Culture

Is there anything menopausal women can’t do (on television)? Last Sunday, as a couple of them were still working on the daring theft of a Salvador Dali painting in ITV1’s Frauds, BBC1 launched Riot Women in which five others form a punk band. Meanwhile, two regular features of British TV remain actresses lamenting the lack of older women starring in drama series – and older women starring in drama series. Virtually all these shows also recall the headline from the American satirical magazine The Onion: ‘Women empowered by whatever a woman does.’ And that’s certainly true of Riot Women, written by Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley, Gentleman Jack etc.) and therefore set in the Calder Valley, with the author’s message never hard to detect.

First the surprising news: not a single one of the four Guinness siblings in 1868 Dublin is black; and only 25 per cent of them – surely a record for Netflix – is gay. Now the bad: despite these oversights, House of Guinness remains very recognisably the work of Steven Knight, the Peaky Blinders screenwriter who once set a drama in 1919 Birmingham and said to himself: ‘I know just what this period needs to make it more echt: a cameo appearance by dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah.’ As a Brummie (more or less), I loathed Peaky Blinders.

By now, viewers of TV thrillers are no strangers to a baffling prologue – but this week brought a particularly extreme example. Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue opened with shots of a desert, a cactus, an animal skull nailed to a cross and a moustachioed man driving a battered pick-up truck with a Virgin Mary on the dashboard. So we were definitely in Mexico. For a while, however, that was about all that was clear, as the words ‘Day Nine’ flashed up and the truck’s unidentified female passenger spied on a dilapidated military base through binoculars.

As we know, when terrestrial television has a big new hit these days, its response – once it’s got over the surprise – is to serve up a variation on the same formula. In the case of The Hack, the hit that inspired it is clearly Mr Bates vs the Post Office, as another real-life plucky underdog takes on a shadowy, powerful cabal – this time over phone-hacking – and struggles to get the story heard. In the first episode, the formula remained strong, but the variation bit fell somewhere between the unnecessary and the badly misguided. The episode opened with a voice-over urging us to imagine a country where ‘people believe they are living in a democracy’, when in fact they’re ‘being abused by a treacherous combination of press, police and politicians’.

The drama series Doc began with the most literal of bangs. While the screen remained black, the sound-effects team knocked themselves out by creating a spectacular crashing noise. When the lights came on, we saw a smashed-up car containing ‘a female, unresponsive’. By the time she did respond – one major brain operation and seven seconds of the show later – it was apparent to the doctors that there was something high-concept wrong with her. As her colleagues at Minneapolis’s Westside hospital, they knew she was right to say her name was Amy Larsen, but her answers about her children’s ages, her current job status and the name of the president were all eight years out of date. Amy had forgotten everything between 2016 and the present day.

Apart from hunting, one of the very few consolations of the end of summer is that telly stops being quite so dire. But that moment hasn’t quite arrived yet – as you can tell from the fact that I’m reviewing Hostage. There’s so much that is annoying about Hostage that I don’t know quite where to begin. But let’s start with its cloth-eared use of the word ‘abducted’. Suppose you were the prime minister (Suranne Jones) and your implausible Médicins Sans Frontières husband Alex (Ashley Thomas) had been kidnapped by a masked terror group in French Guiana and you had to brief your teenage daughter on what had happened, which verb would you use: the formal, uptight, Latinate, police-procedural one or the normal spoken-English one?

Another week, another show striving desperately to become the new Traitors. So it is that The Inheritance brings a group of disparate people together in a very big house, gives them tasks that win them money and invites them to pretend to cooperate while secretly behaving treacherously. In fact, about the only surprising thing about it is that it’s pretty good. It’s also, I think, pretty knowing: aware of its possible absurdity, often quite camp, yet still going about its business with a face set resolutely to po. The premise is that the very big house’s owner has died, leaving a rather implausible will that requires 13 strangers to compete for her money by collecting stuff and betraying each other.

During lockdown, a friend and I moved into a flat that had a difficult relationship with the TV aerial. Ineptitude and laziness combined to ensure that the only channels we were able to watch were BBC ones via the iPlayer app. So most nights – if there was no live sport – we found that our entertainment was at the behest of the state broadcaster. And what a drag it was. Every time, we’d reject the populist crap on BBC1, the parochial crap on BBC2, the braindead crap on BBC3, the boring crap on BBC4, the insane crap on BBC News, the wrist-slashing crap on BBC Parliament. And then we’d get to the end of the nav bar, to see one option left, and my flatmate would put on a Scottish accent and say: ‘Alreet, what’s on Alba?

I once spent a delightful weekend in Madrid with the co-producer of Alien. His name was David Giler (now dead, sadly, I’ve just discovered) and he’d hit upon the bizarre idea of trying to get my anti-eco-lunacy book Watermelons made into a Hollywood movie. The film project never came off but I did learn an important lesson in our time together, hanging out in nice restaurants and pretending to work: if you want a happy life cushioned from financial care, the secret is to wangle yourself percentage points of a successful franchise. Another example of this is Franc Roddam, with whom I once spent an even stranger weekend in Accra, Ghana. Roddam devised the format for the MasterChef concept and has been sitting pretty ever since.

