The Herald - The Herald Magazine
TV review Thank goodness autumn is here to add a little drama to life
ALISON ROWAT
THERE has been something missing in all our lives lately. It is not money (hopefully) and it is not love, ditto. It is drama. Make-believe. Adults hitting the dressing up box and pretending to be someone else.
What we have had instead is reality. Too much of it. Coming at us in news bulletins, in documentaries, on social media, in daily televised press conferences.
Just in time to save our sanities, autumn begins to whisper its arrival. In television land, the nights drawing in means one thing: new drama. We knew there were series hidden at the back of the wardrobe, like Christmas presents bought early. We made do, just about, with tales made under lockdown conditions. Some were dandy (Staged, with David Tennant and Michael Sheen top of the list), most were missable. But now it is time to pony up, Mr and Ms Scheduler. We need to escape somewhere, and we do not want to self-isolate on our return.
First out of the wrapper was
Now in its fourth series, this drama based on the novels by Robert Galbraith is settling into its groove.
After a quick catch up with the last series, the murder mystery was set in motion. In this case, a disturbed man broke into the office of private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott (Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger) with a tale of murder most horrid.
Given he was making little sense, and did not look as if he could pay their fee, most ‘tecs would have probably ushered him out the door. But Strike and Robin care. They are not in this game for the money. Perhaps one of them secretly wrote a bestselling book about a boy wizard and is sitting on a pile of cash.
Strike creaks at times as the stories make the transition from the page to the screen. Threadbare devices (Robin asking to use the loo, sneaking into a room and happening to put her hands on essential evidence, etc), littered the piece. It hardly mattered. No one watches Strike for the quality of its mysteries. Its allure lies in its style and sense
What’s the story?
Inside The Zoo.
Another documentary about life at The Herald?
I see what you did there. Funnily enough, no. This new BBC Scotland series goes behind the scenes at Edinburgh Zoo and its sister site, the Highland Wildlife Park, near Kingussie.
Tell me more.
Narrated by Gail Porter, Inside The Zoo charts life for the myriad residents – from majestic European grey wolves to a grumpy guineafowl – while laying bare the challenges faced by those tasked with feeding, cleaning and caring for their every need.
Is it a big job?
More than 3,000 animals. 200 staff. 365 days a year.
Point taken. Anything else?
It’s not all oohing at cute and cuddly creatures (although there is plenty of that too, don’t worry). We’re talking state-of-the-art-science and endangered species conservation – not to forget the often-unpredictable nature of the job.
They do say never work with children or animals.
Quite. Not for the lily-livered.
Will we see Hamish the polar bear?
Yes. Keep an eye peeled in future episodes.
What about pandas Tian Tian and Yang Guang?
That’s an affirmative.
When can I watch?
ALISON ROWAT
TELEVISION viewers watching television viewers watching television. It sounds like a terrible idea for a programme, the kind of monkey tennis nonsense Alan Partridge might have offered to the controller of BBC1. Auntie should have been so lucky.
Gogglebox (Channel 4,
Friday, 9pm) was instead the creation of Stephen Lambert (Wife Swap, Undercover Boss) and Tania Alexander. From its beginning on Channel 4 in 2013, the programme has won a clutch of awards, including a Bafta, with the format taken up by broadcasters around the world.
Back for its 16th series, Gogglebox shows no signs of outstaying its welcome. The secret of its success, as its makers have acknowledged, is that it is so much more than just a programme about the week’s television.
It’s a way of catching up with the news, with familiar faces
– the Malones and their dogs (and cakes) in Manchester, posh Giles and Mary in Wiltshire, the giggling Siddiquis from Derby, best pals Jenny and Lee in Hull among them – and the state of the nations in general.
To watch Gogglebox is to take the political and cultural temperature of the UK – which is just the sort of Pseuds Corner remark that would be rightly mocked by these ladies and gents of the television jury.
Its only failing so far has been the producers’ inability to find a Scots family that can stay the distance. Maybe this new series will be the one to change that.
