MASTERFUL

Olivia Colman is likeable and animated... and she’s just being her real-life self

PHILIP NOLAN’S TV REVIEW

FROM Peep Show to Green Wing, Rev to Broadchurch, and The Night Manager to W1A, Olivia Colman has proved herself one of the most versatile actors on television, as compelling in drama as she has been hilarious in comedy. Despite that success, she never has been as animated and likeable as she was simply being herself on the first episode of the latest series of the genealogy show, Who Do You Think You Are?

The programme mainly focused on the story of Harriot Slessor, Colman’s four times greatgrandmother. She was born in Kishangarj in Rajasthan, to a father who was an officer in the army of the East India Company and a local woman whose identity remained a mystery; an estimated one-third of all British men in India at the time, far from the company of female compatriots, were in relationships with Indian women, and often had children with them. Tragically, Harriot’s father accidentally shot and killed himself, and at just four years old, she was sent alone on the sixmonth voyage to England to live with her grandmother.

On receipt of a substantial bequest from a great-aunt (about €45,000 in today’s money), she returned to India in her twenties and married a man she met on the ship, but he died just a year later. ‘It seemed like everyone died,’ Colman said sadly, but there was a happy ending.

Harriot met Charles Bazett, another army officer, while in India but rebuffed his advances. Four years later, they happened upon each other again, this time in England. A letter he wrote to his brother describing their time together was, as an Indian genealogist so accurately noted, straight from Jane Austen, a genuinely thrilling account of hands brushing against each other, his head rested on a couch as close to hers as he dared and, despite her initial reluctance, her eventual admission in private that she loved him and would marry him. It was so descriptive, you could almost see his cheeks redden as her bosom heaved.

We often look at the past and think it somehow was different, when in truth the same fundamental needs have driven us for all eternity. Colman’s glee at the romance of it all was infectious; I doubt I could have been more interested had it been the story of my own ancestors.

She delivered the loveliest line ever on the series, in what was the best episode since Kim Cattrall went on the trail of her bigamist grandfather. Noting that Harriot’s grandson was Colman’s own mother’s grandfather (if you’re with me), Colman wistfully said: ‘We’ve all touched each other’s hands through time.’ It was a beautiful piece of television, and a reminder that when Colman takes over as Queen Elizabeth in the next series of The Crown, she surely will infuse that role with the warmth and empathy of the middle years of the reign, after the rather formal and icy early years so brilliantly portrayed by Claire Foy. On Sky One’s The Week That

Wasn’t, the pickings were a little hit and miss. The show uses real clips from the previous week’s television but adds voiceovers from impressionists Alistair McGowan and Ronni Ancona to make them something else entirely.

The script isn’t quite up to the quality of the mimicry, but two segments made me laugh out loud. Clearly enthusiastic and physically animated World Cup pundits Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer and Jermaine Jenas were using expansive hand gestures to relive the action from a match, but the voiceover hilariously instead had them discussing the biggest fish they ever caught. In another sketch, a clip of Mary Berry making a dessert with gelatine became a lesson on how to prepare new skin for elderly women. It was frightfully silly and very, very rude, but I have to admit I howled. Any sketch show with two good hits justifies the weaker material, and if nothing else, it’s nice to see original comedy on Sky that’s actually funny.

Also funny, and surprisingly so, was Comedy Central’s re-showing of a 2011 celebrity Roast of Donald

Trump. If you don’t know, a roast is when celebrities queue up to say vile things about the subject, and Trump took all the jokes – about models, importing wives, his hair – in good humour, rather differently to the thin-skinned, selfaggrandising caricature he has become.

Back then, he was considering a run for the 2012 presidency, and Seth McFarlane of Family Guy fame took the potshot. Looking Trump in the eye, he said: ‘It’s pronounced: “I am f***ing delusional,” not: “I am running for president.”’

In the week when Trump ran around Europe lobbing hand grenades at his allies while preparing to climb so far up Vladimir Putin, I fear we’ll need the Thai Navy SEALs again to get him back out, it was a stark reminder that history often is the opposite of what foresight might have imagined.

We’ve all touched each other’s hands through time, indeed. Sometimes, though, you wish we hadn’t.