The punters are saying My Oxford Year is a disaster. ‘Predictable, uninspiring and laughable,’ complains some meanie on Rotten Tomatoes. But they’re missing the point. My Oxford Year may be a work of accidental genius, but it’s a work of genius nonetheless. You will squirm, you will laugh derisively, you will cringe. By the end, though, you will be forced to admit that you secretly enjoyed every moment, for this is the very examplar of a so-bad-it’s-good masterpiece. You know it’s going to be awful from the very first frame: a still representing the bookshelf of our handsome, clever and poor heroine Anna De La Vega (Sofia Carson) who has come up to Oxford to spend a year doing an MA in Victorian poetry prior to taking up a job at Goldman Sachs.

If you enjoyed Apocalypto – that long but exciting Mel Gibson movie about natives being chased through the jungle with (supposedly) ancient Mayan dialogue – then you’ll probably like Chief of War, which is much the same, only in Hawaiian. Like Apocalypto, it even has sailing ships appearing mysteriously from Europe with crews that serve the role of dei ex machina, rescuing endangered native protagonists at key moments. This time our based-on-a-true-story hero is Ka’iana, the 18th-century Maui chieftain who succeeded in uniting the four warring island kingdoms (Oahu, Maui, Molokai and Lanai) and turned them into the kingdom of Hawaii.

President Trump has a very small willy. His boyfriend is Satan. He’s a con man who will sue you for billions on the flimsiest of pretexts but will probably settle for a few hundred million. If this is your idea of cutting-edge satire then you are going to love the new season of South Park, which includes a number of scenes of Trump stripping off in his White House bedroom and trying to interest the devil in his minuscule appendage. But if I were Paramount+ and I’d just signed a $1.5 billion deal for the exclusive five-year rights to South Park, I think I’d be feeling a bit shortchanged by the première of the show’s 27th season. Sure, you could argue that South Park was always this way: the first episode (in 1997) was, after all, titled ‘Cartman Gets An Anal Probe’.

It’s been a good week for fans of TV dramas that are set partly in Syria, feature poetry-lovers confronting extreme violence, like to keep their viewers in the dark (sometimes literally) and have main characters with Australian accents (sometimes accidentally). But there are also significant differences between the two examples on display – with The Narrow Road to the Deep North the much more sombre and The Veil the considerably more bonkers. Adapted from Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winner, The Narrow Road began in Syria in 1941. Through what would prove the programme’s characteristic murk, a group of Australian soldiers led by one Dorrigo Evans could just about be seen rescuing a young boy and joshing about the respective size of their penises.

One of the great things about getting older is no longer feeling under any obligation to try to like stuff you were doomed never to like. Steely Dan, Dickens, Stravinsky, Henry James, George Eliot, Wagner, the Grateful Dead, Robin Williams, the collected films of Wes Anderson and Tim Burton, Graham Greene, the Clash, The Young Ones, Seinfeld, Emily Dickinson – obviously I could go on. I don’t like them; I never did like them; but the difference between then and now is that now I know I’m right, whereas then I thought it might be a personal deficiency. Also fairly high on my ‘No’ list would be superhero comics, superhero movies and late-1980s graphic novels, including the excessively fawned-upon Watchmen.

Today’s television is notably fond of presenting us with very rich people to both despise and wish we lived like. As well as high-end dramas like Succession and The White Lotus (a programme that’s caused a huge rise in bookings for the resorts where its characters’ dreadfulness is filmed), there are any number of documentaries in which the bling’s the thing. Netflix, for example, has a genre called ‘Lavish Reality Lifestyles’ that consists of 38 different shows. In a mildly cunning twist, Billion Dollar Playground makes some of the staff who wait on the wealthy a kind of audience surrogate: mixing enthusiastic wonder at all that money can bring with beady-eyed disdain for the sense of entitlement displayed by those it brings it to.

Marge Simpson is dead. But does anyone care? I’ve written loads of pieces over the years about the genius of The Simpsons – how extraordinarily prescient it is (most famously when, in 2000, it predicted a Trump presidency), how delightful the subplots are, how it works on so many levels – but I’m now beginning to suspect that all along it was a honeytrap designed to seduce you and your children into screen zombiedom. Obviously I don’t want to push the ‘TV is bad for you’ argument too hard because I might be out of a job.

There aren’t many dramas featuring the rise of the Nazis that could be described as jaunty, but Outrageous is one. Oddly, this seems to be the first ever TV drama about the Mitford sisters – and, faced with the choice between playing it for laughs, going for a big historical soap opera or exploring the increasingly dark politics of the 1930s, the show’s writer Sarah Williams has, perhaps wisely, opted for all three. At times, admittedly, the clash of tones can be jarring, but generally in a way that feels like an authentic reflection of a story that remains irreducibly weird. The show also strikes a neat balance between acknowledging the Mitfords’ charm and never entirely succumbing to it.

