Culture

Back once more to our favourite unhappy place: the dystopian future. And yet again it seems that the authorities have been lying to us about the true nature of reality. This time – in Silo – the lie concerns the nature of the world outside the enormous silo in which our heroes and about 10,000 other survivors have been hiding for the past 100-odd years since some nameless apocalypse. Is it really as dangerous as the Powers That Be say? Or is this an illusion, maintained over a century of relentless official propaganda, designed to keep the enclosed populace frightened and in check? Silo began life in 2011 as a self-published short story by Hugh Howey – called Wool, not Silo – which he put out through Amazon’s Kindle Direct.

The most controversial aspect of Netflix’s new drama-documentary Queen Cleopatra – not least in Egypt – was the casting of a black actress, Adele James, in the title role. After all, one of the few things that seems certain about Cleopatra’s early life is that she was a Macedonian Greek. Luckily, though, the show had a powerful counterargument to this awkward and Eurocentric fact. As the African-American professor Shelley P. Haley put it with a QED-style flourish, back when she was girl, her beloved (if uneducated) grandmother once said to her: ‘I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black.

With the current taste for remakes of erotic-thriller movies of the 1980s and ’90s, these are certainly good times for TV intimacy co-ordinators. Just two weeks ago, we had Netflix’s Obsession. Now Paramount+ has come to the slightly weird party, turning the daddy of them all, Fatal Attraction, into an eight-part series. In the original film, you may remember, high-flying married lawyer Dan Gallagher had an ill-advised weekend fling with Alex Forrest, who didn’t take him ending it terribly well. Instead she posed such an unhinged single-female threat to the nuclear family (and its pet rabbit) that cinema audiences famously cheered when Dan’s wife Beth did the decent thing and shot the mad cow dead.

Tetris is a righteously entertaining movie about the stampede to secure the rights from within the Soviet Union to what would become the world’s bestselling video game. The question you’re going to be asking yourself time and again – especially during the Lada-ZiL chase scene through the streets of Moscow in which our heroes try to elude the hatchet-faced KGB agents – is: ‘How much of this is true?’ And the honest answer is: ‘Not very much, actually.

It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing itself as ‘erotic’ is in fact deeply boring. Unfortunately, faced with Netflix’s four-part Obsession, the b-word is hard to avoid – the twist in this case being that boring was as good as the series got. The rest of the time it alternated between the inept, the infuriating and the utterly mystifying – and not just because you could never fathom what on earth the characters thought they were up do. How, for instance, did so much money and talent get wasted on a show that the people involved with must surely have realised was terrible?

War Sailor (Krigsseileren), a three-part drama on Netflix about the Norwegian merchant navy in the second world war, is one of the best things you’ll see on TV this year. But I doubt many other critics are going to rave about it or even notice it, for some of the very same reasons that I think make it so cherishable: it’s meandering, episodic, understated and made in Norway, with subtitles. Originally released last year as a feature film for the international category of the Oscars (where it was overshadowed by the more in-your-face All Quiet On the Western Front), War Sailor is the most expensive Norwegian movie ever made. But there’s nothing showy or obviously big budget about it.

By now a genuinely radical way to turn a Victorian novel into a TV drama would be to take that novel and turn it into a TV drama. But while we wait for someone to do it, Great Expectations stays true to the current ideals of junking large parts of the source material and infecting what remains with the neuroses of our own age – thereby demonstrating once again the strange modern neediness to believe in our superiority to all those benighted bigots who came before us. (Please tell us we’re the best people who ever lived! Please!) Or rather, it takes those ideals to new heights that are either infuriating or hilarious depending on your mood. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

I have a theory that many great artists’ strength is a product of their weakness. The flaw of the relentlessly frivolous creator of Succession Jesse Armstrong, for example, is that he is very easily bored by grown-up subjects such as big business, finance, corporate structure, legal affairs or anything involving depth and seriousness. Which ought, you might think, to pose a major problem for someone constructing an epic drama – loosely based on the Murdoch family – about the struggle for succession in a global media empire. But Armstrong’s saving grace is this: most viewers are not interested in such tedium either.

