WITH the acres of gold-plating on show in Inside Dubai: Playground of the Rich (BBC2, Monday, 9pm), it looks like the kind of place where Donald Trump would feel right at home. Everything about this tax haven, the fourth most visited city in the world, shouts “money”, but is it for everyone?
The expat millionaires who live there clearly think so, as do the native Emiratis who are handed everything – land, jobs, position – on a (gold) plate. What, though, of the many migrant workers on low pay, or anyone who dares criticise the ruling elite? As Will Mellor, narrator of this three-part docuseries puts it, Dubai is “paradise for some – if you follow the rules”.
Among the expats is the wife of a businessman who gives us a tour of one of Dubai’s gated communities. She points out a house owned by the Mugabe family; they do amazing parties on New Year’s Eve, apparently.
Then there’s the fashionista who bought her lifebuoys from Hermes and Chanel. She has terrible trouble remembering the price of anything. Into every life a little rain, etc. Handily, the producers help out by supplying the prices in captions.
The divide between the haves and have nots becomes painfully apparent when the filmmakers talk to some of the domestic staff. One chef, who sends money home for her son’s education, has seen the boy once a year since he was born. He is now 20.
Fresh on the heels of its festive special, Call the Midwife (BBC1, Sunday, 8pm) starts a new eight part run.
Heida Thomas’s drama is now in its 11th series. The Christmas Day episode proved to be an opinion divider with some viewers wondering if the (spoiler alert) baby born to a heroin addicted mother was not too much realism. But blending the personal and the political has always been the strength of this drama, and there is no let up on that front as the calendar moves on to 1967.
After another year of lockdowns and more than a few repeats, 2022 starts strong with a rush of new dramas to go with the old familiars.
The Tourist (BBC1, Saturday/Sunday, 9pm, and on iPlayer) is a six-parter from Jack and Harry Williams (The Missing, Angela Black) which stars Jamie Dornan as a visitor to the Australian outback who doesn’t have a clue how he got there. That must have been quite the lost weekend.
British television is hardly short of strong women actors, and few do justice to true stories like Sheridan Smith and Maxine Peake. Smith stars in Four Lives (BBC1, Monday-Wednesday, 9pm) as a mother seeking justice after the murder of her son, while Peake plays the title role in Anne (STV, Sunday-Wednesday). Anne Williams’ teenage son, Kevin, was one of many who went off to watch a football match at Hillsborough stadium one day in 1989 and never came home again.
Art on the BBC (BBC4, Monday, 9pm) lets four young art historians loose in the corporation’s rich archives to find out how Auntie helped, or hindered, the understanding of great artists and their works. David Dibosa has Salvador Dali as his subject. An easy one, you might think, judging from Dibosa’s early description of the Spanish surrealist as “one of modern art’s greatest showmen”.
But was there more to him than the publicity stunts and the posters on many a student wall?
Having so much material to choose from was perhaps more a curse than a blessing. At times the film is a guddle, not quite knowing if it wants to be a conventional portrait of an artist, or a critique of the critics.
Worth watching, though, for Dibosa’s erudition and wit, and for the chance to stroll again through Auntie’s arts coverage. Omnibus, Arena, Malcolm Muggeridge, Sister Wendy (remember her?), they are all here, some of them teased delightfully, as in the clip of Alan Yentob speaking about Andre Breton. “Breton was surrealism’s godfather. Breton was surrealism’s midwife. Breton was surrealism’s seamstress.” Make your mind up, mate. Sister Wendy thought Dali set out to disturb and branded his works “horrible”.
Philippa Perry’s 2017 film, How to Be a Surrealist, earns rave reviews from the very choosy critics interviewed, and you can see it again right after Dibosi’s hour comes to a close. Other subjects in the coming weeks will be Van Gogh, Monet, and Turner.
It occurred to me that this, the second series of Art on the BBC, doubles as a sort of X-Factor to discover the next big name in TV arts coverage. As such, Dibosi marks himself out as a man to beat. I was also struck by how many arts presenters the BBC has had. In TV longevity terms the job is the equivalent of stuntman or crocodile wrangler. Good luck to the next man or woman who lands the gig.
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