COUNTRY FOUL
Sean O’Grady hails the depraved comedy of ‘This Country’, follows Simon Schama into some ancient caves and falls for the easy charm of Mary Berry... oh, and ‘Top Gear’ is back
Easily the highlight of the week so far and perhaps the entire year is the return for a much-deserved second series of the award-winning This Country, the funniest thing, just about, to get online and on air in 2017.
It’s a mockumentary; it’s extremely funny; it’s charming in its own scatological way; and you find yourself being seduced into the deepest crevices of human depravity in the incongruous surroundings of Cotswold villages more usually associated with cosy dinner parties, Range Rovers and pensioners on coach trips to Stow-on-the Wold for cream teas. Not a bloke who used to play pool with Fred West (“best in the West”, they used to call him round Northleach, we’re told). For some of us it feels like a mixture of the finely observed humour in The Office, the utter immaturity of Viz comic and the cult power of the Moonies.
Nominally a BBC documentary into the travails of life for disaffected and bored young people in rural
Britain, it centres on cousins Lee “Kurtan” Mucklowe and his cousin Kerry, as played by real-life brother and sister team Charlie and Daisy Cooper. In orbit around their chavvy axis of power we find their dad, Martin, a man for whom the #MeToo campaign should have been invented, Kerry’s bed-ridden mum, who cannot pronounce the letter “t”, their mumbling mate Slugs, professional hard woman Mandy, a sort of scrapyard Rottweiler in human form, and the well-meaning vicar, who finally loses his clerical rag in this series, I’m pleased to say. You’d be well advised to binge-watch the first series, available now on iPlayer, before exposing yourself to this second orgy of satire and social inadequacy.
If you’re familiar with it, I can vouchsafe that it is soapier, with more storylines and more surreal than last year’s debut, and charters such as the Vicar and mad Mandy are enhanced. Kerry seems just a touch nastier than she used to be, which is satisfying. So a slightly more nuanced comedy experience.
This week: Kerry learns to play golf and embarks on a campaign of random acts of kindness, Kurtan gets a girlfriend and Kerry’s mum is having trouble with the laundry. Be warned, however, as the vicar says, there’s quite a lot of “effing and jeffing” around.
Rather more civilised is Civilisations – note the plural – which is a sort of homage to art critic Sir Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, first shown in 1969, and an unapologetically Eurocentric celebration of the triumph of the West. Well, from what I can remember.
This time it’s historian Simon Schama, one of the public intellectuals of our age, who takes on the role of magisterial guide to, well, more than one civilisation, which is as it should. Because there always have been many; just such a shame they used to wage war on one another all the time. This Schama takes us to the first cave paintings, dating back 80,000 years and in what is now South Africa, plus a quick look at the Maya in Central America and Petra in present-day Jordan. This is supposed to be what television was invented for; popularising high culture for the masses. A touch patronising? Maybe, but good to see it being done all the same.
Top Gear is back, but I have to say that not even a celebration of the V8 engine is sufficient to entice me to watch that old dog of a show
There are mysteries that are well known to us but retain their often macabre fascination down the ages – Jack the Ripper, say – and there are mysteries that, to be polite, aren’t so compelling. No disrespect, you understand. The murder of Gianni Versace is one such, and I admit I had quite forgotten the name of his
assailant, Andrew Cunanan, an anti-social young gay man who made a habit of acquainting himself with very wealthy older men. How and why Cunanan came to shoot Versace dead in 1997, and then commit suicide does, in fact, beg a series of questions, and is a more engrossing tale than I’d allowed for at the time. Whether you did or not it was one of the stranger of celebrity deaths: The Assassination of Gianni Versace looks at the theories.
Damned is more than just a vehicle for Jo Brand, though if it were only that that would be reason enough to worship it. This week she, as hard-pressed social worker Rose, and the rest of the rather mixed bag of professionals at the Elm Heath Children’s Services Department are tasked with placing into local authority care the child of chap who goes by the name “The Animal”. So you can see the potential for comedy and homicide, and possibly both, right there, can’t you? The inestimably fine Kevin Eldon assists.
Sometimes I wonder just how many destructive relationships Suranne Jones can get through, as she seems to have been through the wringer of emotional abuse, physical attack and attempted murder (by or of her in each case) about a half dozen times a year she she was a happy-go-not-so-lucky machinist at Mike Baldwin’s sweatshop in Corrie. Then I remembered that she’s an actress. One, however, who might ask her agent for a bit more variety in the roles she gets thrown. Anyway as you may have seen in Sky’s Save Me, she plays she plays the mother of a child who the police say was abducted by her ex. This is the first of the six episodes. Loyalty, they name is Berry; but it brings its own rewards for Mary, that being her very own BBC cookery series, Classic Mary Berry. An apt title, because she is pretty classic, isn’t she? There’s no Mel and Sue or irritating amateur cooks around, just Mary, her kitchen and her natural charm to take you on from baking to other cooking activities; boiling, braising, toasting, roasting, fricasseeing, frying... there’s a lot to get through. Well, her and a Swedish chef – not the one off The Muppet Show – called Niklas Ekstedt who shows us his meatballs.
I ought also to mention some other superb current regulars; Shetland, the Sheltie noir crime drama, masterfully cast and plotted; Back in Time for Tea, the latest “time travel” popular social history show, which reaches the 1970s; and Mum, a subtle and simmeringly amusing comedy featuring the great Lesley Manville.
If you really insist, then... I’ll admit that Top Gear is back for its I-neither-know-nor-care-th season. I have to say that not even a celebration of the V8 engine is sufficient to entice me to watch that old dog of a show, and I’d really rather someone invented an intelligent telly show about cars (starring me, obviously).
Also turning up in your living room is Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, which I can also happily leaveaway. They’re there if you really want them.
This Country (BBC3/iPlayer, Monday 10am): Civilisations (BBC2, Thursday 9pm); The Assassination of Gianni Versace (BBC2, Wednesday 9pm); Damned (Channel 4, Wednesday 10pm); Save Me (Sky Atlantic, Wednesday 9pm); Classic Mary Berry (Monday, BBC1 8.30pm); Shetland (BBC1, Tuesday 9pm); Back In Time for Tea (BBC2, Tuesday 8pm); Mum (BBC2, Tuesday 10pm); Top Gear (BBC2, Sunday 8pm); Ant and Dec’s Saturday Takeaway (ITV, Saturday 7pm)