The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Alison Rowat’s TV review
ALISON ROWAT
IT has been a funny old year everywhere (let no one say this column doesn’t do breaking news) and television has been caught in the chaos, nowhere more so than at ITV. The channel ran out of dramas pretty quickly, forcing it to rely on clip shows and repeats with the odd original offering, filmed under lockdown. Week after week would pass with little worth watching. The cupboard was bare, the field left clear for the BBC.
But what do you know, in the television equivalent of mum going to Iceland, the schedulers popped out to the shops and came back with the outstanding
A portrait of the Scots serial killer Dennis Nilsen, Des was the sort of mainstream, intelligent drama the channel does so well when it has a mind to. Think Unforgotten, Flesh and Blood, Broadchurch. Only in this case the drama was based on the only too real murders, at least 15 of them, that took place in London between the late 1970s and 1983.
It was clear from the casting that we were travelling on a first class ticket: David Tennant as Nilsen, Daniel Mays as the detective in charge of the case, and Jason
Watkins as Brian Masters, whose book, Killing for Company, was the main source for the piece.
The tale began with Nilsen’s arrest and took it from there. There were no recreations of the crimes, no gruesome shots of boiled heads, and the drama was all the more powerful for it. This was an examination of evil at one remove, a look at how Nilsen’s actions affected others, including the vulnerable, isolated victims and their families. Nilsen almost deserved to be pushed to one side, and he might have been had Tennant not been so superb in the role. Mimicking those flat, Fraserburgh tones, Tennant showed what an arrogant, manipulative, narcissistic creature Nilsen was. Nothing special. Nothing, really.
The late Nilsen, looking up from wherever he is, would have hated it. I can think of no higher recommendation.
If Des showed “the other side” back at its popular best,
soon wiped a few thousand Brownie
What’s the story?
Christmas viewing.
Hold your horses. We’ve not had Hallowe’en yet. Or Bonfire Night. It is barely even autumn.
Tell that to the folks at Sony Movies Christmas.
Pardon?
The 24/7 festive film channel returns to the airwaves on Thursday – exactly three months until Christmas Eve.
You are winding me up.
I promise, I’m not. According to the announcement from Sony: “You can expect a full-day schedule of Yuletide delights to keep you company while you decorate the house, wrap some presents or kick back with some mince pies.”
Mince pies, decorations and wrapping presents in September?
That’s the spirit. All while watching jauntily titled movies such as A Beauty and the Beast Christmas, Marrying Father Christmas, and The Christmas Cabin.
Other film titles due to air over the coming weeks include A Christmas Eve Miracle, Christmas Cruise, Lucky Christmas, The Christmas Contract, and Magic Stocking. There will also be themed weekends.
Themed weekends?
Christmas Comedies, Naughty versus Nice, Wicked Christmas, Singing for Christmas. That kind of thing.
Bah humbug!
Ho ho ho! Someone is already channelling their inner Grinch/ Scrooge. I’ll tell Santa.
When can watch?
All day, every day on Freeview 50, Sky 319, Virgin 424 and Freesat 303.
SUSAN SWARBRICK
ALISON ROWAT
HERE’S one for you:
It sounds like the title for a skit along the lines of Heroin Galore!, the Fast Show’s take on the Ealing classic, but straight up, as the presenter himself would say, it’s a proper documentary wiff sit dahn interviews an awl that malarkey.
(As anyone familiar with his oeuvre will know, Mr Dyer, currently a resident of Walford Square in EastEnders, could never be accused of skimping on the Cockney front.)
When he was a 22-year-old actor, Dyer auditioned for and became something of a protege of Harold Pinter, giant of modern theatre and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. All true, and set out here in fine style by Dyer and writer-director Ian Denyer.
As Dyer admits, he never really knew what made the playwright and actor tick. His aim here is to find out why Pinter should have taken a shine to him, and to discover what his plays, several of which Dyer has appeared in (another revelation) are all about. “Or is it just me who ain’t got a clue?” he says candidly of Celebration, The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter and their ilk.
Dyer can overdo it as the wide boy who hasn’t the proverbial Scooby. His first television role was as a teenage tearaway in Prime Suspect in 1993, and he has pretty much been in work since. He knows the business and he is no daft laddie, as he shows here in interviews with directors or fellow actors including Kenneth Cranham (another Pinter favourite).