For the most part, expect the usual cast of regulars, some of whom seem to have spent the period in lockdown losing weight and changing their hairstyles. Perhaps they are hoping to follow the example of former Goggleboxer Scarlett Moffatt and become television personalities in their own right. Now that is television eating itself.
A mention in dispatches, too, for narrator Craig Cash, who had
Andy Puddicombe, co-creator of the Mindspace app, the four half hour programmes introduce viewers to the concept of mindfulness, or “the ability to be present with a clear, calm, curious mind”.
If you think this is hippy dippy stuff for the birds, Mindful Escapes will be anything but relaxing.
To the untrained ear and eye it looks like one long clip show featuring familiar scenes from nature documentaries, but what do I know?
It did seem curious to be watching something to relax, rather than having one’s eyes closed and listening solely to a voice and music, but I suppose lava lamps and fishtanks work on the same principle.
Might be worth downloading from the iPlayer for future use. You never know when you might need some inner calm, pronto.
Eat Well for Less? (BBC1, Tuesday, 8pm) makes its return next week for a seventh series. The first family to have their shopping and cooking habits overhauled are the Macbeths from Berkshire: mum Holly, and her two sons Spencer, 16, who has cerebral palsy, and Fletcher, 11, recently diagnosed with autism.
Mum’s cooking strategy can be summed up as pierce and ping – most meals are ready made, microwave numbers – and there is a lot of snacking going on throughout the day.
Presenters Gregg Wallace and Chris Bavin take up their positions in the backroom of the supermarket to watch Holly and Fletcher shop. The usual drill is to surprise the family at the checkout, but such is the amount of biscuits and other baddies going into the trolley, Chris decides an emergency intervention is needed, via the tannoy. Fortunately, Holly sees the funny side.
Keeping the tone light but informative, and serving up advice with a sense of humour, is what Eat Well for Less does better than most. Even though it sticks rigidly to its format, including staging taste tests and swapping brand names for own labels (or as Fletcher said when he came home: “They’ve got rid of all the good stuff,”), it still comes across as fresh.
In the case of the Macbeths, the changes were easy, quick, and delicious. Fletcher, who at the start of the programme is described as a fussy eater who never has breakfast, turns out to be a dab hand in the kitchen.
Give a boy a packet of crisps and you feed him for ten minutes; teach him how to make a pasta bake and you feed him for a lifetime.
Justified (All4, from Fri)
In March 2010, a Western crime drama inspired by Elmore Leonard’s Fire in the Hole novel, began airing in the US. It was an instant hit, both with viewers and critics.
Five years later, after six series comprising of 78 episodes in total, it came to an end, leaving fans bereft. It’s never had as big a following in the UK, but it should have - perhaps making it available to stream via All4 will help lift the show’s profile.
Timothy Olyphant heads the cast as Raylan Givens, a tough deputy US Marshal dispensing his own brand of justice in the Appalachian mountains region of eastern Kentucky.
It all begins after Givens is banished to the region in which he grew up after shooting a mobster in
Miami.
Get Organised with the Home Edit (Netflix, from Wed)
Oscar-winning star Reese Witherspoon is one of the executive producers of this new series. She’s also one of the clients of its hosts, Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin, the master organisers and bestselling authors behind The Home Edit, a company that clears clutter and turns chaotic households into tidy, functional places.
Now they’re bringing their expertise to the small screen across eight episodes in which they help both a famous face and a member of the public transform their homes and - so they claim their lives.
So, if you need tips on how to stop hoarding and get stylish, this is the show to watch.
Among the celebrities set to appear are Witherspoon herself, Khloe Kardashian, Retta, Neil Patrick Harris and Jordana Brewster.
Julie and the Phantoms (Netflix, from Thu)
Award-winning director and choreographer Kenny Ortega, whose previous works include High School Musical and Descendants, is one of the creative forces behind this new series which should go down a treat with younger viewers. Madison Reyes heads the cast as high school student Julie who, a year on from her mother’s death, is struggling to rekindle her passion for music.
