The weekend on television Michael Hogan The highs and traumatic lows of being a Spice Girl
There was a strange sense of déjà vu about Piers Morgan’s Life Stories (ITV, Saturday). Even though this was the first airing of his conversation with Mel B, aka Melanie “Scary Spice” Brown, its headline revelation was revealed two months ago.
Brown’s provocative confession – “a Spice bombshell” as Morgan called it, ever the tabloid editor – that she’d slept with Geri “Ginger Spice” Horner née Halliwell (to give her her full title) during the Spice Girls’ Nineties heyday was widely reported when this interview was filmed.
Having been gleefully picked over by the press already, would the programme itself prove an anticlimax? Partly. Instead what emerged was a portrait of a vulnerable but remarkably resilient force of nature.
Anyone hoping for insights into the pop industry would have come away disappointed. This hour-long profile was strictly about Brown’s tumultuous private life. Morgan did his usual prodding and probing in a bid to extract juicy titbits and make his subject blub but he was largely redundant. The outspoken Brown was an open book and pretty much interviewed herself.
In fact, a few of Morgan’s interjections rather ruined her flow. As Brown recalled the first of her two suicide bids, he butted in with, ”Let’s go to the next VT”, which was incongruously about her fashion sense. When he tried to wheedle out more detail about sex with her bandmate, Brown scoffed “Stop it, you pervert” and moved swiftly on.
She was a veritable soundbite machine. Horner was branded “bats--- crazy with great boobs”, while Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham was “a bit of a b----”. Brown spoke with searing honesty about the prejudice she faced as a mixed-race child in Leeds. She admitted that Hollywood comic Eddie Murphy, who fathered the second of her three children, was the love of her life and always would be.
Rawest of all, was her discussion about her traumatic 10-year marriage to the film producer Stephen Belafonte. Tears flowed as she recalled promising her father on his deathbed: “I’m going to divorce this monster.” Brown even showed how she’d symbolically cut Belafonte out of her life with the removal of a piece of skin where his name was tattooed. She has since become an ambassador for victims of coercive control and domestic abuse.
Beneath the bravado, Brown shone through as a complex, admirable character. As her mother Andrea concluded: “For somebody that famous, the highs are unusually high – but then the lows are going to be lower.” It was an apt summation of her daughter’s chequered life. Mothers always know best.
Suranne Jones must have got through several pairs of period boots while filming (BBC One, Sunday). As pioneering Victorian polymath Anne Lister, Jones spent much of her screen time striding purposefully around the handsome Halifax countryside. Lister was a woman on a mission and it was impossible not to get swept along.
The second episode saw Lister embark on a playful but risky courtship of shy heiress Miss Walker (Sophie Rundle), while continuing her efforts to renovate shabby Shibden Hall and crusading for justice on several fronts. This brought her into conflict with the decidedly dodgy local coal mining magnates.
Written and directed by Sally Wainwright, this thrilling rush of a costume drama reminded me of Russell T Davies’s underrated 2005 series Casanova, as Lister ran rings around the men and seduced the women. This has been a passion project for Wainwright and it showed. The production teemed with loving details and her exuberant script sparkled.
“I’m fettling t’cart!” shouted a scruffy urchin, while his brother looked up at Lister and enquired: “Are you a man?”
“Well that’s a… question,” she replied. “I’m a lady. A woman. A ladywoman.”
With its mould-breaking material, charismatic heroine and impish looks-to-camera, Gentleman Jack is like Ye Olde Fleabag. The BBC have already commissioned a second series and I don’t blame them. With 4million words’ worth of Lister’s coded diaries to dramatise, there’s no shortage of material.
Piers Morgan’s Life Stories Gentleman Jack
BBC TWO, 9.00PM
Those who believe that factionalism and division in Conservative ranks is a symptom solely of our Brexit-dominated times might well think again after watching the second episode of Steve Condie’s fine five-part portrait of Margaret Thatcher. It begins with the Conservatives’ general election victory in May 1979 and Thatcher’s first days as prime minster, the selection of her Cabinet and the setting in train of her radical programme to reform the British economy.
As those involved recall, the winds of change were in the air and the next two years were among the busiest and most turbulent of Thatcher’s career, with resistance from her Cabinet evident early on and, due to the impact of her monetarist economic policies, deep distrust more widely, too. One internal poll, taken around the time of the 1981 Budget, shows an astonishing 68 per cent dissatisfaction rating with her leadership among Conservative party members. Galloping inflation, sky-high interest Game of Thrones: The Last Watch
SKY ATLANTIC, 2.00AM/9.00PM
If you’re suffering Game of Thrones withdrawal, this HBO documentary about the making of the final series should fill the gap. It promises to “reveal the tears and triumphs” involved in creating Westeros in the “studios, fields and car parks of Northern Ireland”. GO Confessions of a Serial Killer rates, mushrooming unemployment, riots in the streets – was it all too great a price to pay? looks at the claims made by convicted killer Samuel Little that he didn’t only commit the three murders for which he’s currently being held in a Californian prison, but a staggering further 93 across nine US states. GO