‘Riviera is the new Night Manager,’ I read somewhere. No, it’s not. Riviera (Sky Atlantic, Thursday) is the new Eldorado — except, unlike the doomed early 1990s soap opera in which Tony Holland attempted to recreate the success of EastEnders on the Costa del Sol, it has at least been glamorously relocated to Nice, Monaco, New York etc. The settings are the best thing about it.
The other day I had a very dispiriting conversation with a TV industry insider. It turns out that everything you see on reality TV is fake. It’s the ‘everything’ part that really bothered me. Obviously, we all sort of know that most TV is faked: that close-ups on wildlife documentaries are sometimes filmed in zoos and that the meerkat they pretend is the same meerkat is actually three different meerkats; that the chance meetings with colourful characters and experts are all prearranged and that when they answer the door and act surprised it’s often the third or fourth take; that the glamorous parties and realistic, totally unstilted dialogue on Made in Chelsea wouldn’t happen if the cameras weren’t there; and so on.
Psychological thrillers — or ‘thrillers’ as they used to be known — have become almost as ubiquitous on television as they are in the average bookshop. On the whole, this is now a genre where contented domesticity exists solely to be undermined, and where the chief function of the past is to come back and haunt people — which is clearly what it’s going to do in Channel 4’s Born to Kill, even if Thursday’s increasingly intriguing first episode was in no hurry to explain exactly how. To begin with, 16-year-old Sam (Jack Rowan) seemed to be on a solo mission to overturn all preconceptions about teenage boys.
An American woman started a website called ‘People I Want to Punch in the Throat’, in which she listed the people she wanted to punch in the throat. It was enormously successful and spawned a book called People I Want to Punch in the Throat, which sold very well. This is the heartening thing about the internet; the level of visceral loathing harboured by all of us for other people, which otherwise would remain hidden. I have thought about getting in on the action by starting a website called ‘People I Want to Stab to Death with a Bradawl’, or perhaps ‘People I Want to Dissolve in a Vat of Acid’. Very high up on my list for the bradawl treatment would be the BBC executive who decided that corporation staff would not be allowed to eat meat on Mondays.
An American woman started a website called ‘People I Want to Punch in the Throat’, in which she listed the people she wanted to punch in the throat. It was enormously successful and spawned a book called People I Want to Punch in the Throat, which sold very well. This is the heartening thing about the internet; the level of visceral loathing harboured by all of us for other people, which otherwise would remain hidden. I have thought about getting in on the action by starting a website called ‘People I Want to Stab to Death with a Bradawl’, or perhaps ‘People I Want to Dissolve in a Vat of Acid’. Very high up on my list for the bradawl treatment would be the BBC executive who decided that corporation staff would not be allowed to eat meat on Mondays.
Oh dear. With Scotland Yard treating today's attack in Westminster this afternoon 'as a terrorist incident', hacks have spent the day trying to establish more details about the situation that has so far claimed four casualties. However, has a thirst for news meant some are a bit too eager to publish before properly checking the facts? Mr S only asks after Channel 4 had to perform a humiliating U-turn this evening live on air. At the beginning of Channel 4's 7 O'clock news bulletin, the broadcaster announced that they had reason to believe Abu Izzadeen, the Islamic hate preacher, was the Westminster terror attacker. However as the show went on, this 'scoop' began to unravel. You see there was a problem...
Fans of tough investigative journalism should probably avoid Channel 4’s How’d You Get So Rich? Presenter Katherine Ryan’s main tactic is to ask wealthy people how much they paid for something and, when they tell her, to repeat their answer in a tone of wondering admiration. Yet, despite her best efforts to keep it shallow, the programme does end up shedding some light on our peculiar attitudes to the very rich — and in particular our capacity to feel superior and inferior to them at the same time. Ryan, a Canadian comedian who’ll be familiar to anybody who’s watched virtually any panel show, began Monday’s opening episode at the Shropshire pile owned by Steve Smith, the founder of Poundland.
There was a good programme last week on Channel 4 about Muslims looking for love, or at least marriage. It was called 'Extremely British Muslims', and it did indeed show us some young Muslims who were very much like anyone else. But it was also a reminder that many Muslims have a deep-seated assumption about religion and secularism that the rest of don’t. Lots of these young Muslims, though not very religious, saw it as their duty to become more religious as they grew up and settled down. Religion, for them, was an essential part of becoming responsible, civic-minded, family-minded, and about putting away youthful selfishness. And – the other side of the coin – secularism was assumed to be devoid of such healthy values, the site of mere hedonism.
Just in case tensions between Brexiteers and Remain-ers were beginning to die down now that MPs have voted for Article 50, television producers are at the ready to whip up more drama between the two camps. Channel 4 is bringing back Wife Swap for a Brexit special. While it has been touted as a one-off special, Mr S has been passed the casting call which suggests they are looking for more than one pair of families to take part. So, are you a Brexiteer who is ready and willing to convince a family of Remain-ers that Brexit Britain isn't such a bad thing? If so, details on how to apply can be found above.
With the Shannon Matthews story, it’s not easy to accentuate the positive — but BBC1’s The Moorside (Tuesday) is having a go nonetheless. Although touching at times, the result ultimately proves a rather awkward watch. Shannon was nine when she went missing from the Moorside estate, Dewsbury, in February 2008. Her mother Karen made a tearful televised appeal for the return of ‘my beautiful princess daughter’, but ended up serving four years in jail for being an accomplice in Shannon’s kidnapping. With her chaotic taxpayer-funded life, and her seven children by five fathers, Karen was duly turned into a sort of anti-poster girl for the tabloids. The Moorside itself became a symbol, including for David Cameron, of ‘our broken society’.
