I’d rather be seeing the real Crossroads
WHAT WOULD Noele Gordon, legend of Crossroads, have made of the story of her life on ITVX? I’m sure she would have shouted something sweary, pushed over some wobbly scenery, and called for her sparkling Rolls-royce to be brought round the front.
The first episode of Nolly (ITVX, Thursday) was not half as good as it thought it was, and indeed made me long for a real episode of Crossroads.
In fact it was extremely disappointing. If you watch the accompanying documentary about her life, you will see the problem.
Writer Russell T Davies, normally top notch, got this one slightly wrong.
The first episode started with the end of her career rather than the beginning.
Davies showed two scenes – one of a younger Nolly testing colour TV – and another of Meg Mortimer’s wedding at Birmingham Cathedral, which was mobbed by 10,000 fans. And that was it for background. Nolly also had very little screen presence here through actress Helena Bonham Carter. It wasn’t her fault either. Although they got her look right, the script just didn’t give her any of the legendary chutzpah.
The largely forgotten Noele Gordon, from the real footage we’ve seen, was quite a presence with a definite aura about her.
In Davies’s drama, we were given a rather serene woman who was about to be pushed around by ATV, the owner of Crossroads.
Yes, she was sacked, mostly without reason by the company, but it caused an enormous media storm.
That’s surely to come. But in this drama her sacking was treated like someone senior had retired from the canteen!
The Real Nolly (ITVX, Thursday) was far more rewarding. Most illuminating was Gordon’s private life which included a 20-year affair with the TV and theatre impresario Val Parnell.
This was all part of an arrangement with Parnell’s wife, yet Parnell would leave both for a young actress.
There are better drama prospects for Portofino (ITV, Friday), not least for the expected boom in Italian travel. Impressed viewers will be poised on Airbnb, throughout the six exquisitely shot episodes of this new hotel drama, to book a stay on the Italian Riviera at prices only an Italian count could entertain.
In TV terms, it was billed as “the next Downton Abbey”.
However, while it may have had some of the same aristocratic charm and floaty wardrobe, it lacked a little of the ready wit Julian Fellowes gave the Granthams and their staff. After all, who else could come up
(ITV2, Monday) with the line for Dame Maggie Smith’s Dowager Duchess, “What is a weekend?”
Both series were also dealing with the aftermath of the First World War.
Here we had Lucian Ainsworth, son of the new hotel owners, coping with horrific injuries from the trenches – but at least finding plenty of sympathy and comfort during the night from one of the more fragrant hotel staff.
Then there was his father Cecil, a long way from Hugh Bonneville’s chummy Earl of Grantham. Mark Umber’s cad seems to be up for any caper, launching himself into what appeared to be a forgery scam of old masters after he got the whiff of the idea from Adam James’s new American guest, who looks dodgy too. I doubt Cecil knows his Brueghel from his Banksy. The pair will probably put the hotel through an equity release scheme by the end of episode two.
We’ve yet to see the full potential of Anna Chancellor’s comic battle-axe Lady Latchmere. She appears over-burdened in the first episode by her chronic constipation – which could run and run.
The resident hotel doctor has prescribed her a limoncello digestif, which has more than a whiff of quackery.
The Italian plumbing will be competing with the evocative local cicadas.
The Great British Menu (BBC Two, Tuesday) returned, all 24 hours of it. Why do we still have this show?
We enjoy cooking shows when we can relate to them, but this one is too pleased with itself. My local pub would rarely do a velouté, a sauce by any other name. I say give this interminable series the velouté, or cut it back to six episodes. We already have Masterchef: The Professionals.
Finally, Love Island (ITV2, nightly) now has a new-style “baddie”. Footballer Tom Clare was an audience “bombshell” choice, but this Lancs boy is a sort of anti-islander, barely playing the game – though winning the affection of four girls without trying. He only went wrong when he kissed one! Fellow Islanders were shocked, but isn’t it called Love Island?
When the four girls in question ask him about how he feels towards them, he just replies, “I don’t know” – and he appears genuine in saying it. Now playing football for Bradford City, I can’t see Tom, the definition of down-to-earth, lined up for the chop. He started at Barnsley after all.
WANT to know what the young people are up to? Of course you don’t. But if you insist, please don’t bother with a “comedy” called Buffering which presumably was recommissioned due to an administrative error. It’s co-written by the very likeable Iain Stirling who must have wanted something to do in his downtime from fashioning witticisms on Love Island. Indeed, it needed a few Islanders around to liven it up. Even turns from Emily Atack and DJ Melvin Odoom couldn’t lift the gloom of the first episode. More suffering than Buffering.