TV Review
If you overindulged at New Year, you might find this doco, er, sobering.
Well, thank God that’s over. The holiday season may be jolly good fun and all that, but once it’s over, I don’t miss its days and days of overindulgence of the supposedly good things in life: family, friends, food, but most especially the demon drink.
It is, I decided long ago, probably best not to add up the number of units of alcohol consumed between December 1 and January 1, for the simple reason that the final figure would be appalling. Confronting one’s own drinking can be, well, sobering.
Certainly this was what helped make the excellent Louis Theroux: Drinking to Oblivion, an hour-long film on extreme alcohol addiction, such a worrying watch. When asked to consider the sad, sometimes chaotic lives of this documentary’s subjects, the natural reaction is to wonder quietly to oneself: how does my drinking compare?
This seemed to have occurred to Theroux. At King’s College Hospital in London, which has a specialist liver centre, he meets Stuart, a middle-aged antique dealer with liver disease. Stuart, who was there to have litres of liquid drained from his bloated abdomen, tells Theroux that an average day’s drinking used to be four or five pints at the pub then a couple of bottles of wine at home. Theroux considered this and then said he too might have four or five pints.
“Or I might drink a bottle and a half … maybe even two bottles, of wine, in an afternoon-evening. I wouldn’t do both … I don’t think.”
Putting aside selfish concerns, the truly terrifying bit of Drinking to Oblivion was the sheer helplessness of those in the grip of extreme addiction. Joe, a sensitive 35-year-old struggling with a break-up, and Peter, a man made vulnerable by his father’s recent death, seemed powerless to stop themselves, even with full knowledge of the nature of the disease and its damage.
However, it was Aurelie, a deeply decent and philosophical 45-year-old who drinks 8% cider all day, that stayed with me most. Facing death from liver disease if she doesn’t stop drinking, she told Theroux calmly and without self-pity, “I think I’m more afraid of stopping than dying.”
Theroux’s usual style – the deadpan observer throwing hand-grenade questions – was more huggy here than one might expect, but his non-judgmental narration and clear sympathy for his subjects
made this absorbing viewing, too.
It was a shrewd bit of programming from Prime to schedule this, the first of its season of Theroux films (others tackle heroin and sex trafficking), in the week following New Year: if you hadn’t already made a resolution to cut down before watching it, you surely would have done after.
Excesses of other kinds pervade The Assassination of Gianni Versace, the much-anticipated second series of American Crime Story, (the first was The People v OJ Simpson).
Unlike those handing out the gongs at the Emmys and the Globes, I didn’t think much of the latter – some of the dialogue was excruciating – but at least it was about a crime that still resonates in the public imagination. I’m not sure that one can say that about the death of Versace – a fashion designer who lived like a Roman emperor – at the hands of a pathetic conman and serial killer called Andrew Cunanan in 1997.
The crime itself was banal: Versace was shot point-blank in broad daylight on the steps of his Miami Beach villa, and there was no question whodunnit. Which leaves this miniseries to speculate, in a not very interesting way, on whether homophobia in the FBI and the local cops allowed Cunanan, who’d already killed four others, the opportunity to kill Versace.
It also tries, in muddled, conjectural flashback, to get inside the mind of its killer. But that’s a job that Darren Criss ( Glee’s Blaine Anderson), who plays Cunanan, isn’t really up to, I’m afraid. This is more frocky horror show than penetrating drama.
LOUIS THEROUX, Prime, Thursdays, 9.35pm; THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE, SoHo, Thursdays 9.30pm.
The crime was banal: Versace was shot pointblank in broad daylight and there was no question whodunnit.