In tracing Pinter’s life and times, Dyer finds some similarities with his own upbringing in the East End of London, and as someone who wears his political heart on his sleeve (the programme wisely cannot resist revisiting the time on live TV when Dyer called former Prime Minister David Cameron a **** ).
Mostly he discovers that the
You Think You Are, when he was revealed to be a direct descendant of William the Conqueror (for what that is worth), Dyer is full of surprises, the Pinter connection among them.
Still in his early forties, he has a while to astonish us yet. Just stay away from the movies, dear, there’s a love.
In these pandemic days a lot of television arrives looking dated. That is particularly true of
A fly on the wall documentary about The Shankly Hotel in Liverpool, which specialises in “group sleepovers” for parties of anything up to 24 people, half the guests would be fined for breaching regulations if the programme was being filmed now.
As it is, most of them are merely guilty of over exuberance, while the hotel owner deserves a night in the cells for crimes against interior design. If you are looking for a hotel with jungle print wallpaper, gold painted lions, fake flamingoes hanging from the ceiling, and a giant jacuzzi in every room, you’ve come to the right place.
With hot and cold running hen nights, stag dos, weddings and baby showers, the party hotel looks like a nightmare to stay if all you are after is a quiet dinner and bed. Which makes it a great place for a doc, of course.
All the usual elements of such series are present: clashing characters on the staff, a new manager looking to make an impression (“I don’t suffer fools”), and guests with backstories, such as the firsttime grandma and the newly divorced. All human life is here, quite a bit of it three sheets to the wind. Everyone seems to enjoy themselves, though I don’t suppose the housekeeping staff are laughing when they arrive to clean up. As a former member of that noble breed I bristled on their behalf.
There may not be any pantomimes this year, but just in time with a supply of daft jokes comes the return of Ghosts (BBC1, Monday, 8.30pm). Alison and Mike (Charlotte Ritchie and Kiell Smith-Bynoe) are still trying to turn their money pit of an old house into a fancy hotel and spa. If only the resident spectres would let them.
Among the ghosts are a Stone Age man, an Army captain, a corpseless head, a disgraced
MP, and a matron called
Fanny, whose name is not at all exploited for cheap laughs. Written by Martha HoweDouglas and Laurence Rickard, Ghosts should connect with most viewers’ funny bones.
A Love Song for Latasha (Netflix, from Mon)
On March 16, 1991, 15-yearold Latasha Harlins was fatally shot in the back of the head by Soon Ja Du.
A jail term of 16 years was recommended, but the judge opted to give the convenience store owner a sentence of time served, 400 hours of community service, $500 restitution and funeral expenses; it’s believed the news of this light sentence was one of the catalysts for the 1992 LA riots.
Here, director Sophia Nahli Allison moves away from the controversial nature of Natasha’s death to tell the story of a promising life lost in tragic circumstances.
Enola Holmes
(Netflix, from Wed)
Did you know that Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes had a younger sister? No, neither did we, but we’re about to meet her in this knockabout Victorian adventure based on a book by Nancy Springer adapted by Jack Thorne, whose previous works include Kiri and His Dark Materials.
Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown plays Enola who, on the morning of her 16th birthday, discovers her mother has vanished, leaving behind various gifts but no clues to whereabouts.
Before her brothers can pack her off to a finishing school, Enola heads off into the big, wide world alone, becoming a super-sleuth in her own right while unravelling a conspiracy.
Helena Bonham Carter, Sam Claflin and Henry Cavill play the other members of the famous family.
Utopia (Amazon Prime, from Fri)
Amazon clearly has a lot of faith in this series and it certainly has the pedigree to become its latest big hit – it comes from the pen of author Gillian Flynn, whose previous works include Gone Girl and Sharp Objects, and was inspired by the Channel 4 series of the same name, which aired in 2014.
Told over the course of eight episodes, the story focuses on a group of comic book enthusiasts who meet and bond over their shared obsession with Utopia, which they initially believe to be a fictional tale.
However, before long, the main protagonists realise its page conceal a conspiracy predicting threats to the human race.
