Superficial, B-list and with nothing important to say
It is unlikely that any of us will forget the last stand of the Trump presidency: his railing against the result, the storming of the Capitol, that bizarre press conference in the car park of Four Seasons Total Landscaping. The concluding episode of The Trump Show (BBC Two) – titled Downfall to hammer home the final-days-in-thebunker feel – would probably fascinate audiences 20 years from now. But for viewers who watched this all unfold on the news a few short weeks ago, it felt surplus to requirements.
What fresh takes did it have to offer? Shaky footage that appeared to be taken from the presidential motorcade gave the impression that the programme-makers had been granted some special, behind-the-scenes access. But everything we saw of Trump was taken from press conferences and public appearances, albeit played at longer length than the snippets we saw on the major UK news bulletins.
The episode began in October, as Trump battled for re-election, and took us through to the attack on the Capitol. A handful of talking heads appeared to give their take on events, none of them what you’d call “A-list”. From the Trump camp, the programme mustered a pastor from Ohio who
considered himself a friend of the president and agreed that the election had been stolen. The strategic communications director for Trump’s re-election campaign called the president’s children “rock stars in their own right” who had given the campaign a tremendous boost. Jon Sopel, the BBC’S North America editor, popped up briefly to liken Trump to Don Corleone and Tony Soprano.
The two interviewees with the most to say were Anthony Scaramucci (fired as the White House communications director after 11 days on the job), and our own Nigel Farage. The Mooch referred to his former boss as “an orange wrecking ball”, “a son of a b----” and “a cunning sociopath”, and insisted that the fraud accusations were a cynical, premeditated strategy that Trump had planned to wheel out in 2016 if things didn’t go his way.
Farage was star-struck, breathlessly describing the moment before a political rally at which Trump landed in Air Force One to the strains of Something in the Air Tonight by Phil Collins. We were clearly meant to sneer at this showmanship. But there was a theatricality to this documentary, too, playing romantic music over a Joe Biden speech and overselling itself as an “inside story” that was all too superficial.
Some of the behaviour in Finding Alice (ITV) is quite odd, isn’t it? I’m not talking about Keeley Hawes as Alice – at points she seems quite off her rocker, but grief can do funny things to a person even when they’re not dosed up on Diazepam. No, in this episode I’m talking about Nathan the mortuary technician. I think he’s a mortuary technician – he also runs a bereavement group, although quite possibly those two things can coexist. But are people who work in hospital mortuaries allowed to take a body for burial by strapping it to the roof rack of their car, with members of the bereavement group tagging along for the ride?
Writers Roger Goldby and Simon Nye clearly see their work here as wonderfully unconventional, but what they’ve ended up with is neither one thing nor another, and frequently detached from reality. The first episode veered between gentle comedy drama and thriller. By episode two, the thriller bit was out the window. Remember the mystery of Harry’s finances, and the woman who turned up claiming to be his business partner? The show seems to have forgotten them.
We did start where we left off, with a young man announcing that he was Harry’s secret son. But then he disappeared again. Alice wondered if he was the person glimpsed on CCTV moments before Harry fell to his death, but for reasons best known to herself didn’t mention this to police when they asked.
The main thing keeping me watching is the performances from Joanna Lumley and Nigel Havers as Alice’s parents, and from Gemma Jones and Kenneth Cranham as her in-laws. The key business of this episode was Alice organising Harry’s funeral. She decided to bury him at home rather than the “municipal dumping ground” of a council cemetery.
More questions, though. Are we supposed to like Keeley Hawes’s portrayal of Alice? Who was the random mourner who volunteered that he’d had “enough weed to kill a cow”? And how was Alice, a woman who spent 24 hours unable to find her own fridge, able to competently operate a digger?
The Trump Show ★★
Finding Alice ★★