. His grandfather, Osmond, spent almost four years as a Japanese prisoner of war. A Hong Kong-based banker with no military experience, Osmond bravely joined a volunteer defence force in December 1941. On Christmas Day of that year he was shot and imprisoned. Rylance, who comes across as a lovely, sensitive soul, uncovers the moving story of a man who, like so many men who endured harrowing ordeals during the war, rarely spoke about it afterwards.

COUNTRY MUSIC: A FILM BY KEN BURNS

Friday, BBC Four, 9:30pm

Multi-award-winning documentarian Ken Burns is renowned for his epic accounts of American history. It was only a matter of time before he got around to country music, an ancient stream at the heart of the nation’s divided, complex culture. In episodes five and six he reaches the mid-1960s, a tumultuous era of change and revolt when certain preternaturally rebellious artists from the largely conservative world of country music commented sympathetically on current events. He focuses on Godlike feminist trailblazers Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, indomitable human rights activist Johnny Cash, Fellini-inspired hippie cowboy Kris Kristofferson and the extraordinary African-American country singer Charley Pride. Country music prides itself on integrity: these guys are the ultimate bastions.

LAST WEEK’S TV

KILL YOUR TV: JIM MOIR’S WEIRD WORLD OF VIDEO ART

Sunday 24th November, BBC Four

If you’ve ever wondered where Jim Moir, aka Vic Reeves, gets his kerrazy ideas from, you only have to watch programmes such as this. Moir is an avant-garde artist who became a comedian by mistake. This documentary, in which he explored the colourful history of artists exploiting video technology for wild, subversive means, was probably the closest we’ll ever get to a mission statement from someone whose work defies logic.

MEAT: A THREAT TO OUR PLANET?

Monday 25th November, BBC One

Humans feast upon 65 billion animals a year. Scientific research has confirmed that meat production is one of the biggest causes of our environmental crisis. In this commendably grave and urgent documentary, animal biologist (and meat-eater) Liz Bonnin became increasingly horrified by her findings. She also provided some hope via rational solutions to the problem. Remember rational solutions? How quaint.

THE MAN WHO SAW TOO MUCH

Wednesday 27th November, BBC One

Say what you like about Alan Yentob (I always do), but fair play to the man: his stark documentary about Boris Pahor, a 106-year-old survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, was riveting. Pahor spent time in Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Natzweiler. The latter is rarely spoken about, despite being one of the most horrific camps of its kind. A powerful piece of television.