Reviewed: The White Lotus; Reunion; Jules and Greg's Wild Swim; Grand Designs; Interior Design Masters with Alan Carr
Farewell for now to The White Lotus (Sky Atlantic/NOW, Monday). We’ll miss you. Some more than others.
The third series, set in Thailand, has not been as universally adored as its predecessors (Hawaii and Sicily). Too bleak, too slow, too bonkers (the brothers storyline). It took the arrival of Sam Rockwell as a bad boy gone to the good (and back again), to highlight what was sorely missing in this run - humour.
That, thankfully, returned in the finale. Some characters even left the resort happy. A fourth series is on the way once the producers settle on a location. Dare we suggest Scotland?
With the world as it is, you might think it impossible for any drama to beat reality for dystopian bleakness, and so it proved with the patchy seventh series of Black Mirror (Netflix).
But don’t give up on Charlie Brooker’s baby (now a teenager) just yet. There were flashes of brilliance here, and a few star turns - step forward Peter Capaldi - to make your head spin.
Of the six new episodes, the best was Common People. Chris O’Dowd and Rashida Jones played Mike and Amanda, just your average American couple struggling to get by.
When Amanda, a teacher, was felled by a brain tumour, it looked like recovery was going to be long, slow and painful. But then the pair were introduced to a new programme, Rivermind, which used an implant to get the brain working again. All that was needed to access the service was a monthly subscription at a surprisingly reasonable price.
Everything was going great until Amanda started to slow down again. An upgrade was required, for a fee of course. Upgrades, ad-free versions, special offers, basic models - any resemblance to streaming services was, I’m sure, wholly coincidental.
Elsewhere, Plaything had Peter Capaldi in a standout performance as a crazed gamer arrested for attempted murder, with fellow Glaswegian Lewis Gribben (T2 Trainspotting) as his younger self.
There was another star turn from Paul Giamatti as a shambling author who gets a call one day telling him an old flame has died. Would he contribute to the eulogy? Since the affair ended badly, he’s worked hard to erase memories of his lost love. But what do you know, technology, as in Common People, had a solution for that.
Like many other characters, Giamatti’s writer had no hesitation hooking his brain up to the latest tech. Have these people never seen an episode of Black Mirror?
When Alan Carr was last seen wielding a paintbrush with intent he was in the company of Amanda Holden doing another of their home transformations abroad. Holden barely lets him get a word in edgeways so it’s little wonder he goes a tad crazy in Interior Design Masters with Alan Carr (BBC1, Thursday).
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But then everyone is happy on this show. As a reality competition, it’s the opposite of The Apprentice. That said, judge Michelle Ogundehin does have a sofa of doom from which she dispatches a losing contestant each week.
In the first episode it looked like one of our own, Victoria, was going home to the west end of Glasgow sooner than anticipated. In the task to redesign a youth hostel room in the Lake District she had run riot with her signature style, “contemporary luxe” (lots of flowery stuff and stripes), and not paying attention to the practical needs of guests, like having somewhere to store their muddy boots. Luckily for Victoria, someone else got their marching orders.
Ah, stairs. You run up and down them like Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music for years, then suddenly every day is like climbing Everest in baffies.
Usual solutions, moving to a bungalow or installing a stairlift, aren’t for everyone, so I was intrigued to see if Grand Designs (Channel 4, Wednesday), had come across something better.
Kathryn, 82, had lost her husband a year ago. She couldn’t face leaving the street they had lived in for so many years, so with the help of an architect she came up with the idea of building a new home on the side of her existing house.
Presenter Kevin McCloud looked suitably aghast, especially when the cheery build manager said it would be done in ten months. “Yeah?” laughed Kevin. After hosting GD for more than 25 years our Kev has seen it all.
Of course, there were problems. Naturally, costs soared. Kev took to saying “pray God” a lot when Kathryn, still living on site, needed something to go right for once. Nothing like a home build to make a person find religion.
The new house was beautiful, truly stunning, with light flooding into the wide open yet still cosy and manageable spaces.
Not many would have the money or the energy to follow Kathryn’s example, but it might have inspired a few folk as they hiked the wooden stairs to Bedfordshire.
Now and then I like to take a look at what has migrated south from the BBC in Scotland and made it to the UK-wide network. If nothing else it shows how others see us.
Latest to take the leap is Jules and Greg’s Wild Swim (BBC2, Tuesday). Confession: I didn’t rush to see this when it was first on up here. More fool me, because it’s a modest but perfectly formed gem of a series. Think Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, with lots of calming water and without the faff of hooking a fish. There’s a dog, too, the canine cousin of Ted the Patterdale terrier. Bonnie’s the name and being a golden retriever is her game.
Actors Julie Wilson Nimmo and Greg Hemphill took up wild swimming in mid-life and have become evangelists for the cause. In a road trip around Scotland they met others for whom it has been everything from a balm to a lifesaver.
Jules dispensed hugs and joined in the tears, while Greg proved himself a mine of mostly useless information, and occasionally quite annoying with it. But he listened, bless him.
I liked the pair of them, and I liked the Scotland that was on screen. It was capable, confident, probably suffering from hypothermia, but it was out there, alive and kicking against the tide.
Revenge thriller Reunion (BBC1, Monday-Tuesday) attracted press attention before it aired because of its use of sign language language alongside spoken English and subtitles. An t-Eilean (The Island), the first primetime drama to use Gaelic, had a similar “What’s all this then? ”reception when it aired recently.
Matthew Gurney played Daniel Brennan, a lifer due for release after serving time for murder. His probation officer had not been told of Brennan’s deafness and didn’t have an interpreter with her at their first, crucial, meeting. Not for the first time, Brennan had been cut off from the hearing world and left to make do as best he could. Also in the cast were Anne-Marie Duff (who uses BSL), as the victim’s wife and Rose Ayling-Ellis as her daughter.
It is not the first time languages other than English have been used in television drama. What of all the Scandi box sets and the Walter Presents series on Channel 4? Watching with the subtitles on, moreover, has become the default mode for those (myself included) driven mad by mumbling. Poor sound quality, like general gloominess, is everywhere.
Reunion’s use of BSL did not change anything. No pace was lost as everything, signing and speaking, happened simultaneously. If anything, the use of BSL, with its sometimes heightened expressions, added to the intensity of exchanges.
Charlie Bigham: Britain’s Poshest Ready Meal? (Channel 5, Wednesday) was the latest in a line of moreish consumer documentaries from the channel.
The drill is always the same. Ask a juicy question, use it in the title, and assemble various talking heads to speak for or against the proposition. So, was Charlie Bigham Britain’s poshest meal?
The hour was a blur of experts blind-tasting chicken tikka masalas and macaroni cheese. The conclusions were pretty much as you could have imagined, with the ones with the freshest, most high-quality ingredients scoring the most.
The future in the luxury ready-made meal game is not garlic bread - so 1970s - but kits. Everything you need to make a meal in one box, with ingredients picked out, assembled, and delivered to your door with foolproof instructions. A bit like a Channel 5 documentary.
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