HERE’S one for you: Danny Dyer on Harold Pinter (Sky Arts, Tuesday, 9pm). It sounds like the title for a skit along the lines of Heroin Galore!, the Fast Show’s take on the Ealing classic, but straight up, as the presenter himself would say, it’s a proper documentary wiff sit dahn interviews an awl that malarkey.
(As anyone familiar with his oeuvre will know, Mr Dyer, currently a resident of Walford Square in EastEnders, could never be accused of skimping on the Cockney front.)
When he was a 22-year-old actor, Dyer auditioned for and became something of a protege of Harold Pinter, giant of modern theatre and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. All true, and set out here in fine style by Dyer and writer-director Ian Denyer.
As Dyer admits, he never really knew what made the playwright and actor tick. His aim here is to find out why Pinter should have taken a shine to him, and to discover what his plays, several of which Dyer has appeared in (another revelation) are all about. “Or is it just me who ain’t got a clue?” he says candidly of Celebration, The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter and their ilk.
Dyer can overdo it as the wide boy who hasn’t the proverbial Scooby. His first television role was as a teenage tearaway in Prime Suspect in 1993, and he has pretty much been in work since. He knows the business and he is no daft laddie, as he shows here in interviews with directors or fellow actors including Kenneth Cranham (another Pinter favourite).
In tracing Pinter’s life and times, Dyer finds some similarities with his own upbringing in the East End of London, and as someone who wears his political heart on his sleeve (the programme wisely cannot resist revisiting the time on live TV when Dyer called former Prime Minister David Cameron a ****).
Mostly he discovers that the things Pinter explored, including violence, fear, and paranoia, had much to do with the Cold War era in which he came of age.
There is a touch of Pygmalion about the piece, with Dyer saying he felt more intelligent just by standing next to Pinter. The most genuine and moving moments happen when Dyer speaks from the heart about his own insecurities and failings, including the night he was in no fit state to perform Pinter on Broadway but went ahead anyway.
As he showed in Who Do You Think You Are, when he was revealed to be a direct descendant of William the Conqueror (for what that is worth), Dyer is full of surprises, the Pinter connection among them.
Still in his early forties, he has a while to astonish us yet. Just stay away from the movies, dear, there’s a love.
In these pandemic days a lot of television arrives looking dated. That is particularly true of The Grand Party Hotel (BBC1, Thursday, 8pm. Above: Fearne (receptionist), Eric (doorman) and June (cleaner).
A fly on the wall documentary about The Shankly Hotel in Liverpool, which specialises in “group sleepovers” for parties of anything up to 24 people, half the guests would be fined for breaching regulations if the programme was being filmed now.
As it is, most of them are merely guilty of over exuberance, while the hotel owner deserves a night in the cells for crimes against interior design. If you are looking for a hotel with jungle print wallpaper, gold painted lions, fake flamingoes hanging from the ceiling, and a giant jacuzzi in every room, you’ve come to the right place.
With hot and cold running hen nights, stag dos, weddings and baby showers, the party hotel looks like a nightmare to stay if all you are after is a quiet dinner and bed. Which makes it a great place for a doc, of course.
All the usual elements of such series are present: clashing characters on the staff, a new manager looking to make an impression (“I don’t suffer fools”), and guests with backstories, such as the first time grandma and the newly divorced. All human life is here, quite a bit of it three sheets to the wind. Everyone seems to enjoy themselves, though I don’t suppose the housekeeping staff are laughing when they arrive to clean up. As a former member of that noble breed I bristled on their behalf.
There may not be any pantomimes this year, but just in time with a supply of daft jokes comes the return of Ghosts (BBC1, Monday, 8.30pm). Alison and Mike (Charlotte Ritchie and Kiell Smith-Bynoe) are still trying to turn their money pit of an old house into a fancy hotel and spa. If only the resident spectres would let them.
Among the ghosts are a Stone Age man, an Army captain, a corpseless head, a disgraced MP, and a matron called Fanny, whose name is not at all exploited for cheap laughs. Written by Martha Howe-Douglas and Laurence Rickard, Ghosts should connect with most viewers’ funny bones.
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