Manville’s ‘Mum’ makes the mother of all returns
Poignant is a word that doesn’t get used much these days, but it fits Mum (BBC Two) like a glove. In this spare, quiet sitcom, deep emotions aren’t so much plumbed as plucked at in a piquant, reserved, achingly sympathetic way. Lesley Manville plays widowed Cathy, who is trying to hold on to her sense of self in the wake of her husband’s death. She’s a loving, endlessly maternal woman to whom everyone in her dysfunctional family still turns for support, despite the bottom falling out of her own world. Not the most promising scenario for a sitcom, perhaps, but it works, beautifully. So it was no surprise that its writer, Stefan Golaszewski, won a Bafta for the series’ pitch-perfect debut, which juggled laughs and sharp emotional insight with a sure comic touch, and Manville was also nominated for her sublime performance.
As the second series began, Cathy had another soul-sapping challenge to confront: her 60th birthday,
Again, the laugh-out-loud moments were provided by Cathy’s nice-butdim son Jason (Sam Swainsbury) and his amoeba-brained girlfriend Kelly (Lisa Mcgrillis), with occasional bombs dropped by her aggressively senile father-in-law Reg (Karl Johnson) and unrepentantly snobbish sister-inlaw Pauline (Dorothy Atkinson). Yet the really biting, bittersweet comedy moments all revolved around Cathy. Not so much in what happened or what she said, but in what failed to happen and what remained steadfastly unsaid.
Which is where Michael (Peter Mullan), an old friend of Cathy’s late husband, comes in. Michael, we learnt in the last series, has been in love with Cathy for years. And she seems rather taken with him, too. Yet any hope that their relationship might shift out of friendship and into a different, more loving orbit remains tantalisingly unfulfilled thanks to his reticence and her tentativeness.
Michael got the biggest knock-back yet last night, as his uncharacteristically bold decision to shower Cathy with birthday gifts backfired. His cringemaking awkwardness let the chance to show his feelings slip from his grasp in the face of unintended cruelty on Jason’s part (“It’s a bit weird Michael, even for you”) and the failure of anyone else to take him remotely seriously.
Still, the episode ended on an almost high, with Cathy intuiting the truth and almost forcing Michael to show his hand. It was a small, exquisitely poignant moment that may come to something. Or perhaps nothing. It was a moment of pure feeling that made the world seem a better place to be in. Gerard O’donovan
Harvey Weinstein’s monstrousness has been exhaustively documented. But
Working with Weinstein (Channel 4) added another dimension to our understanding of the disgraced Hollywood producer, with ordinary, non-celebrity employees and colleagues forced to endure his unwanted sexual advances and bullying and violent outbursts coming forward to speak for the first time.
The excruciating yet compelling story was narrated by Zelda Perkins, a former assistant of Weinstein who last October explained how, nearly 20 years prior, Weinstein had exposed himself to her and requested that he watch her bathe – a testimony that broke the non-disclosure agreement she had signed with his former production company Miramax. (Weinstein has denied all allegations of non-consenusal sex.)
But the story was as much that of the British film industry and how it had enabled Weinstein’s reported predatory behaviour. He had, we learnt, arrived in London in the early Eighties, a scrappy miracle worker soon breathing life into flailing projects.
“He was not only charming but very knowledgeable about film,” said producer Stephen Woolley, whose film Scandal, a retelling of the Profumo Affair, was brought to the big screen by Weinstein and became a hit.
The triumphs stacked up, Perkins explained, and when it came to Weinstein’s private life everyone looked the other way. He was fêted at 10 Downing Street and at the Baftas, where everyone laughed at his terrible jokes. Meanwhile, his indiscretions proceeded unchecked, claimed Perkins. The accounts of his sleazy behaviour were skin crawling, but arguably more shocking was his alleged treatment of employees.
Weinstein Company personal assistant Gaia Elkington’s recalled the time she had rushed Weinstein from his London house to a flight to New York. Before leaving, she said, he’d smacked her out of the way – not out of aggression but because she was too unimportant to matter. At departures, he called her a “c---” and told her she was fired. He jetted off to his life of glory and uninhibited privilege. She went outside and threw up. Ed Power
Mum ★★★★★ Working with Weinstein ★★★★