You may be a gentleman, Jack, but you’re certainly no hero
Now we know what people used to do before they were constantly looking at their smartphones. Suranne Jones, as Anne Lister in Gentleman Jack (BBC1), couldn’t stop consulting her pocket watch.
Every time she stood up, sat down or crossed her legs, she pulled out the watch and flipped it open. At first I assumed she was obsessively punctual, but by the end of the hour I was beginning to wonder if she was getting Victorian text messages.
Hang on, I’ve just realised. She was looking at Tick Tock videos.
Anne is forever in a tearing rush. She strides along, coat tails flapping and cane swinging, while others scurry to keep up. All day long, she is dashing about on Important Business.
The trouble with this period drama, based on the 1830s diaries of the stridently lesbian Miss Lister, is that it’s hard to care about her fiscal affairs.
She’s having new pits dug for coal mines on her Yorkshire estate, she’s planning to turn her townhouse into a hotel, she’s bossing the servants about or discussing auction bids with her lawyer.
No doubt all this is true to the spirit and the content of the diaries, but 190 years later it’s hard to feel it matters very much.
we care much more about her romance with the timid but wilful
Ann walker (Sophie Rundle), an overgrown adolescent who is hopelessly besotted.
Miss walker loves Anne ‘in a thousand ways’, though it’s their physical relationship that is most important to her. By contrast, La Lister is not so much passionate as practical in the bedroom — she wants to discuss property and finance even when, so to speak, getting down to business matters.
The chief problem with Gentleman Jack is that our mannish heroine, who appears in every scene, is simply not very likeable. She bullies people. She bulldozers every conversation.
She wrangles with the frail Miss walker about her will so often that I am beginning to suspect her of mercenary intent.
Their relationship is starting to look less like a sapphic love affair and more like an exercise in coercive control and manipulation. when Anxious Ann’s ferocious aunt, played with gusto by Stephanie Cole, accuses Miss Lister of isolating the poor girl from her family, she is making a good point.
The show’s creator, Sally wainwright, expects us to take Anne Lister’s side, but I can’t see why we would.
Sacking a footman for insolence, she tells him: ‘If you’re still on the premises in 20 minutes, I shall shoot you.’ Then she marches into her study and loads a pistol. what’s so admirable and feminist about that? It’s the sort of thing wicked George warleggan in Poldark would do.
Bullying and violent threats are the first resort of special forces instructors Rudy Reyes, Jason Fox and pals, on SAS: Who Dares Wins (C4).
The military men are putting 20 recruits through a facsimile of an SAS training camp in the Jordan desert. This involves gruelling workouts for the wannabe commandos, while their tormentors stand on a wooden stage in tight T-shirts, bellowing scripted insults such as: ‘welcome to the slaughterhouse, little lambs!’
But with arms truculently folded or thumbs tucked into their belts, there’s an undeniable resemblance to male strippers at a hen night. Rudy and Foxy look like cut-price Chippendales. They even have the names for it.
I keep expecting Joe Cocker’s rasping voice to launch into You Can Leave Your Hat on, or Alexander ‘Full Monty’ Armstrong to leap out and disrobe. Gawd forbid.