Funny old rise to the top
ACCORDING to the presenter, shows like BEFORE THEY WERE STARS (Saturday, Channel 5) are meant to be full of clips that celebrities don’t want us to see. Being no celebrity myself, maybe I shouldn’t comment but if I was one, I’d feel the opposite. Why wouldn’t I want everyone to see the hours I put in, plugging cough syrup or milk substitutes?
Why would I be embarrassed to be seen, as a very youthful and brightly jumpered Jeremy Irons so often is seen, delivering corny jokes on a Seventies kids’ show?
All that means, surely is that I put a lot of work into getting where I am now. It means that whether I ended up a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company or road-testing shopping trolleys on a shopping channel, I never thought a single gig was beneath me.
If anything, clip shows like this one, delivered with dry one-liners from Susan Calman, make me respect certain famous faces I hadn’t much respected before.
I’m making an exception for the current President of the US, who due to a life-long career in self-promotion has cropped up everywhere from singing a soap opera theme tune at the Emmy Awards to pretending to have reunited with former wife Ivana in order to plug pizzas.
Even that montage of Donald horrors didn’t fit the mission statement, though, because there’s no way a man with a hairdo like that minds what people think of some old clip of him and there’s no way those who disrespect him could ever disrespect him any more deeply than they do already.
The best way to watch these alleged toe-curlers is to approach them as you would a rubbish holiday. It rains, so you go and look around a weird supermarket.
The hotel is hosting a noisy party so you join in. Among the hundreds of unremarkable clips you’ve seen before, you find the odd thing to wonder at. One of the key themes, I reckon, has less to do with who was in a show or an advert but how it ever got made.
How did Sir David Attenborough end up trying to explain the glorious colouring of an iguana on black-and-white TV? Never mind Charlie from Casualty being in it, what the Dickens was the 1965 sci-fi comedy musical Gonks Go Beat about? “Before they were famous”? This was before TV made sense.
One of the marks of a good crime story is its cameos. I’m not talking about the comedy pathologist, eating lunch as she removes a pancreas or the stock police boss, more obsessed with Twitter and Facebook than banging up baddies.
In fact, one of the more obvious ways in which UNFORGOTTEN (Sunday, ITV) manages to be so uncommonly good is that it serves up a standard mismatched detective duo without doing all the lazy clichés.
Just as the great crime writers could bring less central characters to life with a single scene, this show’s creator, Chris Lang, invests time and faith in people who set the emotional tone but don’t necessarily push the plot along.
Bronagh Waugh gave a searingly good performance last night as Jessica, twin-sister of murder victim Hayley Reid, explaining to the police just what the years of grief, doubt and suspicion had done to her family and the community they lived in.
Unforgotten involves us in the chase and the mystery but unlike many a crime thriller, it never forgets the crime.