TV folk (they’re like woodland folk, only taller) never tire of telling us that the small screen is going through a golden age. I think viewers will be the judge of that, Mr and Ms Commissioning Editor. Still, in a week when not one but several titans of television unveiled their latest offerings, the case for the golden age proposition is looking pretty, pretty good, and that’s before, oh joy, we get to the new series of Curb Your Enthusiasm next week.
That said, there was also an almighty egg laid in the schedules this week, and it was most certainly not golden. So where are we: golden, bronze, tin? Is there a metallurgist in the house?
First, the good, possibly great, stuff. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick are to documentary making what Sondheim is to songwriting. Having made groundbreaking series on the American Civil War and the Second World War it was inevitable that they should turn one day to Vietnam. That they are doing so more than four decades since the Fall of Saigon shows what an open wound Vietnam continues to be.
The first of 10 instalments in The Vietnam War (BBC Four, Monday 9pm) was typically enthralling, with history’s witnesses and protagonists, from former US marines and ex-North Vietnamese soldiers, to historians and reporters, having their say. Between talking heads there were the trademark Burnsian stills and archive footage of a quality one gets when a series has been ten years in the making. Here was the big picture, and the small, devastating details, as when a former agent for the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) revealed how America ran arms to Ho Chi Minh’s rebels in the Second World War as a way of weakening the Japanese. Unmissable.
Also good enough to induce goosebumps is The Deuce (Sky Atlantic). What do you need to know? That it is written by David Simon (The Wire) and George Pelacanos (for Stephen King’s money the greatest living American crime writer)? That it takes place in the walk-on-the-wild-side New York of the 1970s as the porn industry begins to take over the titular district near Times Square? Or that the cast includes such movie stars as James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal as a bar manager, his gambler twin brother, and hooker respectively? On the evidence of the nicely sleazy (and stunningly realised) opener, The Deuce is set to be a doozy.
More big-screen names were to the fore in The Child in Time (BBC One, Sunday, 9pm), an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel about a missing child. Benedict Cumberbatch and Kelly Macdonald played the parents trying to piece their lives back together. Though beautifully shot, with flawless performances from the two leads, this would normally be the kind of drama I would pay not to watch. But since I am paid to watch such fare, I did, and duly ended up in a small puddle on the floor. You too? Still, at least we will know what everyone is talking about when it comes to the inevitable Baftas.
I don’t think Bad Move (STV, Wednesday, 8pm) will be troubling awards juries. Written by and starring Jack Dee as a website designer who moves to the country, it has some nicely snarky lines, and Dee is always a pleasure to have around. I am not sniffing a second series, though.
The arts show Front Row has been on Radio 4 every weeknight for series after series. “I know,” some 20-watt commissioning editor presumably said, “since this is the golden age of TV, why don’t we put Front Row on Saturday night telly?” The answer was there to see on Front Row (BBC Two, Saturday, 7.30pm). Hosted by Giles Coren, who told the Radio Times he loved the theatre so much he hadn’t been in years, the half-hour programme was like some cheap reheat of the old Newsnight Review. But instead of the saving graces of a Tom “I’m Appalled” Paulin or Paul “Professional Northerner” Morley, Coren had some DJ from 5Live and a comedienne to keep him company as he made a hash of presenting.
Gesticulating madly, the three sparked off each other like wet tissues, and the subjects they covered, from Gilbert and George to whether Harry Potter had any merit beyond making loadsamoney for JK Rowling, have been done to death. Despite the show being made just up the road from here at the BBC’s Pacific Quay, the amount of time given over to the arts in Scotland was naff all.
The only segment worth the admission price was an interview with director Michael Winterbottom by John Wilson, the same, er, John Wilson who does the job perfectly well on radio.
First-class arts programming? Golden age of TV? I know what Jim Royle would say to that.
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