The light and dark side of a remarkably funny woman
It’s churlish to quibble, I know, but A Life in Ten Pictures (BBC Two) is not a life in 10 pictures. This hour spent in the company of the late Carrie Fisher was first rate, because in everything she said and did Carrie Fisher was always “full of piss and vinegar” (as one friend so delightfully put it). But it was the moving pictures and the audio that provided the vinegar.
Previous episodes of A Life in Ten Pictures (subjects include Freddie Mercury, Tupac Shakur and Muhammad Ali) have shown that poring over 10 iconic shots or private snaps can indeed unlock their story. In the case of Carrie Fisher you just have to watch her, listen to people talk about her or best, read her novel
Postcards from the Edge.
Most viewers will, quite rightly, discount all that as Prince Persnickety splitting hairs, and if you took this first episode of a new series of A Life
in Ten Pictures simply as a biopic you would have come away as happy as a clam. To those who only know Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in
Star Wars, it will have been a quiet revelation. To those who know her as one of the first celebrities to confront publicly both her bipolar disorder and struggles with addiction, it will have been a salve.
Fisher, photo number one showed, was born into Hollywood royalty, the daughter of Singin’ in the Rain’s Debbie Reynolds and the singer Eddie Fisher. Naturally, this messed her up – her father ran off with Elizabeth Taylor and her mother took her and her little brother Todd to Las Vegas to play Von Trapps as part of the Debbie stage show. This further messed her up.
Then there was the move to New York, the immersion in the Saturday Night Live comedy/drug culture, youthful dabbling in the club/drug scene and then sudden fame with Star Wars. None of these, we now know, are ideal foundations for emotional stability. All of them together, we now know, created Carrie Fisher, a lovely woman with a withering sense of humour founded on a deep-seated belief that the world was insane.
Charting her path from the highs to the lows and back to reprising Princess Leia in 2015 in The Force Awakens, the year before she died, aged 60, makes for a pleasing redemption arc. It is also one that Fisher would have scoffed at as pietistic phooey. The programme made this amply clear. The only shame is that she isn’t here to offer up her own photo from her collection. I bet it would have been previously unseen, hugely unflattering and screamingly funny. Benji Wilson
It’s unclear what possessed Paramount to reboot the 30-yearold Playstation video game Twisted (Paramount+) as a riotous action comedy. But the real surprise is that this Mad Max-style tale of postapocalyptic road warriors should so successfully make the jump from pixels to prestige dramedy.
Marvel’s incoming Captain America, Anthony Mackie, plays John Doe – a “Milkman” in an ecologically devastated United States who drives from city to city delivering essential supplies. He is hired by the mayor of the fortress-like New San Francisco to retrieve a package from Chicago. The mayor is played by Neve Campbell
(Scream), the only cast member who seems self-conscious about starring in a hokey video-game adaptation. Everyone else buys into it. That includes Mackie, having fun as a disaster-prone Mad Max, and comedian Will Arnett, voicing a homicidal clown named Sweet Tooth.
Twisted Metal is by the producers of
Deadpool and holds true to its pixelated predecessor’s manic qualities: at one point Sweet Tooth goes on a spree with a chainsaw. Limbs are lopped, blood gushes – the entire gory tableau played for laughs. Sensitive viewers may not see the funny side.
There’s a serviceable human interest drama, too. Early on, Doe takes up with Quiet (Brooklyn Nine-nine’s Stephanie Beatriz), an on-the-run urchin pursued by the vengeful Agent Stone (Thomas Haden Church). Mackie and Beatriz have a matey chemistry – their characters’ cautious friendship gives the series its emotional core.
Twisted Metal comes to the UK nearly a year after its debut in the US, where it earned the Peacock streaming service some of its highest ratings ever. It was quickly renewed for a second season, its success in large part due to a cheerful refusal to take itself seriously.
Its popularity also raises the exciting prospect of other quasi-forgotten video games returning as high-end TV. What next? A BBC reboot of Jet Set Willy starring Benedict Cumberbatch? If Twisted Metal can ride high three decades after its game debut, surely anything is possible.
A Life in Ten Pictures ★★★★ Twisted Metal ★★★★