Sunday-night dramas on the two main terrestrial channels definitely aren’t what they used to be. Not so long ago, you could bid farewell to the weekend with a reliable cocktail of lovely scenery, eccentric but good-natured rustics and plots carefully designed to warm the cockles. Now we have The Gold on BBC1 providing a meticulous analysis of recent economic history – while on ITV1 the new series of Grace began with an episode that hinged on one simple question asked early on: ‘What kind of sick mind dresses up in a full latex bodysuit and assaults his victims with a dildo?’ The programme is based on the bestselling novels by Peter James, whose avowed fondness for Brighton coppers extends to being a patron of the Sussex Police Charitable Trust.

Chris Rock was paid $20 million for his 70-minute Netflix special, so by my reckoning his riff on whether or not the royal family are racist must have made him more than a million quid. Was it worth the money? Well, I enjoyed it but I’m not sure how well it will translate here, in precis, with all the swearing removed. At that altitude, bodies get frozen to three times their normal weight Rock begins by pointing up the absurdity of Meghan Markle (winner of the ‘lightskin lottery’, he says) complaining to Oprah: ‘I didn’t know how racist they were.’ ‘It’s the royal family!’ expostulates Rock. ‘They’re the OGs [Original Gangstas] of racism. They’re the Sugarnill Gang of racism.

Back in 1990, Grandpa from The Simpsons wrote a letter of protest to TV-makers. ‘I am disgusted with the way old people are depicted on television,’ he told them. ‘We are not all vibrant, fun-loving sex maniacs. Many of us are bitter, resentful individuals who remember the good old days.’ Thirty-three years on, it’s a protest that continues to fall on deaf ears, as we saw once again in the first part of Kathy Burke: Growing Up (Wednesday). The starting point was Kathy’s own 58th birthday, which had clearly come as rather a shock to her – and, given her take-no-nonsense (polite version) spikiness, you might have thought that the programme would dispense with the customary platitudes and wishful thinking in favour of something funnier and more candid.

My new favourite tennis player, just ahead of Novak Djokovic, is Nick Kyrgios. Up until recently I’d barely heard of him and what little I knew – his massive, sweary, on-court tantrums – did not inspire much enthusiasm. But then I watched Break Point and realised that here was exactly the kind of man I’d like to be myself: someone so talented at what he does that he puts in no preparation and little practice; who prefers chilling with his mates and his family to the grinding tedium of work; who loathes rules and formality and won’t be told what to do; and who, despite all these self-generated handicaps, is still capable of pulling off the occasional stunt that proves his critics spectacularly wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

There’s a distinct and rather cunning whiff of cakeism about the new documentary series Parole. On the one hand, it can convincingly pass itself off as a sombre BBC2 exploration of the British justice system. On the other, it offers us an undeniably enjoyable, reality TV-style opportunity to compare our opinions with those of the experts. Who doesn’t welcome the chance to indulge in some serious – or even titillating – armchair psychology? Monday’s opening episode began with some solid statistical captions stating that 16,000 UK prisoners are considered for parole every year, that 4,000 are granted it and that each decision is made by a small panel drawn from the 346 members of the Parole Board.

I was almost tempted not to watch Kleo because it sounded like so many things I’d seen before: beautiful ex-Stasi assassin, mysteriously imprisoned for nameless crimes, suddenly out of a job after the fall of the Berlin Wall, takes brutal revenge on all who betrayed her. It’s reminiscent not just of everything from La Femme Nikita, Kick-Ass and Kill Bill to the ghastly, grisly Killing Eve, but of any number of hitmen-out-of-retirement dramas (most recently The Old Man), plus every revenge yarn from the Count of Monte Cristo onwards, all seasoned with a delicate hint of Deutschland 83. But the thing about TV, you realise, is that originality is overrated, not to mention all but impossible. What matters is the detail, the tone, the handling.

Nick Hornby’s 2014 novel Funny Girl was both a heartfelt defence and a convincing example of what popular entertainment can achieve. Telling the story of Barbara Parker, a fictional 1960s TV star, it took a stern line on highbrows who prize the punishing over the pleasurable, while delivering a lot of pleasure itself. My only reservation was that Hornby was a little too obviously smitten with his heroine: a ‘quick-witted, unpretentious, high-spirited, funny, curvy, clever, beautiful blonde’, whose attitudes occasionally seemed to owe a suspicious amount to contemporary feminism.