The person who holds the key to unlocking the mystery is the comic’s creator, Jessica Hyde, who lives up to her name by being almost impossible to trace. John Cusack and Rainn Wilson head the cast.
Sneakerheads (Netflix, from Fri)
Unless you’re heavily into collecting trainers, chances are you have no idea what ‘sneakerheads’ means.
For the uninitiated it’s the name used to describe those who buy and sell athletic shoes as a hobby; it originated in the US in the 1980s and is now a global phenomenon with soughtafter pairs going for ridiculous sums of money. Now Allen Maldonado, Andrew Bachelor, Jearnest Corchado, Matthew Josten, Yaani King Mondschein, Justin Lee and Aja Evans are starring in a comedy set within the sneakerhead community.
Maldonado plays Devin, a house husband who, after losing a sizeable chunk of cash in a hopeless moneymaking scheme, tries to get it back by locating ‘Zeroes’, rare trainers he can sell on for a profit. He enlists his friends to assist him in his tricky task.
FIRST things first. The title of Ruth Davidson’s new Sundaynight show on LBC is terrible, isn’t it? An Inconvenient Ruth. Seriously? There’s trying too hard and then there’s the simply trying.
Title apart, how did the Baroness’s first show go?
Pretty well for the most part. Apart from a few technical gremlins that were a result of the socially distanced way radio has to work these days, Davidson made a decent fist of this hour-long interview. Her interviewee was some bloke called Tony Blair, former Prime Minister. A Labour one at that. Yes, such things once existed, children.
In politics I firmly adhere to the “never trust a Tory” line of argument and Davidson is definitely no exception to that rule. Still, as a radio presenter, she passes muster.
For the most part here she was happy to step back and let Blair do all the heavy lifting, only weighing in now and then to push him when he waffled, or to lament the odd New Labour policy such as the introduction of university fees. “I had a full grant in my first year,” she lamented. (Not that she was suggesting it should be reversed, mind.)
It wasn’t a confrontational interview. If anything, it was all a little too polite (not something in my limited experience of the station you could say often about LBC). And that included Blair too, who passed up the chance to have a proper go at the current crop of utter incompetents in power in Westminster. That aside, Davidson may well have a future as a broadcaster. If that encourages her to give up politics, all the better.
A Broadcasting Life, Radio 4, tonight, 8pm. Sue MacGregor looks back on five decades of broadcasting as she says goodbye to Radio 4
Listen Out For:
TEDDY JAMIESON
I, TONYA
Saturday, BBC Two, 9.30pm
THINK sports black comedy and you’ll probably conjure up an image of Slap Shot (Paul Newman in the world’s most violent and unscrupulous ice hockey team) or Caddyshack (Chevy Chase and Bill Murray playing a round, literally and metaphorically).
They’re both fictitious. Although the world of real sport can be outrageously funny – check out those YouTube clips of the daftest own goals – filmmakers tackling the true-life stories real sports throw up generally see them not as material for comedy but as a form of morality tale: characters battle adversity and through strength and determination win against the odds. You know the kind of thing.
Although it centres on real people and real events, not much of that morally-uplifting stuff goes down in I, Tonya, Australian director Craig Gillespie’s sort-of biopic of figure skating bad girl Tonya Harding and the headline-grabbing scandal she became embroiled in ahead of the 1994 Winter Olympics.
If you weren’t born at the time or had your eyes somewhere other than the US figure skating scene – there was also the small matter of a World Cup that year, at which Ireland famously beat Italy – Harding was implicated in an attack on figure skating rival Nancy Kerrigan. It was undertaken by two goons, apparently at the behest of Harding’s ex-husband and her former bodyguard.
Using an almost mockumentary style and regularly breaking the fourth wall, Gillespie’s film tells the story of Harding’s childhood, her early career as a figure skater, the rivalry with Kerrigan, the events leading up to the attack and the aftermath.
Gillespie’s fellow Australian Margot Robbie plays Harding
An engrossing study of class, abuse, media over-exposure and, of course, figure skating. Funny, too – and pleasingly grubby. Harding, for the record, went on to have a career as a professional boxer and has appeared on Dancing With The Stars.
