Meet A-lister Amy, the movie star you’ve never heard of . . .
BET you can’t name the British movie actress whose films sell the most tickets. Here is a clue — it’s not Keira Knightley or Emma Watson.
Don’t bother guessing Carey Mulligan, Emily Blunt or Thandie Newton, either. They’re all B-listers compared to this girl.
Amy Jackson, a 26-year-old beauty queen from Liverpool, is a megastar. Never mind that most UK filmgoers have never heard of her — she’s the Scouse Princess of Bollywood, currently starring in the most expensive Indian movie ever made, in a country that sells two billion cinema tickets a year.
If that baffles you, don’t worry. When her dad, Alan, visited her on the sci-fi set of her movie 2.0 — surrounded by dancers dressed as robots in costumes laced with lights — he looked like he’d landed on another planet.
Anita Rani’s two-part documentary, Bollywood: The World’s Biggest Film Industry (BBC2), has been engrossing because it is filled with staggering facts that are unknown to most Brits.
Anita built up to them cleverly: instead of slapping us in the face with headlines, she caught our attention with details and gradually uncovered the real surprises.
On the sound stage of a historical epic, Padmaavat, she drew our attention to the gorgeous marble walls — they were actually painted cloth. This, Anita revealed, was because the set had already been burned down once.
In fact, this half-finished movie sparked riots, after rumours spread that one dream sequence featured a love scene between a Muslim king and a Hindu queen. Not content with razing the studio, religious extremists placed a £ 1 million bounty on the director’s head.
With delicious Indian understatement, he remarked that the production had suffered ‘a couple of disruptions’.
The programme was slowed by a few self-indulgent scenes, where Anita learned sword- fighting moves or joined a spectacular dance set-piece.
This ‘Blue Peter’ style doesn’t suit her: she’s much better in the traditional Alan Whicker role, asking sharp questions with a smile.
She persuaded two Western actresses to talk about the sexism and harassment they face in the industry. Their heavily-accented Hindi wasn’t a problem because audiences loved their pale skin — a token of beauty in India. But getting work was difficult unless they were prepared to ‘compromise’, or sleep with the producers. Maybe Bollywood and Hollywood are more similar than they seem.
In a white-plastered village on the peninsula of Puglia, great-granny Linda gave chef Jamie Oliver her cheeky views on ‘compromise’, in Jamie Cooks Italy (C4). ‘Listen,’ said the 81year-old, ‘I’m ugly and I’m tired, but I’m never out of work.’ Her large family keeps her constantly busy cooking, which she loves.
She credits the success of her marriage, with its many children, to her rich dishes. The secret to pleasing a man, she said, is to ‘put up with him’ and keep him fed.
To demonstrate what she meant, she cooked a seafood hotpot, with layers of rice, mussels and roughly chopped veg. Jamie had a go at recreating it but, inevitably, his recipe looked arty instead of rustic.
It also didn’t look much fun to cook, unless you fancy squeezing the heads of raw langoustines to make the juices run into the pot. Yee-uecch.
The best scene had Jamie surrounded by four strident grans, scolding him constantly and singing loudly when he tried to talk to camera. If only they could go with him everywhere.