The Herald - The Herald Magazine
TV preview Looking below the surface to reveal the reality within
him in the family business is his daughter Emma (Andrea Riseborough, Birdman, The Death of Stalin). Kept on the sidelines, but aware of everything going on, is Lynwood’s son
Chris (Dane DeHaan, Kill Your Darlings, The Place Beyond the Pines).
Meanwhile, watching events in Mexico is a specialist team of soldiers determined to put an end to the carnage on their doorstep, even if that means adding to it.
After all that talk of grubby deeds and dirty money, time to
raise the tone with Britain’s Lost Masterpieces (BBC4, Monday, 9pm). Back for a fifth series, you get a lot of bang for your cultural buck with presenters Bendor Grosvenor and Emma Dabiri.
Working from the Art UK website, which bills itself as “the online home for every public art collection in the UK”, Grosvenor and Dabiri go in search of works which are unattributed, or possibly wrongly identified. Their first stop is the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, where Grosvenor believes a lost Trevisani and a Joos van Cleve are housed, awaiting discovery.
Grosvenor is the art historian, digging into the story of the art work and the life of its creator. Dabiri handles the social history end, which includes looking at the buildings that house the pieces.
The slyly humorous Grosvenor gets the better end of the deal, flying off to talk to experts and getting to stand by conservator Simon Gillespie as he cleans centuries of dirt from paintings and reveals their true glory.
They are a highly watchable trio, with the double act between
Gillespie and Grosvenor a particular joy. If you like a nice scarf (and who doesn’t?), Gillespie is your man.
Cometh another lockdown, cometh the return of Grayson’s Art Club: Get Creating (Channel 4, Sunday, 7pm). One of Channel 4’s biggest hits of the first lockdown, pulling in upwards of one million viewers an episode, Grayson’s Art Club is open to all, the only entry requirement enthusiasm and willingness to have a laugh, even if it is just at your own efforts.
The programme should really be titled Grayson and Philippa’s Art Club since it also features the artist’s wife, author, psychotherapist and broadcaster, Philippa Perry. Maybe that title change will come in the third series, the one that will have absolutely nothing to do with any lockdown and will simply be there for the joy of it.
Sunday’s standalone programme looks back at the last series and promises to inspire us to “get creating” for the upcoming new run. Last time round the grand finale was set to be an exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery. Alas, the doors remain shut due, you’ve guessed it, to the lockdown.
If you are still in the mood to create, stick around for The Great Pottery Throwdown (Channel 4, Sunday, 8pm), and finish the night with one of the more fabulously inventive, and fun, costume dramas around, The Great (Channel 4, Sunday, 9pm). Knocks polka dots off Bridgerton any day.
Firefly Lane (Netflix, from Wed)
Kristin Hannah has written 24 books, including Winter Garden, The Nightingale and The Great Alone, all of which are about to be turned into movies. But heading our way first is this TV 10-part adaptation of her 2008 novel Firefly Lane, which examines the ups and downs of the relationship between two lifelong best friends. Tully Hart and Kate Mullarkey first meet as teenagers in the 1970s. Kate is a nerdy girl who is astonished when the supercool and hugely popular Tully moves in across the road and decides they should hang out together. For the next 30 years they are inseparable, despite Tully’s determination to find fame and fortune and Kate achieving her more down-to-earth dream of falling in love and having a family. Then betrayal threatens to tear them apart forever... Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke star.
Strip Down, Rise Up (Netflix, from Fri)
Can pole dancing really be a restorative act, or is it merely performed to titillate? Michele Ohayon, the Academy Award-nominated documentary-maker behind Colors Straight Up, believes the former is true and her latest production sets out to prove it. “It’s not about feeling pretty, it’s about feeling powerful,” says one participant in a most extraordinary class. Women of all ages, shapes, sizes, experiences and backgrounds gather for six months of training, which is designed to help them explore their sexuality, get in touch with their sensuality and find themselves again after years of body shame, fear, loss, trauma and heartbreak.
