The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
WHY IS COVID KILLING PEOPLE OF COLOUR?
BBC Two, 9pm & 9.45pm
BBC One, 9pm
More often seen fronting British documentaries than starring in British dramas these days, Homeland actor David Harewood follows up his excellent films on discrimination in education and politics (Will Britain Ever Have a Black Prime Minister?) and the stigma of mental illness (Psychosis and Me) with an equally thoughtful examination of structural racism in healthcare and beyond. His investigation, underpinned by research from Dr Guddi Singh, is rooted in a mountain of statistics highlighting the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on ethnic minorities. Before long, however, it spirals out to examine the unarguable connections between underlying health conditions and deprivation, and the circumstances that can make minority communities more vulnerable to the virus.
Harewood’s climactic showdown with
Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch simmers with anger yet proves frustrating on several different levels. Even so, his enquiries raise so many important questions in so many different areas that the results deserve to be seen, chewed over and argued about at the highest levels. Gabriel Tate
Ridley Scott knows more than most about how to get the biggest and best scares from a scenario that pits a small group of humans, trapped in an alien landscape, against a savage, largely unseen monster – and his spirit runs through this chilling new drama series made by his Scott Free production company for AMC in America.
Loosely based on the story of a “lost” expedition of the 1840s, it follows the icy tribulations of two Royal Navy ships, the Erebus and the Terror, on a doomed attempt to discover the fabled Northwest Passage through the Arctic, led by the Victorian explorer
Sir John Franklin (Ciarán Hinds). A thumping pair of opening episodes lays the groundwork skilfully – the hubris, the fatal errors of judgment, the below-decks fears and rivalries, the rising tensions between the blowhard Commander James Fitzjames (Tobias Menzies) of the Erebus and the more experienced, capable and world-weary Captain Francis Crozier (Jared Harris) of the Terror. As a result, a terrific head of suspense builds up even before the horror begins, when eerie occurrences suggest something remorseless and unworldly is behind the ships’s mounting travails. Gerard O’Donovan
This latest edition of Life Stories promises to be an explosive one – and not just because the outspoken Rupert Everett once called Morgan “hung like budgie” (no one inquired as to how he knew). Still, such criticism will be like water off the supremely self-confident Morgan’s slippery back and this should be an hour of no-holds-barred gossip and tantalising titbits.
ITV, unsurprisingly, is keeping the whole thing tightly under wraps but anyone who has read Everett’s louche diaries will know what to expect: the repressed Home Counties background, the mother he adored, the rigid Catholic boarding school and the subsequent rush to the bright lights of the Seventies and Eighties gay scene, an era about which he now feels a strong strain of melancholy. There were films too, mostly as villains in period pieces or comedy sidekicks in US romcoms, but he was wonderful in spy drama Another Country, tapping expertly into what it means to lead a double life and, most recently, as his hero Oscar Wilde in 2018’s labour of love The Happy Prince. An old trouper, he is sure to keep the conversation ticking along nicely while throwing Morgan the occasional new bone to chew on. Whatever else, it certainly won’t be dull. Sarah Hughes