Bake Off, warm and welcoming as ever
WHAT does the nation need now? Yes, a vaccine, but more than seven million of us also desperately needed a new
The Great British Bake Off
series of
( Channel 4, Tuesday).
Little Britain star Matt Lucas arrived oven-ready with wit, warmth and a decent parody of a prime minister who had just made everyone’s dinner turn with this gem – “The iron laws of geometrical progression are shouting at us from the graphs”.
Thankfully, the “iron laws” of Bake Off were also in place: ridiculously ambitious showstoppers, collapsing bakes and a contestant using a microwave to save an under-cooked sponge. Is that the new microwave spin-off – The Great British Ready Meal? And the cherry on the top? David Attenborough in cake form. A rise, Sir David.
Temperatures were climbing too in David Nicholls’s adaptation of his own novel, ( BBC One, Sunday). In fact, it was just what every middleaged husband needs right now. A wake-up call in which your wife of many decades rolls over and says to you, “I want change”. And she’s not talking about your energy supplier. Oh no. Welcome to the first compelling episode of four hours of tragi-comic marriage break-up, set to lovely music and scenery across the most glamorous destinations in Europe. If you’re going to split-up, do it in style and on a big budget.
Tom Hollander’s stunned biochem expert did what every self-respecting person would do – he escaped to the dump! To the strains of Mozart, he filled the car with useless tat, ie the garden shed contents. He drove to a place where men and women go in times of crisis to find peace and solitude – the recycling centre. He then superbly ripped up cardboard in anger (a brilliant, overlooked therapy) before sitting quietly in his car while working out the value of his house divided by two.
Their relationship definitely needed some up-cycling. Saskia Reeves’s arty wife Connie had taken to napping, which according to Hollander’s Douglas was representative of “the death of the cell”. That’s his problem in one.
While entertaining some of the time, he’s annoying most of the time. He simply needs to flip that equation. So off they went to Europe to have a holiday. His son Albie – whom he barely knows – brought back a casual girlfriend to the Paris hotel overnight and at breakfast she managed to literally fill her boots, and everything else, with the buffet. Douglas was straight on it: “The buffet is a system of mutual trust”. We shall all remember that if we ever attend a wedding again.
Us shouldn’t be as entertaining as it is. But some finely-honed performances from Reeves and Hollander make it highly
And Rose West (ITV, Monday), together for one night only, and then more of the drama Appropriate Adult about the murders of Fred West (ITV, Tuesday). This is schedule filling of the most hideous, ratings-chasing kind. We need good comedy and escapism in times like this, not showcasing in primetime the most heinous behaviour of our fellow men and women. Thankfully, we can escape to BBC
One this week... for three hours of Harold
Shipman.
watchable. Is divorce funny? From the outside looking in, as we are here, it can be utterly ridiculous. How did this couple ever get together, and stay together? She’s flaky; he’s a pedant and a control freak. But they did and it worked for a few good years. Will they stay together? They should
– he’ll probably get a decent pension from that nasty biotech company and the last thing she wants to do is work for a living. Ah, the sufferings of the middle classes.
If, for you, divorce is a little grim for Sunday night television, think on this: at least it’s not about Covid, and harks back to simpler times when going on a Grand Tour meant you could pick up nothing worse than a foreign busker. David Nicholls, we applaud you – and we’d like a happy ending please, and definitely not a fatal car accident in Italy.
I’m concerned that the fleeing audiences have completely misjudged The Singapore Grip ( ITV, Sunday). It’s actually been made by the ITV light entertainment department from the 1970s. On one hand, you have the steamy goings-on in and around the two colonial houses. With a nod to Carry On... Up The Khyber, guests and hangers-on throw themselves into the swimming pool before declaring their immediate love for each other so they can save Daddy’s dear rubber business. In a similar vein, we have a remake of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, set in the Singapore British army headquarters, with a stammerer – inappropriate for today – trying to warn of imminent Japanese invasion. The Air Vice-marshall alas has a deeper interpretation. “Trouble with the Japanese,” he says, “is that they eat too much. It plays havoc with their thyroid.” Excellent: let’s close all sushi bars once they’ve invaded.
Ghosts ( BBC One, Monday) is actually a deliberate comedy, and is back for another well-earned series. It’s even been promoted to a family slot of 8.30pm. There’s some argument over whether this team is superior to Monty Python. I can end that now – yes, they are. I hope that settles this, and I won’t hear anything else from upstarts in The Argument Room in favour of those has-beens.