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TV preview All the President’s tweets take to the air again
interview Miriam Margolyes. Far from being an “express” service as advertised, the train stopped for everyone and everything. At one point it came to a halt in 1956. So I was late, horribly late. Having heard MM was a no nonsense type I was fully prepared to receive a telling off.
She could not have been nicer, calming me with a Coke and a packet of crisps while I took several hours to get my breath back (I ran from Waverley). Sweetheart she was, and a great interviewee.
All that was before she became
thankfully his mother Rachel is more sympathetic to his plight.
Late one night after a shift at the clinic, Rich returns home, unaware he is being followed by larcenous brothers Jamie and Matthias. They break into the house and hold the family hostage to compel Rich to perform emergency surgery on a bullet wound.
Survive The Night is a lumbering home invasion thriller, which reunites director Matt Eskandari with leading man Bruce Willis following last year’s equally ho-hum Trauma Center.
The Salisbury Poisonings (Cert 15)
What’s it called?
Real Dictators
What’s it about?
Dictators. Real ones, such as Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Kim Jong-il, son of North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung and father of its current leader, Kim Jong-un. The podcast only launched in April and with three episodes dedicated to each subject it’s only the last two in that list who have been covered so far. But the podcast’s discursive nature is one of its strengths: working through the early life of, say,
Kim Jong-il provides a deeper understanding of the social and political context. Did you know, that he was born in Soviet Russia during the Second World War but spent the rest of his life pretending he wasn’t? Or that in 1907 Josef Stalin held up a stagecoach in a heist in which 50 people died, and escaped with the equivalent of tens of millions of roubles in today’s money?
Who’s in it?
The narrator is Paul McGann. Yes, he of Withnail And I fame. Adding their expert and wellresearched analysis is a roster of historians and journalists.
What’s so good about it?
It goes into its subjects in real depth, helped out by the expertise of the interviewees, and uses sound effects to try to put you right in the centre of the events it’s narrating.
Fun fact …
Kim Jong-il was the world’s largest single paying customer for Hennessy cognac.
Where can I find it?
The podcast is made by Noiser and available free on iTunes.
For fans of …
Dictators, BBC Four history
BARRY DIDCOCK
I AM NOT A WITCH
Film 4, Tuesday, 11.40pm
BORN in Zambia, raised in Wales and educated at boarding school in England, Rungano Nyoni deploys oodles of film school nous as she puts her African heritage under the spotlight in this breathtakingly original film, which screened in the Directors’ Fortnight strand of the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and went on to win its young director a BAFTA the following year.
Surreal and satirical are the words most often applied – both are appropriate – and Nyoni brings a touch of magical realism to proceedings as well. At times you could be watching something by Federico Fellini or rumbustious Serbian director Emir Kusturica, though in terms of gender politics Nyoni digs considerably deeper than either of those men.
Our heroine is a nameless young girl, played by newcomer Maggie Mulubwa, who appears one day in a village in rural Zambia and, after a series of strange occurrences there, is dragged to the local police station and accused of being a witch by the locals.
Such events aren’t uncommon in sub-Saharan Africa, which is what gives I Am Not A Witch its weight, but taking that reality and stretching it Nyoni fashions the satirical premise which drives her film: the girl is brought to the attention of Mr Banda (Henry BJ Phiri), a corpulent, pompous, self-serving government minister with responsibility for “traditional beliefs”, who uses a medicine man and a chicken to determine that she really is a witch and then takes her to an officially-sanctioned witch camp where a group of (mostly) elderly women are attached to enormous spindles by ribbons fixed to their backs.
This is supposedly to stop them flying away. The women give the girl the name Shula.