If one morning you should ever call on the painter and sculptor Maggi Hambling for tea, don’t bring her a croissant. A cinnamon bun is grand, but a croissant will be met with a (very) firm refusal.
Here’s hoping I took more away from My Week with … Maggi Hambling (Sky Arts/Now) than the skinny on her pastry choices. Art historian Kate Bryan’s film, the first of three on women artists, was an enthralling, funny, sometimes magical hour. Being on Sky Arts, free to view as well.
Bryan was rather chuffed with the bun breakthrough. “Oh, did I get that right?” she cried. It was the start of the seven days and she was excited but nervous.
“She’s never let anyone spend time with her like this before,” said Bryan. Judging by the greeting, the two were not strangers, but you knew what the presenter meant. While Hambling was a formidable presence, she balanced this with a wry sense of humour, as when Bryan laughed at the artist’s “rather fierce” passport photo. “People have said they’re surprised I’m let back into the country,” said Hambling.
With her shades, drainpipe jeans and wild grey hair (think Brian May with a bob), Hambling looked like a bit of a geezer. It had been 18 months since her heart attack in New York, and she seemed in fine form.
We saw inside her London home and studio, but she drew the line at being filmed working. “I can’t paint in front of a camera because it will become performance,” she said.
However, she did describe the relationship between painter and subject.
“They have to sit on a table over there so my eyes are going straight into their eyes … Bit like a love affair. You hope at the end there will be a good portrait and not a broken heart.”
The last such “love affair” was with one Andy Murray. They shared a mutual interest in each other’s work, he visited her studio, the two became friends and she asked him to sit for her.
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Hambling was nervous on the day. “He arrived with a tennis racket he had played with as a present. He’s incredibly shy. I had him pose serving. To me it was only like a couple of minutes that he stood there serving, but to him it was a lot longer. After a bit he said I can’t stay like this any longer, I’m going to fall on my face.”
To complete the seven days, Bryan travelled to Hambling’s weekend place in Suffolk, where an installation by the artist moved the presenter to tears. “My God she’s an icon,” concluded Bryan, which Hambling might have laughed at had she heard.
It will be hard for Bryan to beat this with her next films, on Lubiana Himid and the Guerrilla Girls, but a lot of fun to watch her try.
Heaven knows what DCI Taggart would have made of the police officers in Dept Q (Netflix).
With their edgy haircuts, vintage duds, and impossibly youthful looks, they look like escapees from a hipster magazine fashion shoot rather than cops. “Only in Edinburgh,” Maryhill’s finest would likely growl before haring back to Glasgow.
Dept Q had Edinburgh and Scotland running right through it, which was a neat trick given it was based on a Copenhagen-set novel by Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen. Netflix reportedly considered Boston for the location as well, but Edinburgh got the gig. Smart choice.
Ditto the casting of Matthew Goode as DCI Carl Morck. On the face of it, Morck was just another grumpy maverick, but Goode added charm and vulnerability to the mix when the occasion demanded.
As for the rest of the cast, almost every cool Scottish actor you can think of had received call-up papers, including Kelly Macdonald (No Country for Old Men), Mark Bonnar and Jamie Sives (Guilt), Kate Dickie (Red Road), Chloe Pirrie (Shell), and Shirley Henderson (Bridget Jones).
The tale opened with Morck back at work after a long spell off. A seemingly routine shout he and his partner (Ives) attended had ended disastrously, leaving the senior detective to pick up the pieces of his career.
His boss (Kate Dickie) sent Morck off to a new cold case unit, Dept Q. Holed up in a basement office among the broken desks and chairs, it looked like Morck was heading for the skip, too. Then along came the case of a missing advocate (Chloe Pirrie) and Morck was back in the game.
After a cracking start the pace slowed, and for long stretches little seemed to be happening. There was some funny business going on with the timeline, and now and then the dialogue turned clunky, as if something had been lost in translation. And while we are at it, who ordered yet another maverick detective?
A little classiness goes a long way in smoothing over such faults, and this adaptation by Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit) had it to spare. Edinburgh, washed in blues and greys, looked moody and magnificent. The cast sparked off each other as if they’d worked together for most of their careers (as some probably have).
Best of all, the writers had gone their own, defiantly Scottish, way with the material. The bleak outlook, the barbed humour, the slagging of Morck for being English - was this the first attempt at nationalist noir we were watching? Dept Q was too savvy for that, but it had its moments.
I can imagine the pitch meeting for Death Valley (BBC1, Sunday) only too well.
“So, what do you have for us?”
“A murder mystery.”
“Sounds quirky. Always risky, quirky, when dealing with death. Unless it’s Only Murders in the Building, that’s genius. Is it like Only Murders in the Building?”
“Well, the central character is a retired actor who used to play a detective on TV, and he solves cases with a kooky young woman Detective Sergeant, so it is a bit like Only Murders.”
“Kooky. That’s as bad as quirky. Where’s it set?”
“Vale of Glamorgan, hence Death Valley. Plenty of local actors involved, including Steffan Rhodri, aka Dave Coaches from Gavin and Stacey, and Gwen from Gavin and Stacey plays the mum of the young woman DS.”
“Gavin and Stacey, eh? That’s more promising, but I still think it would be more at home in a sleepy afternoon slot rather than Sunday evening. So sorry, it’s a no.”
“Did I mention we’ve got Timothy Spall, bona fide national treasure, lined up to play the retired telly detective?”
“Talk about burying the lead, mate! We’ll have six episodes and don’t stint on the scenery.”
Spall played John Chapel, who used to play a telly detective called Caesar. Do keep up. While Caesar was still in his prime in rerun land, Chapel was holed up in a Vale of Glamorgan village.
When a murder was discovered nearby, young DS Janie Mallowan (Gwyneth Keyworth), who just happened to be Caesar’s number one fan, asked him for help. As they used to say on Early Doors, crime can’t crack itself.
A monumental amount of faffing went on before the tale got going, by which time the Janie character had become seriously annoying. A pity, because under other circumstances, Kirstie Allsopp-lookalike Keyworth would be a likeable sort. And perhaps the gentle humour would land better. Are jokes about star signs still a thing?
Spall is incapable of a duff performance, and his delightfully hammy Chapel/Caesar was reason enough to keep watching. But national treasure or not, the national patience has its limits.
A weekend of series finales beckons with Hacks (Sky Max/Now) and Your Friends and Neighbours (Apple TV+) bowing out. It was a slow start for Hacks, with Joan Rivers-style comedian Deborah Vance and her Gen Z writer Ava Daniels (Jean Smart, Hannah Eibinder) taking a while to gel again, but once they did, one of the best shows on TV came roaring back.
Jon Hamm’s career has gone the same way courtesy of Your Friends and Neighbours, with the Mad Men star superb as a financier whose world falls apart. As a bonus, the main title theme, The Joneses, might just be the coolest TV track since Succession. Both Hacks and Your Friends will be back for new series, just as soon as the real-life Avas can return to the writers' rooms and get stuck into the free doughnuts ...
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