TWO makeover programmes, a couple of decades apart, slightly different titles, but together showing how times have changed.
What Not to Wear was the early noughties reality programme hosted by Trinny and Susannah. Prescriptive title, bossy chicks, one of them prone to assessing cup size by grabbing a handful of breast, it was not a show for the faint hearted victim, sorry, subject. One celebrity participant, Jeremy Clarkson, said he would rather eat his own hair rather than shop with T&S again.
Fast forward to a new show, You Are What You Wear (BBC1, Thursday). Cheerleading title, best buddy host in Rylan Clark-Neal, it wants to be a different kind of makeover show, the kind that looks at a person’s inner beauty and tries to bring it to the surface. Or some such cobblers.
You Are What You Wear has a whiff of last season about it, but it is not entirely the programme’s fault. It was originally meant to air in the middle of March when thoughts were turning to Spring clothes and shopping.
Then “it” happened. Shops, those brightly lit temples to consumerism, were deemed risky places to hang around in and began closing, left, right, and city centre. You Are What You Wear was put back on the shelf, its primetime slot given over to news bulletins and documentaries more in keeping with the nerve-jangling times.
Stores in England open again on June 15, but Scotland’s shoppers have a while to go yet before they are out of the lockdown woods. When they eventually return it will be to a different retail world, one of queuing, not trying anything on, and hand sanitisers everywhere.
Filmed before virus times, there is none of that, mercifully, in You Are What You Wear. It has a team of stylists on hand to help punters out with problems ranging from wearing too many tracky bottoms to a fear of wearing colour. All very light and bright, the kind of show where people say things like, “You can’t get much better than a blazer”, and every second word is “a-mazing”. It could be a-nnoying, but if you are in the market for escapism give it a try.
After the success of The Trip with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, and Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, the male buddy double act has become fashionable again. The latest fine bromance is between David Tennant and Michael Sheen, who worked together on Good Omens, and now appear in Staged BBC1, Wednesday, above).
This format works when the viewer senses a genuine friendship between the two parties. In the case of Brydon and Coogan there’s also an intense rivalry that I don’t believe is entirely put on for the cameras, and which lends the shows a satisfying edge.
Staged is another slice of lockdown-themed viewing. The conceit is that Tennant and Sheen were about to do a West End play together, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, when the same thing that did for You Are What You Wear came along.
Simon the director (Simon Evans, who also co-wrote the six episodes), would still like to get going on casting and rehearsals so the production is ready to roll as soon as the theatres return.
Since Tennant and Sheen are bored out of their overactive minds (the Scot is spelling words backwards in his brain, the Welshman reckons the birds in his garden are out to get him), they agree to give it a go over Zoom.
There follow the usual glitches and goofs, most of which will be wearily familiar to many but which Tennant and Sheen manage to mine fresh gags from. The pair have great fun sending up notions of themselves: Tennant the nervy, gabbling one, Sheen the proud actor who thinks he’s the new Olivier. They tease each other the way pals, particularly of the Celt variety, do. With each episode just 15 minutes long, you may want to binge watch on iPlayer.
A couple of old familiars come to an end this week. The A Word is familiar in a good way, like a comfy armchair in front of the fire on a winter’s afternoon. The only complaint I’ll ever have about Peter Bowker’s family drama is that there is not more of it.
Killing Eve gets its coat and goes as well. This series has been familiar in a not so good way. Three seasons in, it has felt as though it is treading water, with few fresh ideas.
I’ve enjoyed Harriet Walter’s assassin mentor Dasha, and the main actors, Jodie Comer, Sandra Oh and Fiona Shaw, are as watchable as ever. But maybe the idea of a glamorous assassin and the former spy on which she is fixated has simply had its day. Fallen out of fashion if you like, even if Villanelle’s clothes are still ab fab.
You Are What You Wear, BBC1, Thursday, 8.05pm; Staged BBC1, Wednesday, 10.45; The A Word, BBC1, Tuesday, 9pm; Killing Eve, Sunday, BBC1, 9.15pm.
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