Grenfell: getting to the heart of a human tragedy
‘Grenfell Tower could have been Grenfell Street, it’s no different to any other road in London,” said the police officer leading the investigation into the west London tower block fire that killed 72 people. Ben Anthony’s featurelength documentary Grenfell (BBC One) carefully built an image of the people who lived in and around the 24-storey block that became an inferno in the early hours of 14 June last year, as well as those who rushed to help, provided food or shelter, or searched for answers in the aftermath.
Pain poured from the screen. Nabil Choucair, whose mother, sister, brother-in-law and their three children were on the 22nd floor, spoke after visiting all the hospitals where the rescued had been taken. Later, he talked of his agonising wait for confirmation that his family were among the dead. “[The names] kept coming one by one… it just felt like a knife going through you each time.”
Others were dealing with the trauma of being in the tower that night. “That feeling of running down the stairs, that’s the killer for me,” said Christos Fairbairn, who escaped from the 15th floor. You could see his gaze move inwards – away from the
tiny room he was staying in, with its absence of possessions – back towards the horror, “That’s the killer,” he repeated.
Ben Anthony, whose documentary about the 2005 London bombings, 7/7: One Day in London, won a clean sweep of Bafta, Grierson and Royal Television Society Awards, constructed the film from interviews with those affected, plus news and video footage. This gave the documentary its emotional force. There was no voice-over.
There was, however, a level of editorialising, which felt political. Anthony relied heavily on commentary from one Labour councillor. There was less on the London Fire Brigade’s controversial advice to “stay in your flat”, which has come under scrutiny in the opening weeks of the public inquiry.
This was not an interrogation of the complex reasons why so many died. Yet as a document that told the suffering of this community, and the ways in which people of different faiths and backgrounds came together to comfort and support one another, it was profoundly moving. Chris Harvey
‘Every morning I wake up and the first thing I think of is killing myself.” Flowers (Channel 4), a rustic comedy about a severely
depressed children’s writer and his family’s inherent unhappiness, was a gloriously melancholy curio when it aired in 2016. Part of the new wave of “sadcoms” mining mental health for laughs – see also Netflix’s animated series Bojack Horseman – it was not only very funny, marrying pitch-black humour to a surreal yet intensely English sensibility, it was also an affecting study of despair. Phantom Thread director Paul Thomas Anderson called it “perfect”.
Yet, despite its brilliance, viewing figures were unremarkable. Props to Channel 4, then, for commissioning a second series – a decision completely validated by the strength of last night’s double-bill. If anything, writer/ director/star Will Sharpe has conjured something weirder and more colourful this time around, the autumnal gloom of the first series replaced by a summery haze. There’s just as much pathos, too, with Sharpe shifting the focus from Maurice (Julian Barratt) – seemingly on the mend thanks to medication – to daughter Amy’s (Sophia Di Martino) bipolar disorder.
In the opening episodes, having survived being struck by lightning two years ago, artist-musician Amy was now juggling a new relationship with a vicar and ex-junkie (Harriet Walter), her band, and a sudden obsession with the Flowers family’s troubled ancestry. Elsewhere, her mother Deborah (Olivia Colman) was preparing to release her self-help book about coping with Maurice’s depression.
The script – as in Sharpe’s sepulchral 2011 film Black Pond – was deliciously capricious, zigging when you were certain it would zag. And impressive though the dialogue is, nothing would work if the cast weren’t flat-out tremendous, with Sharpe – himself diagnosed with bipolar type two – teasing a particularly tender performance out of Di Martino. The interplay between Barratt and Colman, meanwhile, remains spot on, all hilariously convoluted metaphors and awkward glances. Airing every night this week, Flowers really is quite unlike anything else on TV. Rejoice as it blooms once again. Patrick Smith