TV Column: JADE: THE REALITY STAR WHO CHANGED BRITAIN + THIS WAY UP

This article was originally published in The Courier on 3 August 2019.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

NEXT WEEK’S TV

JADE: THE REALITY STAR WHO CHANGED BRITAIN

Wednesday, Channel 4, 9pm

Channel 4 is responsible for fomenting the late Jade Goody’s pyrrhic fame, so this series charting her cautionary rise and fall carries a whiff of hypocrisy. Or is it a mea culpa? Either way, it’s a grimly compelling account of the birth of celebrity culture and vicious public shaming. Prepare to despair: it peers under the ant-infested stone of media chicanery with horrifying candour. Insight is provided by her mother and former Big Brother execs, one of whom claims that, when he told Goody she’d been selected for the show, he thought, “This is either going to be the best thing that’s ever happened to you, or it’s going to be a complete disaster.” Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

BORN FAMOUS

Monday, Channel 4, 10pm

An unofficial companion piece to the Goody epic, this new series focuses on various celebrities who came from humble beginnings. Their children have never known anything other than a life of luxury. Do they realise how lucky they are? There’s only one way to find out: send them back to where their parents were brought up (for a week). The first specimens are Gordon Ramsay and his teenage son Jack. Chef Ramsay is a working class Scot who was raised on numerous council estates. When Jack materialises in one of dad’s old haunts, he learns a valuable lesson. He’s a nice lad who doesn’t flaunt his privilege, so this study of social mobility and inequality transcends its gimmicky premise.

THE SECRET TEACHER

Thursday, Channel 4, 9pm

This is one helluva week for uplifting social experiments on Channel 4. What’s going on? Cynical answer: they scored a hit with The Secret Millionaire, so here’s its sequel. More positive answer: it’s nice watching self-made entrepreneurs, some of whom were told that they’d never amount to a hill of beans, visit schools in the guise of support workers. Their mission is to encourage kids with untapped potential. For six weeks, undercover agents assist several harassed pupils and teachers. A certain amount of tidily tied-up TV happiness ensues, but this is ultimately a covert political statement. The government, not television, should be taking care of this problem. Still, we’ll all have a nice cry at the end.

THIS WAY UP

Thursday, Channel 4, 10pm

Now this is good. Very good indeed. A sitcom written by and starring the comedian Aisling Bea, about a woman readjusting to life in the wake of a nervous breakdown. It’s the vehicle Bea has been waiting for – so much so, she constructed it herself. She’s a very funny, smart, likeable, insightful person. All the adjectives. Her show understands, as anyone who’s been through something similar understands, that humour can be mined from the direst of circumstances. The performances, the dialogue, are natural and warm. It’s a sitcom mired in pain, but it doesn’t dwell on lazy Gervais-esque awkwardness for laughs. This Way Up is better than that. Also, Sharon Horgan plays Bea’s sister. Are you sold? I hope so.

LAST WEEK’S TV

ANIMALS AT PLAY

Sunday July 28, BBC Two

If Stanley Kubrick taught us anything, it’s that all work and no play makes Jack an axe-wielding homicidal maniac. Fortunately, our animal friends aren’t so easily distracted. This fascinating series began by spending social playtime in the presence of dolphins, chimps, bears and canines. Their sophisticated games are among the most advanced in the natural world. It’s only a matter of time before they conquer Scrabble.

HOLD THE SUNSET

Friday August 2, BBC One

Series two of this – there’s no other way to describe it – gentle sitcom began with retirees Edith (Alison Steadman) and Phil (John Cleese) continuing their quest to get away from it all. I wish I could muster a more interesting opinion about Hold The Sunset than this: it’s nice seeing Cleese, Steadman, Jason Watkins, Joanna Scanlan and Rosie Cavaliero in the same programme, isn't it? But I can’t.

TV Review: COME HOME + INDIAN SUMMER SCHOOL

This article was originally published in The Courier on 31st March 2018.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

COME HOME: Tuesday, BBC One

INDIAN SUMMER SCHOOL: Thursday, Channel 4

Society, with its infinite capacity for fairness and equality, has always decreed that a woman who leaves her family is guilty of a worse crime than a man who does the same.

Regardless of her personal circumstances, a mother is expected to feather the nest at all costs. Life, as all non-idiots know, is more complicated than that. The quietly devastating drama COME HOME confronts this stigma, this uncomfortably emotive issue, with commendable nuance and compassion.

Christopher Eccleston and Paula Malcomson star as Greg and Marie, a working-class couple with three children. One day, Marie walks out on them. They’re stunned and heartbroken. Why did she leave? Marie can only tell Greg that she felt suffocated, which only adds to his forlorn confusion. She didn’t leave him for someone else, she now lives alone in a house nearby.

Greg is still in love with her. As far as he’s concerned, her actions are a mystifying betrayal. She’s abandoned him and his beloved children. It’s not as black and white as that, of course. We’ll find out more about Marie’s motives as the series unfolds.

Episode one was told from Greg’s perspective, as he struggled to rebuild his life eleven months after Marie’s departure. A burgeoning romance with a work acquaintance spiralled out of control when her abusive ex-partner bulldozered into their lives. Behind her vivacious exterior, Greg’s new girlfriend is an emotionally scarred soul who fails to bond with his understandably sceptical children. She’s a vulnerable, tragic figure.

Eccleston, mercifully back in his serious drama comfort zone after an embarrassing “funny granddad” detour in The A Word, delivers a painfully raw performance as a man drowning in heartbreak and loneliness. His Belfast accent (Come Home was made with support from BBC Northern Ireland) is utterly convincing, it never distracts.

James Nesbitt must be spitting feathers, Eccleston has effortlessly stolen his troubled Irish everyman shoes.

The desperately sad, discomfiting scene in which Greg begged Marie to come home was beautifully played by Eccleston and Malcomson. We didn’t see much of her last week, but in later episodes Malcomson handles her difficult and complex role faultlessly. She’s superb.

Writer Danny Brocklehurst is a protégé of Jimmy McGovern, and it shows. Like McGovern, he spins engrossing gut-punching yarns populated by flawed characters unravelling in a jagged moral maze.

This is a drama we can all relate to in one way or another. We’ve all struggled to come to terms with the end of a relationship. We’ve all suffered from loss and regret. We’ve all, like Greg, listened to Lou Reed’s aching Pale Blue Eyes, or something similar, in the empty dead of night.

As hifalutin as this sounds, Come Home is a wise and moving meditation on the fragile mess of the human condition. It’s produced by RED, the company behind the similarly outstanding Happy Valley. If they keep this up, they’ll have to build a fortified annex for their BAFTA storage.

In the new documentary series INDIAN SUMMER SCHOOL, five underperforming British schoolboys volunteer to take their failed GCSE exams again in India’s Doon School, one of the world’s most prestigious seats of learning.

It’s a sympathetic culture clash experiment, refreshingly free of editorial judgement, about undisciplined yet decent kids dealing with a strange new world of rigid conformity. These boys genuinely want to improve their prospects, even if at the moment they’re emotionally unqualified to do so. I hope the experience pays off for them.