The Last of Us is widely being hailed as the best video game adaptation ever. Maybe. But it’s still a video game adaptation. On one of the early levels, for example, you have to escape from a zombie apocalypse that has broken out in Houston, with your truck and your guns, being careful also to avoid the military authorities who will shoot you on sight. Later, your mission is to climb through some sewers, up a ladder and into the hidden entrance of an apartment complex to retrieve the car battery you need to effect your escape from the dystopian hellhole that is post-apocalypse Boston. Instead of a virus, the deadly, world-changing threat is a fungus.

For around a decade now, Grayson Perry has been making reliably thoughtful and entertaining documentary series about such things as class, contemporary masculinity and modern secular rituals. (All a lot more fun than they sound, I promise.) Equipped with an infectious Sid James laugh and an impressive commitment to affability, he’s demonstrated a willingness to listen to opposing views, even to the extent of allowing his mind to be changed. He’s then turned his findings into both a convincing thesis and an art exhibition of some kind. So what’s gone wrong in Grayson Perry’s Full English? The main problem, I think, was inadvertently laid bare right at the start of Thursday’s opening episode.

Kaleidoscope is a fairly routine eight-part heist drama with a supposed novelty spin: apart from the beginning and the end, you can view the episodes in any order, meaning that each viewer has a slightly different experience. If I sound mildly sceptical, it’s because the novelty isn’t actually that novel. B.S. Johnson got there 54 years earlier with his 1969 novel-in-a-box The Unfortunates, an account of a football match in which the chapters were loose bound so that they could be shuffled and read in whatever order you wished. A few years ago, I bought a rare first edition from Simon Finch which I thought would become very valuable but hasn’t because price is subject to demand and frankly there isn’t much demand for experimental 1960s novelists of whom hardly anyone has heard.

On 3 February 2003, the emergency services in Los Angeles received a call. ‘I’m Phil Spector’s driver,’ a voice told them. ‘I think my boss killed somebody.’ This was the inevitable yet still extraordinary starting point for Spector – a new four-part documentary on a man who, in the face of fierce competition, might well be the strangest figure in pop history. By that stage, he perhaps deserved the description of him in one news report as ‘a ghost, a phantom, a half-forgotten rock genius’. Except that – whether by coincidence or something more sinister – he’d recently granted his first interview for decades to the British journalist Mick Brown. ‘I have devils inside me,’ said Spector during their conversation.

A strange new virus has infected half the world but the cure is worse than the disease: authoritarian tyranny, in which the populace lose most of their freedoms, are subject to endless testing and are corralled into gated communities. I’m talking, of course, about the wildly implausible plot of a dystopian sci-fi thriller called Hot Skull. On the downside, it’s a bit depressing, with relentlessly grey cityscapes so bleak it makes Blade Runner look like Pleasantville. On the upside, it’s Turkish which means that – as with the brilliant Russian post-apocalyptic drama To the Lake – you get a completely different, original and perhaps more honest satirical slant on the crazy world we’re living in.

What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions disproportionate to anything a particular story has earned; or b) nothing at all. And if you want to see how both of these are possible, two of this year’s big Christmas TV offerings provide handy illustrations. Firmly in category a) is The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, an animated film by Charlie Mackesy, based on his own mega-selling book and with some impressively big-name actors doing the voices. Its methods are established immediately when a boy lost in a snowy wood happens across a cute talking mole (Tom Hollander). ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ the mole enquires. ‘Kind,’ says the boy.

Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse has been described by the Guardian as ‘the most dangerous show on Netflix’. What? More dangerous than the undigested, neo-Malthusian eco-propaganda that it serves up in its collaborations with Sir David Attenborough? More dangerous than its notorious movie Cuties, whose portrayal of hypersexualised children prompted a worldwide ‘Cancel Netflix’ campaign? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgvaXros3MY The Guardian’s main beef is that by flirting with speculations outside mainstream archaeology – Atlantis, giants, the survivors of the great flood and so on – the show ‘whispers to the conspiracy theorist in all of us’. But oddly enough, I found the opposite to be true.