MEMORIES OF MURDER Curzon Home Cinema
Now streaming
RE-ISSUED in large part to cash in on director Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar success (with Best Picture winner Parasite) and his on-going cult appeal (see 2013 film
Snowpiercer, now a Netflix spinoff series, and 2017 Cannes pleaser Okja), this film follows the South Korean’s 2000 debut and tells the story of a trio of detectives trying to catch a serial killer in rural Gyeonggi Province. It’s based on the real-life crimes of Lee Choon-jae, South Korea’s first serial killer, though at the time the film was released in 2003 the murders he committed were still unsolved.
It wasn’t until 2019 when he was arrested for another crime that he confessed to the killings and the cold case was solved.
The year is 1986. The victims are all young women, each one has also been raped and the murders always take place during rainstorms.
Other significant details become clear as the investigation progresses, though few of them are turned up by hapless local cop Park Doo-man (Parasite’s Song Kang-ho).
If there’s a wrong tree within 10 miles he’ll be there barking up it, often in the company of brutal partner Cho Yon-koo
(Kim Roi-ha) whose method of persuading suspects to talk involves a boot to the face then hanging them upside down in their underpants.
The case only starts to open up with the transfer from Seoul of Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sangkyung), a brooding, intense chain-smoker who views his new colleagues as violent country bumpkins.
So far, so run of the mill police procedural. But don’t think that Parasite was Bong Joon-ho’s first attempt at sly humour, grandiose image-making, social satire and wacko characters with the morals of alley cats.
It’s all on display here too, as the comic-looking Song Kangho and the taciturn Kim Sangkyung traipse (and occasionally sprint) through a succession of rain-slicked streets, night-time downpours, bunker-like offices and lush forests.
Memories Of Murder may only have been Bong Joon-ho’s second film, but in this genresubverting treat there’s a strong sense of a master at work.
Blackbird (Cert 15)
Available from Monday on Amazon Prime Video/BT TV Store/iTunes/Sky Store/ TalkTalk TV Store and from September 28 on DVD £19.99
Lily (Susan Sarandon) is terminally ill and has decided to take her own life aided by her doctor husband Paul (Sam Neill) before the pain rippling through her body completely overwhelms her.
She gathers together family and best friend Elizabeth for a weekend of celebration and reflection before she bids a peaceful adieu to the world.
Lily watches helplessly as loved ones land bruising verbal blows and she reluctantly accepts that she cannot dictate every facet of her tear-jerking final hurrah, which includes an early Christmas dinner with all the trimmings.
Based on the 2014 Danish drama Silent Heart, Blackbird is a moving and thought-provoking drama about euthanasia that relies heavily on director Roger Michell to navigate the bumps in Christian Torpe’s screenplay including unnecessary angst in the final act.
Sarandon brings quiet dignity to her showy role as a mother hen, who refuses to surrender control to her illness.
Outlander - Season Five (Cert 15)
Time-travelling lovebirds make bold decisions, which cause a ripple effect across the centuries when the award-winning drama based on the best-selling Outlander books penned by Diana Gabaldon arrives on home formats this week.
The fourth series concluded with Roger Wakefield (Richard Rankin) declaring his love for Brianna Randall (Sophie Skelton), daughter of Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Heughan), and her father receiving orders from
Governor Tryon to kill Murtagh (Duncan Lacroix).
The spectre of conflict – the American War of Independence – looms large over 18th-century North Carolina as clans congregate to celebrate the wedding of Roger and Brianna.
Elsewhere, Claire welcomes her first patients to the doctor’s surgery, Jamie’s stepdaughter Marsali (Lauren Lyle) and husband Fergus (Cesar Domboy) face their own trials and aunt Jocasta (Maria Doyle Kennedy) orchestrates her latest foolhardy scheme.
The four-disc DVD and Blu-ray box sets include 12 episodes plus previously unseen bonus footage.
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (Cert 15)
Ten years after he directed his student film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, advertising director Toby Grisoni (Adam Driver) finds himself working in the same region of rural Spain on a new project featuring the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza.
Haunted by his memories, Toby travels to Los Suenos in the hope that he might track down one of the stars, Angelica (Joana Ribeiro).
Past and present become blurred as Toby confronts his demons while he conducts an ill-advised affair with Jacqui (Olga Kurylenko), wife of his domineering boss (Stellan Skarsgard).