SATELLITE TELLY
Sean O’Grady relives the drama of Apollo 11’s historic voyage and checks in on action-comedy ‘Lethal Weapon’
Obviously the “live” bit of Channel 4’s Moon Landing Live actually means “half a century late”, but you know what they mean. It’s as neat idea, to be fair, to replicate the experience of seeing human beings bouncing around the moon for the first time (the last was in 1972, as it happens).
OK, you’ve probably already seen more than your fair share of lunar larks over the past month – anniversary journalism starts earlier with every momentous event commemorated it would seem. But this one is the purest of the many reincarnations: the US channel ABC’s original footage, complete with the now familiar exchanges between ground control and the crew of Apollo 11, plus some contemporary vox pops.
Should be fascinating retro-futuristic stuff, unless of course you’re one of the 16 per cent of Brits who think the whole was faked or probably faked. In which case, come to think of it, you might think of this live streaming of 1969 as further proof of your conspiracy theory.
Geoff Norcott is rarer than an Amur leopard, the rhino or any of the critically endangered species of orangutan. He is, you see, a right-wing stand-up comedian. He happens to believe that the liberal middle classes – Waitrose-shopping, Independent-reading, BBC2-watching types no doubt – have “ruined Britain” according to his hour-long polemic on, er, BBC2, which isn’t supposed to allow this sort of thing to be broadcast, what with it being an arm of an establishment plot and all that.
Norcott’s wide-ranging grumblings in How the Middle Classes Ruined Britain extend to gentrification of formerly working-class districts, a dating app for privately educated singletons, and the disappearance of any authentically working-class voices in British politics. Predictably enough, he himself believes that the Brexit vote “was a wake-up call ... it showed one group of people have had their way for far too long”.
If the past three years have taught us anything, it is the power of exactly what Norcott argues – but also that those very grievances and discontents will only be exacerbated by the effects of Brexit itself. In other words the poor will get poorer, even if the middle classes get poorer too after Brexit, if it ever happens. Me, I’m waiting for the arrival of a centrist funnyman to our screens, just to add some balance.
Talking of living standards, Broke (BBC2) is a timely exploration of the lives of the people that Theresa May, famously and briefly, referred to as the “just about managing” – the JAMs. It was a clumsy acronym, but it was useful and telling one because it spoke to an essential truth about the country, being the way that so many families on middle incomes – say £20,000 to £30,000 – are so stretched and have so little margin between their relatively comfortable lives and penury. His three part series documents what can happen when a JAM loses their footing…
Also in case you’d not noticed, the country is about to get a new prime minister. The Boris Johnson Show will be an all channels 24/7 affair next week, representing something of a feast for all you news/politics/Brexit junkies. Channel 5 make their own thoughtful contribution with a personal television essay by Michael Portillio, who, to borrow a phrase, was the future once. He’s not lost his faith, but he’s found it sorely tried. In Portillo: the Trouble with the Tories he does his best to work out how the Conservatives ended up where they are now. Hint: his early virile form of Euroscepticism in the 1990s might have something to do with it.
The other big cultural event of the week, spread over BBC TV and radio channels, is the 2019 Proms. Tomorrow there’s some Czech stuff – Smetana and Dvorak, Jakub Hrusa conducting the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. While on Friday evening the proms will feature the world premiere of the specially commissioned orchestra version of The Race for Space, the 2015 album by Public Service Broadcasting, blending archive recordings of the Apollo mission with contemporary instrumentation.
ITV’s action comedy Lethal Weapon is back on Friday evening, which means gunfights, car chases and explosions, a bit like a quiet night in for Carrie and Boris.
It’s loosely based on the Lethal Weapon movie franchise, and is thus set in the LAPD and has similar plot lines and characters. The first two seasons, Lethal Weapon starred Clayne Crawford as Martin Riggs and Damon Wayans as Roger Murtaugh. Now Crawford is replaced in the new season by American Pie actor Seann William Scott, as ex-CIA operative Wesley Cole – a man who “has been everywhere and seen everything”. It’s the third and final run, I’m afraid.
Moon Landing Live (Channel 4, Saturday 6.55pm); How the Middle Classes ruined Britain (BBC2, Wednesday 9pm); Broke (BBC2, Thursday 9pm); Portillo: the Trouble with the Tories (Channel 5, Thursday 9pm); BBC Proms 2019 (BBC4, Sunday 7pm, Friday 11pm); Lethal Weapon (ITV, Friday 9pm)