Portillo rides rails in glorious technicolour
Lucy’s Pass It On tour (lucyporter.co.uk) runs until May 31
CONGRATULATIONS are in order.
Great British Railway Journeys
(BBC Two, Monday) has turned 10, boasting a decade of series tucked away in its steaming tender. Where has the time gone? We all need to think of something else to do with our lives.
The success of GBRJ is solely down to its chief guard (who’s available in the middle carriage), Michael Portillo. You’ll recognise him straight away, firstly because he’s normally the only one on the service, and secondly because he looks like he’s suffered a tragic collision with a Dulux colour chart. It has left him with a chronic condition which stops him putting different colours together in any sort of harmonious outfit.
He began the first episode wearing the hitherto unlikely combination of light blue sports jacket teamed with orange slacks. Don’t be surprised to see the “Portillo Range” in Marks & Spencer menswear. And womenswear, too. Portillo is very unisex. Or perhaps we’ll see him starring in an ad for Specsavers.
If you stuck with the episode, you were rewarded for your patience when Portillo did a costume change to excite the local ladies from the WI in Preston. For this, he gave them the more traditional dusty pink jacket and navy blue trousers. You do spoil them, Michael.
It did mean, however, that his colour scheme bounced off the walls of the walnut drawing room in super-posh Knowsley Hall, the seat of the Earl of Derby, as his lordship made a fleeting appearance between morning coffee and light luncheon.
Michael’s new aristocratic friend wasn’t to be outdone. He turned up wearing exactly the same coloured jacket! Imagine the talk over the dinner table that evening: “...and then you turned up, Michael, in the self-same colour, you beastly fellow!” The Earl should know you can never upstage a TV celebrity, whoever you are. They’re the real aristocracy now.
Portillo has a talent for finding interesting details on the most unprepossessing journey imaginable. Last week, it was Warrington to Preston, in what looked like a fairly empty 3.34pm service. It was such a fetching carriage too. Advisedly, he ignored his fellow passengers who must have thought, “I wondered what happened to that Tory bloke who got booted out all those years ago...” But for Portillo to undergo a complete transformation in the eyes of the British public, he needs to restore all the wonderful rail lines lost under Beeching. There’s a challenge for you, Michael.
THE GREATEST challenge in watching (ITV, Tuesday) was to fight off a nap. It may have been the breathless sincerity of Americans or the absence of the actor’s usual facetiousness but the entire show lacked revelation or wit. In Clunes’s previous travel series, Doc Martin turned on the charm and had a laugh with his fellow travellers. Not here. He managed to have a bit of a joke with the Hawaiian shirt salesman (thank goodness) but otherwise this was an hour of catching up on fascinating Polynesian history (they killed Captain Cook), a big tsunami that struck the islands aeons ago, and a deified Russian monk called St Herman. Oh and when lava meets the sea, it turns to land. There, I’ve saved you the trouble of watching. Oh, sorry.
America Martin Clunes: Islands Of
Although, while in Alaska, he did spy some interesting brown bear cubs from a distance.
(BBC Two, Tuesday) asked viewers to vote on the most “iconic” figure of the 20th century but it had so little fanfare and presence that it surely wasn’t worth the trouble. Mathematician Alan Turing won the most improbable public vote since... you know the one. For the record, in the third most troubling plebiscite, viewers continue to support majestic reality star Gemma Collins – sorry, The GC – in
(ITV, Sunday). We clearly have a mischievous streak when it comes to important public votes.
The most pressing issue for Icons was that the show aired 19 years after the 20th century
Icons Dancing On Ice
ended. Who can remember what they were doing last Thursday, let alone in 1999? Back then, I was of course reading an Alan Turing biography and imagining what a great job Benedict Cumberbatch would do in the biopic 15 years later. But Turing didn’t really register in general public consciousness until after his pardon in 2013.
ICONS WAS completely bonkers television, a classic bottom-drawer idea dragged out in the absence of anything else. And it goes without saying that it was a waste of licence fee-payers’ money. But I do look forward to 21st Century Icons next year on BBC Two, 80 years before it’s relevant. It’s never too early to ask: Gemma Collins or Dani Dyer?
Television is truly aspirational now. Cleaners are dragging themselves up by their bootstraps and rightly so. Both ITV and BBC have commissioned stories in which cleaners transform their lives (it will be flower sellers learning the Queen’s English next).
Sheridan Smith has become an insider trader in (ITV, Thursday) and now Karl in (BBC One, Monday) realises he should have been a drama tutor rather than wielding a bog brush in the university toilets. In a rather sweet story, however, he’d done it for both love and learning.
Jimmy McGovern’s excellent daytime series again proves the strength and appeal of the single TV play. Not only does it bring on new writers, which we badly need, but it throws up the potential for new series and ideas which might stop the BBC putting Icons on again.
Cleaning Up Moving On