However, three ghosts (Charlie Gillespie, Owen Patrick Joyner and Jeremy Shada) are about to lend her a hand. These phantoms hail from 1995 and suddenly appear in her mum’s old music studio.
Their support gives Julie the strength and inspiration to begin writing songs again. When she begins singing them, her new friends suggest they should form a very unusual band together...
The Duchess (Netflix, from Fri)
Katherine Ryan’s stand-up specials have appeared on the streaming giant’s service in the past, but now it’s the turn of her eagerly awaited debut sitcom to take centre stage.
The central character that of a fashionably disruptive London-based single mother - is based on the character she adopts while on stage. At the heart of her life is Olive, her 11-year-old daughter, but there could be somebody new entering soon.
The central character is in a steady relationship with a man who wants them to take things to the next level, but all she can think about is whether or not she should have another baby with Shep, Olive’s father, despite the fact they’re estranged. Rory Keenan and Steen Raskopoulos co-star.
IT was a bank holiday on Monday. Except for listeners in Scotland, of course. Always an excuse for radio stations to give the staff the day off and round up a brace of “glorious amateurs” as Dermot O’Leary, sitting in for Zoe Ball on the Breakfast Show on Radio 2, put it.
Ken Bruce wasn’t going anywhere, but Jeremy Vine was replaced by Michelle Visage who, sadly, didn’t bother with a phone-in (might have been fun listening to all those Radio 2 listeners’ heads explode, right enough).
You also wonder how Steve Wright’s audience felt about Jo Whiley replacing his afternoon show with an extended countdown of the best-selling Britpop singles. Certainly, the stodgy diet of The Stereophonics, Kula Shaker and, shiver, Dodgy at the bottom end of the chart was nearly enough to drive me away. Of course, my own problem with Britpop (over and above the fact that so much of it wasn’t very good), is that I was already too old for it first time around. So, to be reminded that it is already 25 years ago didn’t help. As it was, the show clearly hit home with parents in their forties who were texting in to fondly remember their student days while packing up to take their own kids to university. The whole thing passed in a bubble of nostalgia and second-rate tunes (with the usual exceptions; Blur, Pulp and, yes, the odd Oasis single).
“It was a very optimistic time I miss that about it now,”
Louise Wener said at one point. We are always nostalgic for our youth. Another 10 years and we’ll be back for the landfill indie top 50.
AMERICAN HUSTLE
Film 4, Tuesday, 12.40am
DIRECTED by David O Russell, and following on from his Oscar-winning pair The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle reunites Russell with the stars of those film – Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro – for a snappy crime caper based on the socalled Abscam sting operation launched by the FBI in the late 1970s.
Using a fake sheik as a frontman and with input from a con man and his accomplice lover, it ensnared a tasty collection of US politicians and other assorted ne’er-do-wells. An interesting aside: French
New Wave director Louis Malle adapted the story as a vehicle for Dan Akroyd and John Belushi as early as 1981, for a film to be called Moon Over Miami, but Belushi’s death from a heroin overdose a year later ended the project.
Robert De Niro, a friend of Belushi’s, had visited the actor on the day of his death.
The real conman was called Mel Weinberg. Malle had renamed him Shelley Slutski but in Russell’s version he’s Irving Rosenfeld (Bale), owner of a string of dry cleaning stores in the Bronx but a man with a neat side-line in grifts and scams.
Fake art is a particular speciality.
Into Irving’s life walks Sydney Prosser (Adams), a girl from
New Mexico who has moved to New York and landed a job at Cosmopolitan.
She and Irving bond over a shared love of Duke Ellington and she becomes a willing participant in his extra-curricular activities.
Irving juggles his affair with Sydney with his home life – he’s married to Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) and has adopted her son, Danny – but things
leads the trio to a meeting with Mob enforcer Victor Tellegio (De Niro, in an uncredited cameo), right hand man to the legendary and infamous Meyer Lansky.