Can you imagine how dull a TV detective series set in a realistic Scottish police station would be? Inspector Salma Rasheed would have her work cut out that’s for sure: the wicked gamekeeper on the grisly toff’s estate who murdered a hen harrier and then blamed its decapitation on an innocent wind turbine; the haggis butcher who misgendered his vegetarian assistant; the Englishman who made a joke on Twitter about a Scotsman going to the chippy and ordering a deep-fried can of Coke… It would get lots of awards, obviously, but I doubt it would do that well in the ratings. As with Slow Horses, this is about enjoying the company of loveable misfits But you needn’t worry about Dept. Q (Netflix).

On the face of it, Beth seemed that most old-fashioned of TV genres: the single play. In fact, Monday’s programme was the complete version of a three-parter made for YouTube and excitedly announced as Channel 4’s first-ever digital commission. A less excited interpretation, however, might be that it was Channel 4’s first sign of surrender to the hostile forces of streaming now threatening all of Britain’s terrestrial networks. Either way, it was a peculiar watch that, over the course of its 36 minutes, felt less like a fully fledged drama than notes towards one. In a nervous bid to ensure YouTube viewers were gripped before they could search for something else, it began with a good-looking couple having sex. But not for long.

You had a narrow escape this week. I was about to urge you to watch Sirens, the latest iteration of that fashionable genre Ultra-Rich Lifestyle Porn, currently trending on Netflix. But luckily for you I watched it right to the end and got to witness the whole edifice collapsing like a speeded up version of Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. Normally, this doesn’t happen. Like most critics I have neither the time nor the work ethic to view a TV series in its entirety before putting in my tuppenny-ha’penny’s worth. I just assume that if something starts well or badly it’s going to continue that way. Not Sirens, though.

Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius began by saying that ‘getting into her mind isn’t easy’ – something you’d never have guessed from the rest of the episode, where both the narrator and the talking heads were able to tell us exactly what Austen was thinking and feeling at any given time. Like many Austen biographies, this one laments her sister Cassandra’s decision to burn most of her letters, but then takes full advantage of how little we consequently know about her to portray (or possibly make up) a woman whose attitudes are spookily close to its own. In a previous era, this might have meant presenting Austen as a gentle and contentedly domestic aunt. Now of course it means that ‘at a time when women were supposed to know their place, Austen ripped up the rulebook’.

The Four Seasons is one of those shows you notice in the ‘Top TV Programmes on Netflix’ section, see it’s some kind of glossy romantic comedy starring American actors you’ve vaguely heard of, and skip past quickly in search of something with zombies or subtitles. This would be a mistake though because, at least if you are of a certain age, you’re really going to enjoy it. I think the litmus test is whether you’re old enough to remember the 1981 Alan Alda film on which it is based, which I do, just about, vaguely. It’s that kind of movie where a bunch of old friends who have been holidaying together regularly since university – does anyone actually do this? – are discombobulated by and rebond over a traumatic event.

‘Next time you do a review, you’ve got to find something you like. You’ve been far too negative,’ said the Fawn. ‘Well, it’s hardly my fault if everything on TV is crap at the moment. I can’t just call up good stuff to order,’ I said. ‘Try,’ said the Fawn. Luckily – and unwontedly – Netflix has come to my rescue with a dystopian sci-fi series called The Eternaut. Though I’m not totally convinced by the name – a conflation of ‘eternity’ and ‘astronaut’ – it’s a very enjoyable watch, which confirms, yet again, Delingpole’s Iron Law of Television: always go for the shows with subtitles. This one is from Argentina, based on a graphic novel written by Hector German Oesterheld with artwork by Francisco Solano-Lopez.

Antonin Carême was known as the ‘chef of kings and the king of chefs’. His patrons and employers included Talleyrand, Napoleon, the Prince Regent, Tsar Alexander and the then richest man in France, James Rothschild. He popularised the tall ‘toque’ hat worn by chefs; he either invented or perfected culinary classics including the vol-au-vent, the profiterole and the mille-feuille, as well as sauces including velouté and béchamel. All this he managed to achieve despite having come from a desperately poor background, raised in a shack in revolutionary France and sent off as a young lad to help make ends meet as a kitchen boy and later as apprentice to Paris’s best patissier. A fascinating rags to riches story, you might think.

Louis Theroux: The Settlers was never likely to be a programme with much of a narrative arc – and so it proved. In the first 30 seconds, Louis put it to a Jewish householder on the West Bank that his house was ‘quite deep in what are called the Palestinian Territories’. ‘You call it the Palestinian Territories,’ the man replied. ‘I call it the heart of Judea.’ And that, on the whole, was that. Louis travelled from one Jewish settlement to another, doing his best to challenge the inhabitants with his faux-naif questions and impressive range of quizzical expressions. And yet, of course, none of them budged an inch.