A superb therapy comedy to keep you on the couch
Adecade ago, not so long after her stint as the daffy Phoebe in Friends came to an end, Lisa Kudrow produced and starred in a comedy called Web Therapy. It featured a therapist proffering short-sharp sessions online. It lured stars as mega as Meryl Streep until, after four seasons, it was cancelled in 2015. But it has now been franchised out to the UK in the shape of Hang Ups (Channel 4) starring Stephen Mangan as Richard Pitt, whose name appears to be no accident.
As with other funny screen shrinks, Richard’s own life could do with a bit of emotional decluttering: he has two stroppy teenagers to deal with plus their posse of hangers-on, and an ogre for a father (Charles Dance), while midlife sex with his tolerant partner (Katherine Parkinson) is a grim mechanical farrago.
As we saw in the opening episode, day one of his new home-based business venture didn’t go any better: his own intensely serious shrink (Richard E Grant) counselled cupping his testicles as a method of selfsoothing, his website designer (Karl Theobald, who was so delightful opposite Mangan in Green Wing) was a needy wreck, while a shady creditor called Neil (Steve Oram) was graphically threatening violence until he accepted the offer of therapy in kind.
And then there were the clients. Sarah Hadland (best known for her role as best friend Stevie in Miranda) as the pick of this opener, a highly strung lady-who-lunches whose loathing for her husband’s cats somehow linked back to a traumatic shower-room incident she had endured in puberty. The writing and the performing were the stuff of high-precision gelignite.
Mangan is never better than when teetering optimistically on the edge of chaos, and if he seems particularly at home here, that’s because he co-wrote the script with his brother-in-law Robert Delamere, who directs at breakneck pace, with fast and furious edits and much inventive use of the videocall cam.
The experience of watching it is many country miles away from the slowburn rhythms of actual psychotherapy. I should imagine that practitioners (such as the one with whom I cohabit) will roll eyeballs at its flagrant liberty-taking. But taken with a pinch of salt, Hang Ups is a ribald skewering of the talking cure that’s almost too much of a tasty treat.
Motorways are a source of necessary tedium, are they not? Mile upon monotonous mile of tarmac, along which we travel at a dispiriting national average of 43 mph. Be that as it may, our oldest six-lane freeway is all set to be 60 years old some time next year. To mark the occasion, and to make sure it got there in time, M1: The Road That Made Britain (Channel 5) set off slightly more than a year in advance.
It turns out that motorway history is not a wildly exciting corner of the televisual archive. One Ernest Maples, the transport secretary who later fled to Monaco before he could be done for tax fraud, declared the whole project open in black and white. The thing was built in 18 months. They knocked up a bridge every three days. Nowadays a crew would need that just to lay out a stretch of cones. Early on, drivers had roadside picnics, while others rejoiced in the lack of a speed limit, enabling two racers to get up to 180 mph. Good luck finding an open stretch to do that now.
The M1’s history encompasses the British Midland plane crash in 1989 and the funeral cortege of Princess Diana in 1997. There didn’t seem to be much to say about either. There were plenty of bamboozling stats. Who knew that every hour the M1 is closed costs the economy around a million quid? (And which clever-clogs worked that out?) The most eye-opening fact was that the AA used to warn of obstructions up ahead by lighting rags and throwing them across the road. Road safety meets the Molotov cocktail.
It would have been nice to hear more about the compulsory purchase of all that farmland and how much it cost (one great uncle of mine did quite nicely when the road ploughed through his fields). Best of all, meanwhile, was a fun little section on the new motorway signs, a design classic that is so irreplaceably good it’s still in use. Who could have guessed that, for the conveyance of information, calming lower-case beats the screech of capital letters.
Hang Ups ★★★★★
M1: The Road That Made Britain ★★★