Deliver Us (Walter Presents/All 4, from Fri)
The first episode of this new award-winning psychological thriller from Denmark is set to debut on Channel 4 on Sunday 7, but if you can’t wait until then, the entire boxset is being made available. The story takes place in a small town that looks like any other – but it has one very unruly resident indeed. Mike loves nothing better than terrorising his neighbours. They do little about his bad behaviour until it appears he’s literally got away with murder, inspiring the locals to take action. They form a vigilante group determined to sort out Mike once and for all – by giving him a taste of his own medicine. They plot what they think will be the perfect crime, little realising that by stooping to his level, they’re about to become the very thing they hate the most. Ride Upon the Storm’s Morten Hee Anderson heads the cast.
Greenland (Amazon Prime, from Fri)
Gerard Butler may have started out as a serious theatre actor, but he’s carved a niche for himself in films by playing muscular heroes in action thrillers and adventures. The Scot counts 300, Olympus Has Fallen and Gods Of Egypt on his CV; now he’s battling forces again in this CGI-laden disaster movie. He plays John Garrity who, along with his estranged wife Allison (Morena Baccarat) and their son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) search for sanctuary after a planet-killing comet has devastated the Earth. The Garritys experience the best and worst of humanity during their perilous journey, as panic and lawlessness begins to take hold around the world. It’s clear that a global apocalypse is on the horizon - can the family find somewhere to wait out the encroaching tragedy? Scott Glenn and Hope Davis are among the supporting cast.
LISTENING to Leah Sottile’s Battle for the Capitol (Radio 4, Monday) was a sobering insight into the mentality behind some of the protesters who stormed government buildings on January 6, leading to the death of five people.
If most of the protesters were Trump supporters angry at the election result and the narrative the outgoing President had spun about election theft, there was also a hardcore of militia members willing to do real damage.
Sottile’s investigation probed where America is right now and highlighted real concerns that January 6 was just a beginning rather than a culmination.
Everyone she talked to – including former Homeland Security analysts and ex-militia members – feared that America faces a real threat from far-right terrorists.
“I feel like our country is in very big trouble right now,” admitted Kelvin Pierce, son of William Luther Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, a novel about white insurrection in the US which is a key text for white supremacists and was an inspiration for McVeigh back in 1995.
Closer to home and the moment that tripped me up this week came on Wednesday, the day after it was announced that we had surpassed the figure of 100,000 deaths due to coronavirus in the UK.
At the end of the Today programme on Radio 4, the actor Rory Kinnear, whose own sister Karina had died from the virus, read a selection of the names of those we have lost. Such a simple idea, but hugely affecting. All those lives. The human cost of this disease spelt out in name after name.
Listen Out For:
Desert Island Discs, Radio 4, Sunday 11am. Chef Monica Galetti is Lauren Laverne’s castaway.
TEDDY JAMIESON
NIGHTCRAWLER
Friday
BBC Two, 11.20pm
AGAUNT and creepy-looking Jake Gyllenhaal stars in this intriguing 2014 film from director Dan Gilroy, shot from Gilroy’s own script and pitched somewhere between media satire and black comedy.
The scene is contemporary Los Angeles but chief protagonist Louis Bloom (Gyllenhaal) is portrayed as an out-of-time character, simperingly polite and obsequious to anyone he thinks can give him a leg up and fond of mouthing off in a kind of rapid-fire management speak that could have come out of a corporate handbook from the 1980s.
He’s also a violent sociopath, a trait he reveals in the opening scene when we see him stealing rolls of fencing late at night and then assaulting the security guard who comes to investigate. Louis will wear the guard’s stolen watch for the rest of the film. Think Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle crossed with Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, but with a lot of Ascher Fellig thrown in. And who’s Ascher Fellig? Better known as Weegee he was a camera-toting pavement rat who plied his trade in afterhours New York, snapping crime scenes (often before the police had arrived) and selling the pictures to newspapers.
Gilroy’s inspiration for Nightcrawler came after reading Naked City, a book of Weegee’s most celebrated images, and then noticing that Los Angeles TV news was crammed with true crime stories driven by lurid footage. And so was born Louis Bloom, a 21st century Weegee only armed not with a 4x5 Speed Graphic but with a digital video camera, a state-ofthe-art laptop, a fast car and a police radio scanner. Realising that the local news networks will pay big money for footage of traffic accidents and shootings