The Herald - The Herald Magazine
TV preview Ways to say goodbye and good riddance to the year gone
GIVEN the time we have had lately, someone should be throwing the party of the century to see out 2020. But this nightmare of a year was never going to let us off that easy, was it? At the time of writing, the plan was for the entire nation to be in bed on Hogmanay at 8.30pm with a cuppa.
But if you insist on staying up with your mandated bubble and wish to see in the new year in traditional television style, then it is my duty as previewer to steer you through the so-so, the mildly bad and the flat out ugly of Hogmanay viewing.
You may wish to begin the night with some pipes in The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo 2019 (BBC Scotland, 7.30pm)
before moving on to comedy with another repeat, this time of
Rab C Nesbitt (BBC Scotland, 9pm).
Susan Calman. Now there’s someone you haven’t seen on the telly for, ooh, at least five minutes. She starts her Hogmanay shift with her Not Quite the End of the Year Show (BBC Scotland, 10pm), a review of the 12 months past. Good luck getting laughs out of that.
Calman returns later with Hogmanay (BBC1 Scotland, 11.30pm). Complete with a virtual audience to be Covid-19 compliant, the show will hopefully be a little more lively than last year’s baggy effort. Before Calman and the bells, there is a piece of TV history with the last ever Only an Excuse (BBC1 Scotland, 10.25pm). You might miss it when it’s gone.
Traditionalists of another variety may want to stick with another old reliable, Jool’s Annual Hootenanny (BBC2, 11.15pm). Guests this year include Tom Jones, Ruby Turner, and the Pipes and Drums of the First Battalion Scots Guards.
STV plays it safe with Billy Connolly: It’s Been a Pleasure (STV, 9.30), a tribute to the comedy legend, followed by Hogmanay: The Pride of Scotland Awards (STV, 10.45pm), honouring Scots who have made a difference to their communities this year.
If you can stay up beyond all that, The Graham Norton Show (BBC1, 1.10am) has Tom Hanks as a guest and Sophie EllisBextor doing something that will doubtless involve a glitterball.
Or why not have a break from the old stuff with the relatively new The Last Leg of The
Year (Channel 4, 9pm), where Lorraine Kelly is among the guests.
Celebrity: a 21st Century Story (BBC2, Tuesday-Friday, 9pm) promises viewers an insider’s look at the business of being famous. If the first episode is any guide, that means lots of now aged 1980s hacks reminiscing about this or that celebrity bash and how many copies of the magazine or newspaper they sold on the back of it.
The publicist for Posh and Becks recalls OK! magazine offering him £1 million for the photo rights to the couple’s wedding. Since the best offer he had had so far was £125,000, he was not slow in accepting publisher Richard Desmond’s apparently over-generous bid. In the event, the edition featuring the wedding sold 1.7 million copies and earned £6 million in sales. Poor Posh and Becks: they should have asked for more.
The first episode deals with “ordinary people”, looking at how television, the tabloid press and the internet made celebrities out of folk whose only qualification for the job was their fierce desire to be famous. So we canter through Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother, hearing
from past winners and losers, and Pop Idol, the TV talent show that was the forerunner of many more to come. Who are those fresh-faced youngsters announcing the winner of the battle royale between Gareth Gates and Will Young? Why, it’s only Ant and Dec, the two ringmasters of the celebrity circus. It would have been fascinating to hear their take on fame.
Other than the obvious religious link, I don’t know what the connection is between nuns and Christmas (Call the Midwife,
Sound of Music, etc), but Black Narcissus (BBC1, Sunday, 9pm)
continues the tradition. Gemma Arterton plays Sister Clodagh, tasked with setting up a nunnery and school atop a mountain in the Himalayas.
The building has been gifted to the nuns by a local general, and on paper it looks like an offer too good to refuse. But on closer inspection the place is falling down and there’s a sense of foreboding in the air. And what happened to the German monks who had the place previously? Why did they leave so soon?
All questions for Sister
Clodagh to ponder as she rallies her nuns, takes regular offence at the over-familiarity of the general’s agent, Mr Dean (Alessandro Nivola), and is visited by memories of her (nonnun) past.
Rumer Godden’s novel became a double Oscar winner for Powell and Pressburger in 1947, with Glasgow’s Deborah Kerr playing the part now taken by Arterton.