Are we really still sniggering over men in tights in 2020?
Are we still laughing at male ballet dancers, 20 years after Billy Elliot and more than half a century after Rudolf Nureyev became a star? According Men at the Barre – Inside the Royal Ballet (BBC Four), the answer is very much yes. To be fair, it began with a woman who really was laughing: Lara Spencer, a vacuous American TV host who was forced to apologise publicly after joking about Prince George taking ballet lessons. But then the narrator told us: “When you think of ballet you probably think of ballerinas in tutus.” Really? If you have even a passing interest in ballet, I doubt this is the case.
As soon as the voice-over kicked in, I knew where I had heard it before. In 2016, Richard Macer installed himself at Vogue for a documentary that was illuminating but featured an awful lot of Richard Macer. Some film-makers like to stay out of the way, but Macer likes to insert himself into proceedings and pose questions which he seems to think are amusingly direct but actually sound a bit idiotic. See his opener: “So before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way, something we’re probably all thinking about but too embarrassed to ask – what does the male ballet dancer wear down his tights?”
But despite his best efforts, this turned out to be a very watchable documentary – not least because the dancers were so beautiful to watch, both in rehearsal and on stage. Ballet dancers can often seem remote, but here we got to see them chatting candidly about the profession’s highs and lows, laughing and joking with each other backstage. The processes were demystified. Cesar Corrales performed stunning jumps and turns as he rehearsed Bluebird’s solo in Sleeping Beauty, then admitted: “It actually makes you want to throw up.” Philip Mosley, a character artist, warmed up mid-show on a running machine in his full costume of tweeds.
If there is rivalry and back-stabbing and clashes of ego at Covent Garden, that wasn’t the story Macer wanted to tell. Instead we saw support and camaraderie. The closest we got to a disgruntled character was Valentino Zucchetti, who was frustrated by being stuck at first soloist level and grumbled a bit about favouritism.
There were touching personal stories: Marcelino Sambé thanking his mother for putting him up for adoption and setting him on a path to the Royal Ballet; Steven Mcrae struggling both physically and mentally with comeback after injury. And there was the joy on the faces of the White Lodge students who were offered a contract with the company; we weren’t shown the disappointment of the ones who didn’t make it.
True crime series can be a bit grim, what with all the dead bodies. So how about a tale featuring the Mob but no murders, some comedy FBI guys and Ronald Mcdonald? Mcmillions (Sky Documentaries) tells how Mcdonald’s Monopoly game in the US was rigged by fraudsters for over a decade, with the fast food chain conned into handing over big ticket prizes and million-dollar cheques.
The Monopoly promotion was wildly popular in the 1990s and worked like this: customers collected tokens and matched them to a Monopoly board to win prizes, usually a free portion of fries but sometimes a car or a boat or a load of cash. It was supposed to be entirely random but one day the FBI office in Jacksonville, Florida, got an anonymous tip-off that three $1m dollar winners came from the same family and were part of a scam run by the mysterious “Uncle Jerry”. And so the investigation began.
The first episode, which sets up the story and introduces us to the key FBI characters, is great fun – imagine the Coen brothers directing a BBC daytime show about white-collar crime and you’re part-way there. Episode two brought us a Sicilian mobster described by his brother as a mash-up of Al Capone and Rodney Dangerfield, but it also dragged a little. This is a story that probably could have been told in three instalments but has been stretched to six. It would have made a better Hollywood film than documentary series, were it not for one man who makes the whole thing irresistible.
Doug Mathews was a rookie FBI agent in the Jacksonville office when the case came in and he threw himself into solving it. As a TV contributor, Mathews is gold. He is wildly gung-ho, with no time for the boring bits of FBI work, and kept coming up with crazy ideas that turned out to be quite clever, such as setting up a fake TV crew to speak to bogus winners, with him posing as the director. “There was no risk that someone was going to think, ‘This guy’s an FBI agent,’” said his boss at the Bureau. When Mathews is on screen, Mcmillions is a winner.
Men at the Barre – Inside the Royal Ballet ★★★
Mcmillions ★★★★