Malkovich’s Pope is a dark and funny blessing
The New Pope Sky Atlantic, Sunday The Great Give Back Virgin Media One, Tuesday Room To Improve: Dermot’s Home RTÉ One, Sunday Love Island Virgin Media One, all week
When The Young Pope ended, back in 2016, Jude Law’s Pope Pius XIII was in a coma after suffering a heart attack, leaving a vacuum at the heart of the Catholic Church. In the sequel, now called The New Pope, we come in nine months later, with Pius still unresponsive after three heart transplants. Italian director Paolo Sorrentino is nothing if not operatic, and we find out that one radio station broadcasts nothing all day but the sick Pope’s breathing. A cult is growing around him, with followers maintaining a constant vigil outside his Vatican hospital room and calling for his canonisation. Worried about the impact this will have on the stability of the Church, Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Voiello (played by the brilliant Silvio Orlando), a schemer with rat-like cunning, organises a conclave to elect a successor, and engineers it so that the timid, malleable Cardinal Viglietti wins and becomes Pope Francis II.
Alas, like all the best-laid plans, it blows up in Voiello’s face. Realising he now has supreme power, Viglietti grows a spine and demands that all his fellow cardinals surrender their jewellery before telling them he will sell off all the Vatican’s treasures and open the gardens of the microstate to house refugees.
Within days, he is dead, and not entirely accidentally, and Voiello and his cronies now seek to install Sir John Brannox (John Malkovich, languid as ever in flamboyant clothes and lots of guyliner), an aristocratic English cardinal with a love for Cardinal Newman and a middle-ground view of religion that has convinced many Anglicans to convert.
If all this sounds a little dry, you couldn’t be further from the truth. Sorrentino is a deliciously subversive writer and director, and he uses often stunning imagery – nuns after lights out dancing to the thumping techno beat of Sofi
Tukker’s Good Time Girl, cardinals conspiring in a bamboo copse, Pius XIII laid out almost naked in a vast room in front of a neon cross – to reel you in.
And what are you reeled into?
Often startlingly provocative (in the sense they make you think) debates about the role of the Church in the modern world, and its relevance in the face of threats not just from secularism but, as we seem to be about to find out, radical Islam too.
There are many who find this series profane (and it certainly is not for the faint of heart, featuring as it does a Curia that is Mafia-like in its ruthlessness, and the repressed desire of two cardinals for each other), but it has questions to raise without ever answering them, all wrapped up in the most deliciously and darkly funny package. I can’t wait for tonight’s double bill.
I worried that Virgin Media’s The
Great Give Back was The Secret Millionaire in another guide, but I was wrong. Conor Grassick is a 26year-old Dubliner who, since the death of his mother from cancer, is the carer for his 22-year-old brother. Colin has Prader-Willi Syndrome, a genetic disorder that means, among other things, sufferers have an eating disorder that means they never feel full and just keep eating. In one year alone, Colin put on five stone.
At his wits’ end, Conor clearly needed help. Enter celebrity hairdresser Dylan Bradshaw and his wife Charlotte, who tidied the house and garden, ran a golf classic and an auction, raised a lot of money, called in architect and builder friends and completely remodelled the house from top to bottom. The lengths they went to were admirable, not least opening up their own home on occasion to Conor so he could get away from everything, and the delightful thing was that he used his time there to teach the Bradshaw boys his martial arts skill, taekwondo.
With Colin finally in respite care for most of the week, Conor now is concentrating on making it to Tokyo to represent Ireland at the Olympics. In the meantime, though, he also works at his old school – as a special needs assistant. His love for his late mother, his patience and calmness with his brother, his need to help others, all marked him out as one of the most exceptional men I’ve seen on television. If he does make the cut for the Games, I will cheer him to the rafters.
I cheered Dermot Bannon too, on Sunday, when he finally finished the renovation of his own house in
Room To Improve. Dear God, though, it took a long time to get there. Dermot, difficult enough to pin down when designing other people’s houses, was just as invisible on the build of his own, and just as indecisive – endless deliberations on the colour of a terrazzo floor had me reaching for the Xanax.
Of course, he got there in the end, with a Diarmuid Gavin garden design as a bonus, and the result was as spectacular as ever. That said, I hope he makes it his forever home, because I’m not sure I could go through all that again.
Finally, Love Island debuted its winter series and you honestly have to ask what’s the point. The summer show is perfect for, well, summer. You watch it at nine at night, when it’s still bright and maybe even the back door is open and wafting in the last of the daytime heat, so you indulge the vapidity and stupidity of the wannabes.
On cold nights, you ask why is it so unjust that these preening numpties get to spend a few weeks in South Africa while you freeze in front of a one-bar SuperSer.