No access and no answers: this Britney doc was pointless
The New York Times recently made a documentary about the secretive business of Britney Spears and her conservatorship. They got nowhere near Spears or her father, who had control of her financial and personal affairs, so instead turned their film into a smart study of fame and its toxic effects.
Oops… they made it again. The Battle for Britney: Fans, Cash and a Conservatorship (BBC Two) attempted to cover exactly the same ground. But when it too hit a brick wall with the main players, it had nowhere else to go. The film was such a non-event that it was difficult to understand why the BBC didn’t dump it as soon as they realised the NYT had got there first.
Presenter Mobeen Azhar made his name with the 2019 series Hometown: A Killing, a very good documentary about a murder in the Yorkshire town where he grew up. There he was on familiar ground, speaking to people he knew. Here he was all at sea.
Azhar speculated about the motives of Spears’s parents. He alleged that the star’s conservatorship team may have pretended to a judge that she had dementia in order to take control of her life (“If that’s the case, then that’s terrifying”), yet admitted that he was basing this theory purely on some unverified documents he’d pulled from a Britney fan site. And many of those fans sounded a few sandwiches short of a picnic. One suggested that someone could be forcing Spears to post upbeat videos by pointing a gun at her head. Azhar conceded that ideas like this were a bit “out there”.
His interviewees were a dancer who hadn’t seen Spears for years and a waitress who hadn’t seen her either. Her former make-up artist, Billy Brasfield, said she was effectively a prisoner in her own home, but Azhar didn’t question him enough on how and when he remains in contact with Spears (the singer has said, in response to the NYT film, that they don’t speak). In fact, Azhar was weirdly nervous about conducting the interview at all.
Having run out of road, Azhar then met the daughter of the late Peter Falk. The Columbo actor suffered from dementia and was the subject of a conservatorship controlled by his second wife. The daughter, Catherine, made a compelling case for being the wronged party – but we were only hearing one side of the story.
Perez Hilton, the showbiz blogger who used to write vicious things about Spears and now feels bad about it, made the most sensible contribution. “I don’t have any clue what’s going to happen in Britney’s conservatorship,” he told Azhar, “and nobody you’ve spoken to probably does either.”
Bloods (Sky One) is an enjoyably silly odd-couple comedy about paramedics, with a star turn from Samson Kayo (from BBC Three’s Famalam). He plays Maleek, whom we first saw accidentally electrocuting his partner with a defibrillator. Maleek is rubbish at his job, a fact he refuses to acknowledge.
With one partner down, Maleek needed another one, and she arrived in the form of Wendy. If I tell you that Wendy is played by Jane Horrocks, you’ll know what to expect. She’s northern and quirky and an eternal optimist, and having her character arrive “from out of the area” means she can just do her own accent.
The series is set in London and has an urban feel (“Now I’ll show you what the battlefield looks like,” Maleek says, taking Wendy to a dodgy estate), and fun is had with the culture clash between the two leads. “Where you from anyway? Emmerdale?” he asked. “You are a long way from Brookside now, you know.” I realise this doesn’t sound very funny written down, but it’s funny when Kayo delivers it. He has great comic timing and the character has a freshness.
But the show also feels as if it’s slightly hedging its bets to reach a wider audience, and that Horrocks should be in another show entirely. Lord, her character is grating. She tells a crackhead: “What did you take all that crack for, you silly billy?” and describes two scrotes who she spies making a hoax phone call to the ambulance service as “naughty nuggets”. I’m not sure if your sympathies are supposed to be with Maleek in this pairing, but mine were.
The rest of the cast are a mixed bag. Sam Campbell and Kevin Garry are entertainingly off-the-wall as a pair of paramedics with an oddly intense bond. Julian Barratt is nicely Eeyoreish as a tragic colleague. But Lucy Punch – so good as the uber-mum in Motherland – fails to land any gags as their awkward boss.
In general, though, the tone works – the paramedics attend drugs overdoses and grisly road traffic accidents and the humour is just dark enough.
The Battle for Britney ★ Bloods ★★★