Miriam’s magic way to tick off Australia
WHEN TV presenters travel to Australia to do a documentary, they invariably get a touch of the sun.they sidle along to Bondi Beach (tick) talking poetically about the big, blue sky, postulate about the Empire (tick) while taking a cruise on Sydney Harbour (tick) before sampling a prawn on a barbie (tick) in abundant suburbia.well, not Miriam Margolyes – excluding a couple of minutes in Bondi.
Miriam Margolyes: Almost
Australian (BBC Two, Friday) was one of the most informative, novel and touching documentaries on the country for many years.and that includes Simon Reeve’s excellent Tropic Of Capricorn, which got under the skin of the debate about the treatment of Aborigines.
Margolyes, 79, is not everyone’s cup of tea. She has a propensity to shock by saying what she’s thinking, and can be very rude. She also shouldn’t bother showing herself squeezing into a tiny loo in her campervan.we have imagination, if we dare, for such things.
Taking all of the above into account, Margolyes also has a great skill of connecting with people, even dull ones – which is especially helpful in Australia.
For goodness sake, she even found someone alive, and compos mentis enough, in the tiny town of Trundle near nowhere – never before filmed for British television surely – to talk about the awful drought there.
Margolyes peered into a hairdressers.
A lady inside inquired: “Are you just passing through?” Quick as a wink, Miriam replied: “I hope so.” Even the Aussies laughed at that.
Now with Australian citizenship, an Australian partner and a home in the sticks, she is as qualified as anyone to observe life there – which she does with humour and intelligence. On the subject of the “Australian dream”, she stumbled upon a very polite young Afghan man in a charity shop and elicited his entire life story from a second-hand sofa. I bet you no one had even listened to his refugee story before, which was heartrending.
They were both in tears.
Tragically, his 10-year visa is temporary and coming to end. He’s hardly going to want to go back. He supports Collingwood in AFL for one, and is without any family.
Most amusing, however, was watching Miriam tackle the heavy sliding door on her charabanc which was cleverly left in for a novel running gag. Finally, she cracked: “It really p ***** me off, that door!” Margolyes is a complete one-off.
TV presenters need a holiday.
It’s punishing sitting down, squawking into that camera. Or in the case of Piers Morgan, shouting at it for all you’re worth – which is considerable. But he and “TV wife” Susanna Reid have bolted from for six months, sorry weeks. Does he have a bar job in St Tropez? Andrew Marr is also off for summer, leaving us bereft on Sundays. During those long hols we might find shows like or
GMB
She’ll be running Australia before the year is out.
The BBC finally brought The Luminaries (BBC One, Sunday) to a welcome and rather arresting end. For six long hours, a nation has scratched its head in bewilderment, wondering who was going to get all that weird looking fake gold, and whether we would ever see Emery Staines again? As it was, he turned the show on its head, with a compelling and very useful narrative, outlining in court his role in the entire conspiracy to kill off Crosbie Wells.
What?! Nice Emery Staines, who was also meant to have stolen Miss Weatherall’s purse at the beginning of
STEPHENSON’S ROCKET
on Sky. And we wouldn’t want MPS starved of telly in the six-week “recess”. episode one?when? It obviously happened in a very dark corner.there were certainly many.
It was not the most impressive scene. That was presided over by Eva Green’s Lydia, who ignited a ring of fire around a seance table. Most sensible people would have fled the room expecting an inferno but these Kiwi chumps looked on lamely believing she was talking to the dead.
She then also stupidly implicated her own lover. Still, one has no power over the occult as we know.
Could it return for another series? Only if the New Zealand government offers all viewers of a second season a return ticket there, as a reward for watching it.
THERE might be scope for a second series of The Secrets She Keeps (BBC One, Monday & Tuesday). Laura Carmichael’s psychotic baby snatcher Aggie was my sort of operator. On the run from the police, she had three burner phones and even managed to pick up her boss’s handgun from under the counter at the corner store.
She was always going to get caught, of course, but Carmichael can be congratulated for drawing the sympathy of many as a victim of religious abuse, from which she had to give up a child.that doesn’t excuse her choice of a dumb sailor as a fake father. Still, any port in the storm.
But the thrilling “search for baby Ben” seemed to surprise everyone, including the police who lost a suspect. Oddly, we’d given up on the smug married victims who had both had affairs. Lifestyle mummy blogger Megan was even about to fake a DNA test on baby Ben.
Where would a second series go? Aggie could get released after 10 years, find a job as a nanny and move back into the neighbourhood.that would tempt back those convincing generic news crews shouting incisive questions such as, “Are you still a psycho?!”