The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
THE SECRETS SHE KEEPS
Monday and Tuesday, BBC1, 9pm
Agatha is a lonely supermarket employee who is about to give birth. She becomes obsessed with Meghan, a pregnant woman with a perfect upper middle-class lifestyle. Inevitably, Meghan’s world isn’t as peachy as it seems. This risible Australian psychological thriller – Peyton Place with delusions of grandeur – thinks it’s blowing minds with signposted twists etched in flaming neon letters. Laura Carmichael (Lady Edith from Downtown Abbey) almost transcends her surroundings with a fairly sensitive performance, but there’s no getting around the fact that Agatha embodies the offensive stereotype of people with mental health issues as figures to be pitied and feared. It’s 2020, we’re supposed to be better than this.
BEING BEETHOVEN
Monday, BBC4, 9pm
Ludwig Van Beethoven was a child prodigy, a natural born genius who never had the chance to be anything else. That’s the poignant theme of the first instalment in this vivid, probing, elegant series, which strips away the layers of myth to uncover the man underneath. An estimable symphony of classical musicians and musicologists rake over Beethoven’s traumatic childhood. One of them, with affection, describes him as “a tiny, friendless, grubby kid who was somehow always in a world of his own all the time”. Fans of that other notable pop genius, Brian Wilson, will recognise the contours of this story: Beethoven’s dad was an aggressive alcoholic and frustrated musician. Peter Capaldi narrates passages from the great man’s jottings.
THERE SHE GOES
Thursday, BBC2, 9.30pm
The daughter of writers Shaun Pye and Sarah Crawford was born with an extremely rare, severe and undiagnosed learning disability. They’ve funnelled their experience into this admirably honest and unsentimental comedydrama, which first appeared on BBC4 in 2018. Series two picks up the story 18 months later. As before, occasional flashbacks place their situation in ever-changing context. David Tennant and Jessica Hynes are low-key and convincing as the parents of a child whose very existence makes wellmeaning people uncomfortable. But There She Goes gains its strength from a determined refusal to preach or judge. Life isn’t etched in black and white, it’s strange, sad, difficult and funny. Profound, I know.