With his famously intense and immersive performances, Christian Bale tends to dominate scenes but Russell has assembled such a strong ensemble cast that it’s hard to say whose film this is.
Adams, as ever, is immensely watchable, as are Lawrence and Renner in the supporting roles. Unsurprisingly, the film racked up 10 Oscar nominations at the 2014 Academy Awards – surprisingly, it didn’t win any.
KOKO-DI KOKO-DA BFI Player
Streaming from Monday
Directed by newcomer Johannes Nyholm, who has a background in animation, this arthouse horror blends Groundhog Day with Don’t Look Now and The Blair Witch Project and has curio running through it from bizarre start to unsettling finish.
It opens with a Swedish family – mother Elin (Ylva Gallon), father Tobias (Leif Edlund) and seven-year-old daughter Maja (Katarina Jakobson) – enjoying a holiday on a sandy Danish island on the eve of Maja’s eighth birthday, though after an allergic reaction to the mussels in a seafood pizza Elin ends up in hospital.
Cut to three years later and Elin and Tobias are setting off on another holiday, alone this time and with a tent in the boot of their car.
What follows is a nightmarish sequences of events in which
Elin gets out of the tent to pee and is attacked and killed by a bizarre trio consisting of a man in a white suit and boater, an immensely tall woman done up like Pippi Longstocking and a bearded backwoods giant carrying a dead dog.
Tobias ends up looking down the barrel of pistol, though there the scene freezes – only to repeat the next night when the same thing happens, though with details changing every time as Tobias gradually becomes aware that time is repeating and danger lurks outside the tent.
Intercut with the action are two long scenes in which a shadow play seems to enact elements of the story.
Refreshingly odd and with some moments of dark and surreal comedy, it’s either a confusing muddle or a hallucinogenic meditation on grief and remorse, depending on your tolerance for that sort of thing.
Love Sarah (Cert 12)
Available from Monday on Amazon Prime Video/BT TV Store/iTunes/Sky Store/ TalkTalk TV Store and DVD £19.99
Ottolenghi-trained chef Sarah Curachi (Candice Brown) and best friend Isabella (Shelley Conn) are poised to open their first bakery in London’s fashionable Notting Hill.
Alas, Sarah is killed in a cycling accident en route to collecting the keys for the shop and a heartbroken Isabella discovers she cannot legally terminate the commercial lease.
Sarah’s daughter, 19-yearold aspiring dancer Clarissa, turns her back on ballet to realise her mother’s dream with financial backing from her estranged grandmother, one-time circus star Mimi (Celia Imrie).
United in grief, the women create a warm and inviting eaterie, serving mouthwatering confections created by Sarah’s Michelinstarred ex-boyfriend
Mathew. Loyalties are tested as the new business competes against nearby bakeries for custom and Mimi takes temporary leave from the till to fan flames of romance with eccentric inventor Felix (Bill Paterson).
Shot on location in London, Love Sarah is a heartfelt drama about grief and female empowerment, made to a well-thumbed recipe in scriptwriter Jake Brunger’s cookbook.
Misbehaviour (Cert 12)
Working mother Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley) answers the call of an outspoken wing of the Women’s Liberation Movement whose rabblerousing members include Jane (Lily Newmark), Jo (Jessie Buckley), Sarah (Ruby Bentall) and Sue (Alexa Davies).
They plan a high-profile protest outside the 1970 Miss World beauty pageant organised by Eric Morley
Doctors and nurses at Gaffney Chicago Medical Centre come under renewed pressure in the fifth series of the fast-paced drama, which is a companion to Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D. and occasionally criss-crosses storylines with these two shows.
In the final episode of series four, supervising attending physician Dr Will Halstead and colleague Dr Natalie Manning were involved in a car crash.
Natalie’s head injuries could have serious repercussions for her future in emergency paediatrics.
Meanwhile, an outbreak of a deadly flesh-eating bacteria sends a tidal wave of panic through Chicago. The five-disc DVD box set includes all 20 episodes.