Tied up over family life
REMEMBER the Monty Python sketch where the successful young miner visits his resentful dad, a writer living in leafy Hampstead? “Tungsten carbide drills is it?” sneers the dad. “What’s wrong with poetry?”
These sketches twisted a genre with deep roots, from the novels of DH Lawrence to the Angry Young Men of the Fifties. The bright lad moves away, makes it big but can he forget where he comes from?
Adapted from Sathnam Sanghera’s memoir THE BOY WITH THE TOPKNOT (BBC2) told a cross-cultural version of the classic clash, with high-flying journalist Sathnam (Sacha Dhawan) poised to marry colleague Laura (Joanna Vanderham).
He just had to tell his mum (Deepti Naval) but, in the way of all great stories, that turned out to be no easy thing. Set between the home of Sathnam’s Sikh family in Wolverhampton and the hip spaces of London, this could, for all its authentic detail, have been predictable. It certainly ended in the way we like love stories to end.
Along the path though it probed something beyond the stumbling blocks of class and background. But it was only when Laura got sick of waiting and Sathnam went to spend time with his family that the journalist, skilled at asking awkward questions, realised something was wrong. More accurately, he realised what he’d always known but couldn’t face.
His dad (Anupam Kher), a genial soul who spent his days in front of The Shopping Channel, was a schizophrenic, heavily medicated to prevent the delusions and violence that had scarred his early life.
His sister Poli (Vineeta Rishi) suffered from the same condition and it was the onset of her problems that had made Sathnam begin to detach from his family.
The topknot, a symbol of Sikh devotion, was the first bit to go and in a sense, marrying a girl called Laura was almost an afterthought. There was a route back to both though involving courage and honesty. So did the script with Mick Ford’s adaptation understanding intuitively how to turn the hidden forces of family life into touching TV drama.
The macabre sitcom of Cold War espionage is very much the home turf of documentary-maker George Carey and in his latest film, TOFFS, QUEERS AND TRAITORS: GUY BURGESS – THE CHARMING SPY: STORYVILLE (BBC4) he pondered why the least gifted of the “Cambridge circle” got away with it for so long.
The answer seems to be that Guy Burgess just had amazing friends. Even his handlers in Moscow wondered how he’d managed to drift degree-less from university into the BBC and then MI6. The KGB didn’t understand class connections, of course. Perhaps there was also an unintentional double bluff going on. In Tangiers, in Washington, the promiscuous, hard-drinking spook behaved so outrageously that nobody thought he could possibly be doing something else on the sly.
Like a camera-equipped version of le Carré’s veteran, George Smiley, Carey spent much of the film taking tea with interesting old ladies in flats. One in Russia remembered the reclusive Burgess, in the bugged rooms upstairs, drinking himself to death.
Another in Britain, ex-MI6, had had the job of steaming open his letters, plaintive and lonely as they were. Charm and connections could take a man a certain distance, it seemed, but no further.