Why do humans want to build robots? It seems, on the face of it, to be a suicidal endeavour, destroying jobs and, ultimately, rendering our species redundant as more intelligent and effective beings take over. Lacking, as we now do, an agreed metaphysical justification for human specialness — for example, the soul — it must only be a matter of time before we submit to the machine ascendancy. So far, it has been a subtle, incremental process that conceals any wider significance. Take satellite navigation. This was first introduced in the 1980s and is now more or less universal. Maps have become quaint. As a result, we walk or drive without a visual model of where we are. This may be a small loss of human agency but it’s a loss nonetheless.
In 2015, the first series of Humans (Sunday) was apparently Channel 4’s most watched home grown drama since The Camomile Lawn: a programme broadcast when Neil Kinnock was still the Labour leader and given a obvious ratings boost by the tabloid outrage about its many nude scenes (and by its many nude scenes). In the case of Humans, though, the British people can’t be accused of ulterior motives, because this is a winningly intelligent piece of sci fi that ponders, among other things, the nature of consciousness and the future of the human race. Cleverly, too, it’s set, not in a domed city of jet packing commuters, but in a world very like our own.
I’ve spent the last few weeks making a documentary for Channel 4’s Dispatches on what I regard as one the biggest new arguments of our times: the generation wars. The idea that (as David Willetts famously put it) the ‘baby boomers took their children’s’ future’ – and ‘should give it back’. I’ve been talking to various experts, being heckled at protest marches, wading through research and putting the established wisdom to the test. The result is on Channel 4 documentary: The Wealth Gap. Only Channel 4 really does documentaries about ideas: the asset bubble, the relationship between wealth and longevity.
The closing credits of National Treasure (Channel 4, Tuesday) contain the usual disclaimer that any resemblance between its characters and real people is merely coincidental. Well, coincidental maybe, but also entirely inevitable — because this is a drama based on Operation Yewtree. With its choice of subject matter, a cast including Robbie Coltrane and Julie Walters and a script by Jack Thorne (author of the all-conquering Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), the series is clearly intended as an Important Piece of Television. Yet, partly for that reason, it’s so far proving a rather careful one. Nobody who watched the first episode could accuse it of sensationalism.
I think I might be turning into Alf Garnett. When I was growing up I saw him as an obnoxious, cantankerous, ranting old git that my grandparents’ generation seemed to find funny but who left me cold. Now I’m beginning to identify with him as an unfairly maligned and surprisingly youthful fount of wisdom whose tragedy is to be ignored by maddeningly unsympathetic womenfolk and infuriating kids. That was my thought, anyway, watching Till Death Us Do Part (Thursday, BBC Four) — a one-off remake of one of Johnny Speight’s original Sixties scripts, with The Fast Show’s Simon Day as Alf.
The unacknowledged subtitle of Channel 4’s new reality series Eden (Mondays) is Die, Hippies! Die! Obviously they’re not going to admit this because that wouldn’t be right. But I’m sure Channel 4 is hoping that a terrible Lord of the Flies-type scenario will unfold for the 23 victims who’ve volunteered to get back to nature on a remote Scottish peninsula for 12 months, in which they hunt one another down with sharpened sticks, with hideously watchable consequences. In episode one, my money would have been on Anton as chap-best-placed-to-survive.
The big returning show of the week began with servants laying out the silverware at a large country house in 1924. But rather than a shock comeback for Downton Abbey, this was — perhaps even more unexpectedly — Tommy Shelby’s new home in Peaky Blinders (BBC2, Thursday). Which explains why so many of the guests were carrying guns, and why the family matriarch was using the word ‘fuck’ a lot more than Lady Grantham ever did. When we last saw gang-leader Tommy (Cillian Murphy), he was still based in the Birmingham backstreets. He was also having a fairly tough time — what with juggling two women, trying not to get murdered and being required by the government to start the Irish Civil War. Two years on, however, things are clearly looking up.
Now that Jeremy Corbyn is head of the Labour party, his army of Corbynistas are waiting in the wings, ready to brand anyone who shows the slightest sign of disloyalty a 'red Tory'. Some of the 'Tories' so far outed by the hard left include Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper, John McTernan, Stella Creasy, Harriet Harman, Tony Blair and Lord Adonis. However, even Mr S was surprised to learn of the latest non-believer to be added to the list. Despite being mocked recently for being a 'revolutionary Marxist' by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Paul Mason has now been accused of being a secret Tory.
Last night Channel 4 broadcast a programme by Trevor Phillips, in which he worried about the integration of British Muslims. He suggested that we should switch to a policy of ‘active integration’. The night before, at the same time of 10pm, Channel 4 broadcast a programme in which the merits of having sex with a complete stranger were discussed. Some people find it very liberating, a sexpert explained, as a thrilled audience of thickos tittered. Yes I know – I wrote about Sex Box last week – one more strike and I’m officially volunteering to be the new Mary Whitehouse. My point is that sensationalist TV is guilty of falsifying who we are as a nation in a way that alienates people with traditional moral views.
Growing up in my Mum’s house, Wogan was king. Throughout the 1980s leading lights like Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and Sammy Davis Jr sat on his sofa and - vicariously - in our living room in Tottenham too. As well as its historic duty to 'inform, educate and entertain', the principle of universality has always been at the very heart of what the BBC stands for. Our most cherished cultural institution is at its root a universal service that must reflect all of Britain by virtue of the simple fact that it is funded by all Britons. In a multi-platform, digital age where more content is available than ever before and is being consumed online, on demand and on the move, viewers can now flick between Netflix, Amazon Prime and a multitude of other sources at the click of a button.