Yet another news reboot? No sweat
BEREFT OF NEW ideas, TV continues to eat itself. As well as recycling stale concepts and resurrecting insipid formats, there is now an accelerating tendency to reboot news stories as documentaries. Scoop (Netflix) purported to show us how BBC Newsnight producer Sam Mcalister landed the interview with Prince Andrew that successfully did for his reputation what Ukraine did to the Moskva warship.
The real thing, broadcast in 2019, was the most widely-watched Newsnight interview of all time.
It’s not as if many of us have forgotten it – or the scores of jokes about Andrew’s inability to sweat and the Woking branch of Pizza Express that followed in its wake.
Mcalister is portrayed rather flatteringly by Billie Piper, with Gillian Anderson playing Emily Maitlis as part-baroness Thatcher, part Cruella De Vil.
Rufus Sewell as the Prince exudes arrogant charm and sports prosthetic buttocks for the unnecessary bath scene.
But as the real thing is still available on Youtube, you wonder what point it served. It wasn’t exactly Frost/nixon.
What odds that a dramatization of the Westminster Whatsapp honeytrap saga is already in pre-production, with comedian Joe Lycett lined up to play William “Toe-wragg” Wragg?
Oddly, TV bods rarely bother to resurrect formats large audiences might like to see, like mainstream sitcoms.
What an oasis of joy they would be in today’s depressing desert of melodrama, over-promoted daytime formats and doom-mongering current affairs.
Sadly, modern broadcasters’ preoccupation with box-ticking and virtue signalling inevitably precludes them.
The same goes for TV “satire”, in whose name we’re offered Have I Got News
For You (BBC1, Friday) which is still staggering along – high on self-regard and as toothless as a gummy bear.
After defending Angela Rayner, Ian Hislop condemned Jacob Rees-mogg as
“an elitist”, while failing to mention that as a public school and Oxford-educated millionaire he quite possibly qualifies for that description himself.
In 2014, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse spoofed the show rather brilliantly with Hislop snorting things like “Er, the Government!” and Paul Merton repeatedly quipping “Is it a dolphin in a bathtub?”
As a review, it’s never been bettered. The Regime (Sky Atlantic, Monday) was another stinker. On paper, it looked promising, with Kate Winslet starring as Elena Vernham, paranoid chancellor of a fictional European state. On our screens it was a different matter. Winslet, so magnificent in Mare Of Easttown, was nobbled by writer Will Tracy’s muddled script.
Not a single satirical punch was landed in the dull, unfocused opener. Why? It’s not as if Eastern Europe is running low on paranoid autocrats.
Missed opportunities define modern life, from Haaland’s open goal blunder against Man Utd to the bungling of Brexit. This Town (BBC1, Monday) is just as disappointing. Set in the Midlands in 1981, the Steven Knight drama is at the tail-end of the glorious 2-Tone era and takes its title from the opening line of
The Specials’ number one Ghost Town.
This town, is coming like a ghost town – although this is more a case of these viewers are coming like Ghost Viewers.
Between episodes one and two, ratings shot downhill like Buster Bloodvessel on a well-greased toboggan.
The show is slow and clunkily written. There’s barely any 2-Tone music on the soundtrack and the promising young cast are let down by a meandering script.
Teenage Bardon is bullied by his IRA terrorist dad into making a warning call when the Coventry unit bomb the railway station in episode two – something that did actually happen… in 1939 when we were on the cusp of war with Germany and the IRA was getting in bed with Hitler.
But then history was never Knight’s strong point. In Peaky Blinders, he had Oswald Mosley as a fascist at a time when he was still a serving Labour MP.
Bardon’s cousins are Dante, the worst poet since William Mcgonagall, and army sergeant Gregory, who leaves his armoured car to wander about listening to birdsong in the middle of hostile Belfast.
Bardon’s mother, Estella, is played by Michelle Dockery, aka Lady Mary from Downton Abbey, who makes her the best singing drunk since Dean Martin. She has gone from aloof to a lush. It’s all very well seeing riots and worse through rose-tinted glasses, but we don’t see the devastated shopkeepers whose life’s work has been ruined and neither do we get a sense of the joy that was at 2-Tone’s heart. A clear case of too much too wrong.
After more than 100 episodes, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (Sky Atlantic, Monday) has finally bowed out, by mimicking the final episode of Seinfeld – the brilliant 90s sitcom he co-created.
Larry was on trial, and although he had a strong defence, one by one the people he had wronged – from his coffee shop foe Mocha Joe to Bruce Springsteen, who he’d infected with Covid – testified about his failings. TV Larry is a misanthropic anti-hero, a cranky curmudgeon easily niggled by small indignities. Think Tony Hancock with a lot more money, or a more selfish Victor Meldrew. I miss them all.