Anne Robinson standing by your sickbed? Now that’s a scary sight!
What a horrible shock for Declan from Glasgow. a chronic illness means he’s reliant on his team of carers ... and the newest recruit is anne Robinson.
Imagine gazing up to see annie’s gimlet eyes and strawberry blonde bob at your bedside — no less scary than a skeletal figure in a cowl, ending your brief tenure on Earth with her clipped catchphrase: ‘You are the weakest link, goodbye!’
She wasn’t here to claim another soul, but to investigate the gender pay gap, in a brisk probe into sexism called The Trouble With Women (BBC1). Declan’s carers, all female, were being paid £3 an hour less than their male counterparts by the council.
anne couldn’t comprehend why they’d ever put up with it. her solution was simple: girls everywhere should march into their bosses’ offices, harangue and belittle them, reduce them to whimpering jellies, and keep doing it till a fat pay rise appeared. It’s a method that has never failed her.
Equally, she saw no problem with wolf whistling or ogling. In her book, every time a lecherous male leers over a cleavage, it’s more proof that men are the weaker sex — and so easy to manipulate.
She seems to regard feminism as a backwards step. ‘I believe equality is all about women having choice,’ she trumpeted, ‘the choice to spend money on plastic surgery and the choice to earn money from their looks.’
Much of the show consisted of anne basking in her own radiance. We leafed through her books of newspaper cuttings — annie is her own librarian — and the camera lingered on her photo album. She even read out other people’s comments about her.
But she had a good point to make, and she rammed it home with gusto: ‘I never expected that generations after me were going to display a nervousness and a timidity about the behaviour of men. they somehow weren’t the warriors we had been.’
to emphasise this, she conducted an experiment with 20 primary schoolchildren, asking them to draw a surgeon, a mechanic and a firefighter. all but three drew males. Worse, when their mums did the test, they all pictured men.
thought-provoking and unpretentious, this one-off show had something worth saying.
the strongest woman of the night was ordering her husbands about in two different centuries, as Outlander (More4) returned. Fearless Claire (Catriona Balfe) found herself flung by a timewarp, from the Jacobite uprising of the 1740s into postwar Britain 200 years later.
hubbie Frank (tobias Menzies) found this hard to believe for a few minutes, but soon he was weeping and begging her forgiveness for ever doubting her. Claire couldn’t bear to let him touch her, though — he looks too much like beastly Black Jack Randall, who cruelly misused her in the 18th century.
One quick flashback later, Claire was dragging her other husband, highland warrior Jamie (Sam heughan), all round Europe on a political mission for Bonnie Prince Charlie... stopping only to thwart an outbreak of smallpox.
thanks to a well-plotted love triangle and splendid costumes, this barmy historical romance looks and feels engrossing.
Characters sometimes spend too long reminding each other about the Battle of Culloden and the highland Clearances, and the Scottish accents do keep veering off to South Wales, but who cares? Just give us plenty of kisses and claymores, and we’re happy.
If you can’t wait to the weekends for a jaunt with Cap’n Ross, try Outlander. It’s a sort of supernatural Poldark.