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Alison Rowat’s TV week
FINGERS on buzzers, please. What kind of programme is proving a retirement haven for newsreaders? Five points off if you said that Channel 4 affair where contestants show bits of their naked bodies to get a date. Although I swear I saw Huw Edwards’ tummy in the line-up the other night.
The correct answer is quiz shows. First Jeremy Paxman took his sneer to University Challenge, now the grand old man of Channel 4 News is fronting Jon Snow’s Very Hard Questions
(More 4). It can only be a matter of time before Andrew Neil turns up on Catchphrase and makes all the contestants cry (“Come on Barbara from Essex, say what you see! The public have a right to know what you see!”).
Very Hard Questions, which some creative type handily reduced to VHQ, was as good as its word. “According to the Oxford Dictionary of Nursing,” began the first question, “the name of which county comes before neck in the term for endemic goitre that was once common there due to lack of iodine in the soil and water?”
Between very boring questions, and the number of clues each team took before giving their answer, it was a long hour, not helped by Snow’s lame attempts at jocularity. Give it up Jon
Snow, you are no Victoria Coren.
Also trying a job swap last week was David Baddiel, the
comedian and writer who turned documentary maker
in Confronting Holocaust
Denial (BBC2, Monday). It was a fascinating look at how the sickening phenomenon persists and is even growing.
Baddiel felt he should talk to a denier, despite the advice of another of his interviewees who said it would only give publicity to their repulsive views. After much agonising, Baddiel set up the meeting. Had he been Louis Theroux, he acknowledged, he would be able to stay calm, smile, observe, and draw the person out. “To some extent I just want to punch this bloke in the face,” said Baddiel. He duly met the cretin and remained polite while the most disgusting tosh was spouted. Baddiel’s initial instinct was right: he should have just punched the idiot.
The last word went to a survivor, Rachel. “Can I give you a hug?” asked Baddiel after she had shared a tiny fragment of her experiences at Auschwitz. “Yes please,” she said. It was the perfect note on which to close.
Homeland (Channel 4, Sunday) was back for its eighth
and final series. It has been nine years since CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) began striding round in boxy trouser suits, going on and off her meds, getting into trouble and out of it again. Despite being treated appallingly by her paymasters
– at the end of the last series they left her to rot in a Russian jail – she keeps coming back for more. This time, father figure Saul (Mandy Patinkin), the only person on Earth who walks quicker than Carrie, asked her to go back to Afghanistan to save peace talks.
While she was watching out for Saul, others in the agency were keeping an eye on her. All that time in Russia: is it possible she was turned? It was a neat loop back to the first series when POW Nicholas Brody returned a hero. Or was he?
There’s life in the old Homeland yet, but will it finally end happily for Carrie? Mmm.
David Schwimmer, like the rest of the cast of Friends, will earn a reported $3 million for appearing in a reunion special. With that, plus the repeat fees, one assumes “Ross” is not scrabbling down the back of the sofa for money to feed the cat.
He has taken his time to decide what to do next, and one episode in,
looks like a smart move. Schwimmer plays Jerry, a National Security Agency seconded from the States to GCHQ in Cheltenham. Jerry thinks he is James Bond, but he is really an American version of Johnny English.
Intelligence is a little bit The Office and a teensy part Airplane in its gag rate. Nick Mohammed, who also stars, has obvious comedy chops. The odd cliched character aside (mad cat lady, really, that’s still a thing?), this has the makings of a hit.
Like Homeland,
is taking its final bow. The two could not be more different, with one laugh out loud funny and the other deadly serious. It does not take the VHQ mob to work out which is which.
The mockumentary is a tired format, but this tale of Cotswold cousins has made it fresh again. The first episode dealt with the loss of a pal, a new job, and a betrayal, all wonderfully woven together.
Kurtan and Kerry (writercreators Charlie and Daisy
May Cooper) fell out, with Kurtan accusing his relative of only having loyalty to herself, Staffies, and the TV channel Dave. “Which in my opinion is a TV channel made by knuckledraggers for knuckledraggers.”
How rude. But true.