For those who consider themselves traditional liberals (full disclosure: such as me) Sunday’s first episode of Simon Schama’s History of Now may have felt like a somewhat dismaying exercise in nostalgia. As Schama ran through a familiar anthology of 20th-century liberalism’s greatest hits, we were taken back to a happier, more recognisable world of clearly demarcated goodies and baddies where democracy would inevitably mean the triumph of our own beliefs and there was little that couldn’t be fixed by art ‘speaking truth to power’. The programme’s starting point, as you might imagine, was the Spanish Civil War, described by Schama as a ‘great battle between democracy and autocracy’ – rather than, say, two autocracies.

TV currently abounds with ‘I thought they were dead’ revival projects: series in which your favourite 1980s movie stars are given a new lease of life and you are reminded – with luck – how much you loved them. Kevin Costner is doing very well in Yellowstone; Ralph Macchio is milking the Karate Kid legacy for all it’s worth in Cobra Kai; Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow had a decent run in The Old Man. Now it’s the turn of Sylvester Stallone in Tulsa King. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaQSScwZPbA But I shan’t be hanging around for the second episode. My main problem with it is the flawed premise. Stallone’s character –Dwight ‘The General’ Manfredi – is a New York mafiosi who has just done 25 years in prison.

Have you ever seen film of the England 1966 football team holding the World Cup at the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington, on the evening of their victory? The answer, I can guarantee, is no. Unbeknownst to everybody except a few policemen and FA officials, what they were holding was only a replica, made a few months previously after the real Jules Rimet trophy was stolenin London. But this was just one of the many eye-popping disclosures in Monday’s 1966: Who Stole the World Cup? Of course, it’s not uncommon for a documentary to claim the tale it’s telling is scarcely believable. Much rarer is for that claim, as here, to be true.

Gratingly edgy soundtrack, stomach-churning gore, torture, witchcraft, sadism and an indigestible title. The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself sounds exactly the sort of series most of us would wish to avoid. It’s aimed at young adults (based on a trilogy by Sally Green called Half Bad) and the only reason I was keen to give it a try was that it has been freely adapted by Joe Barton. For my money, Barton is – along with Jesse Succession Armstrong – the most exciting and original screenwriter currently working in TV.

Sunday’s SAS Rogue Heroes – about the founding of perhaps Britain’s most famous regiment – began with a revealing variation on the usual caption in fact-based dramas about how everything in them really happened, except the things that didn’t. ‘The events depicted which seem most unbelievable,’ it read, ‘are mostly true.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTWqFccBsgg And from there the same sense of somewhat incredulous, head-shaking admiration for its subjects remained. The unexpected result was a 2022 BBC drama that took an unashamedly gung-ho approach to macho heroism – and that, give or take a spot of swearing and heavy-metal music, didn’t feel very different in tone from those classic British second world war films of the 1950s.

Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone – even the title makes you want to scream – is Adam Curtis’s Metal Machine Music: the one where he frightens off his fans by abandoning the trademark flourishes that made him so entertaining and instead goes all pared-down and raw and grim. If you don’t know or remember what those trademark flourishes were, let me refer you to a cruelly funny pastiche which you can easily find on YouTube called The Loving Trap. This sends up poor Adam as a pioneer of the collage-umentary, a genre resembling ‘a drunken late-night Wikipedia binge with pretence to narrative coherence’ which ‘vomits grainy library footage onto the screen to a soundtrack of Brian Eno and Nine Inch Nails.

At the start of Somewhere Boy, an 18-year-old boy is rescued from an isolated house by his aunt Sue following his father’s suicide – and what she, the police and social services regard as a lifetime of abuse. Since he was small, Danny’s father, Sam, had forbidden him from going outside, telling him the world was full of monsters who’d kill him if he did. He’d therefore grown up listening to old songs and watching old films – all the while believing that his beloved dad was keeping him safe. Yet once Danny was installed in Sue’s house, sharing a bedroom with his cousin Aaron, it soon became clear that this was by no means a simple tale of parental cruelty.