James Walton

In his ruefully funny 2012 novel The Man Who Forgot His Wife, John O’Farrell compares the increasingly uncivilised process of divorce to war: ‘In 1939 the RAF thought it was immoral to bomb the Black Forest to deprive the Germans of timber. But by 1945 they were deliberately creating firestorms to kill as many civilians as possible.’ As the title suggests, the starry new divorce-based drama War makes a similar comparison – except that here the unhappy couple are cutting straight to Dresden. The show began as it meant to go on: which is to say, glitteringly. At a London awards ceremony of ineffable poshness, Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) was named Pioneer of the Year for creating one of the world’s biggest yet nicest social media platforms.

In advance, I confidently imagined that 70 Up would be the big programme of the week. In the event, it rather disappointingly felt more like the set-up for the big programme of next week. Or at least let’s hope so – because up to now we’ve had little of what many of us were anticipating with unusual keenness: the much-loved participants in one of British TV’s greatest achievements reflecting at 70 on lives that we’ve been following since whenever we first started watching grown-up telly. The Up series famously began as a one-off documentary in 1964 about a carefully mixed bunch of 14 English seven-year-olds. Back then, its political agenda wasn’t hard to spot.

We first saw Sybylla, the heroine (in every sense) of My Brilliant Career, at a society gathering in 1900 Australia reciting a poem she’d written. After much racy talk of ‘forbidden fruit’ and ‘secret places’, it went on to describe a man as ‘a whisky breath seeking to possess something that will never be his’. We next saw her a month earlier when she was living with her family on their small, failing farm. ‘Women should swear,’ she told her sister. ‘They should eat like a man, ride like a man, decide their fate like a man.’ Sybylla, then, it seemed safe to deduce, is a feminist. Which, as it transpires, is pretty much the entire plot.

Remember Peter Parker? By the end of the last instalment of the Spider-Man movies, No Way Home, we were the only ones who could. Following a characteristically complicated but deft collision of multiverses, young Peter (Tom Holland) had realised that the only way to save the world (again) was by getting Doctor Strange to cast a spell that made everybody – including his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) – forget that he’d ever been Spider-Man. He therefore began his Brand New Day alone in his apartment with only a highly evolved piece of AI for company. Sure, he’d returned to his roots of capturing local crooks by the dozen. But while this restored the hero status that J.

Ride or Die began with a typical day for a fiftysomething woman in a TV drama. Having assassinated a Russian oligarch in an Alpine mountain resort, Judith (Hannah Waddingham) skied away with Olympian speed, effortlessly evading capture by the many goons who pursued her, right until they crashed into trees. Back on solid ground, she went into a bar where she beat all the blokes in drinking games, before pulling a hunky young barman who was heartbroken the following morning when she made it clear that this was merely a one-night stand. Then, zooming home in a sporty Merc, she still found time to call her friend Debbie in London with the assurance that ‘I’ll be back for book club’.

These days, the 1990s seem to be regarded – especially by people too young to remember them – as a prelapsarian idyll. In Britain, London swung again to the sound of Britpop. In America, good-looking twentysomethings lived cheaply in large apartments, wisecracking and hugging their way through solvable problems. And all without the tyranny of social media. A rather less rosy picture, though, emerged in the opening episode of the four-part Katie Price: Nothing to Hide, in which Price added to her nine autobiographies and numerous documentaries and/or reality shows by deciding to ‘reflect on my life’ for the first time. The result was both a revealing social history and not unlike a novel by Martin Amis at his most blackly comic.

If you’ve tended to think Rik Mayall was both very funny and quite annoying, it turns out you’re not alone – because, with varying degrees of tact, that’s what most of the people who knew him suggested in Rik Mayall: Magnificent B’stard. At a time when far too many documentaries about celebrities are celebratory to the point of cloying, this one was, of course, all the better for it. By his own account, Mayall first discovered the joys of showing off in primary school. Instructed to mime in the choir, since his voice was ‘so horrible’, he did so with the wild exaggeration that would remain his speciality. The laughs he got duly turned his boyhood head.

At just over two hours, Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear was 20 minutes longer than the 1962 original. It also added some moral complexity. Instead of a total psycho (Robert Mitchum) menacing a lawyer’s very nice family, we got a total psycho (Robert De Niro) menacing a lawyer’s slightly messed-up one. But how do you stretch the story to ten hours? That’s the challenge faced by Apple TV – and, after two episodes, the answer’s already clear: by throwing in any number of subplots, strenuously referencing as many contemporary anxieties as possible and not worrying too much whether some of the characters seem quite stupid in their willingness to ignore the obvious threat.

James Graham has said in interviews that he regards Gareth Southgate as ‘a hero for the ages’. Even if he hadn’t, though, this view wouldn’t be difficult to detect from Dear England, an adaption of his own stage play. In this week’s two episodes, Southgate’s unfailing loveliness succeeded in reviving not just the England football team, but also a sense of what England itself essentially is. At one point, he watched the Queen’s Covid address about ‘the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet, good-humoured resolve and of fellow feeling’ that ‘still characterise this country’ – and, as ‘Jerusalem’ swelled on the soundtrack, he clearly believed every word; not surprisingly given that these sentiments underlay everything he did.

Children of the Blitz began with the surprising news – to me anyway – that while 800,000 British children in places likely to be bombed were evacuated during the war, two million weren’t. The evacuees’ stories have long been a TV staple, but this riveting documentary was the first programme of any kind I can remember about those who stayed at home. The experience was recalled with extraordinary vividness by people mainly in their nineties or beyond, all of whom gave the type of revelatory interview that programme-makers don’t get merely by pointing the camera and asking questions, but through the careful building of wholly justified trust.

Half Man, Richard Gadd’s follow-up to the all-conquering Baby Reindeer, began with approximately ten seconds of some people at a wedding in rural Scotland having a good time. Two episodes later, they’re still about the only characters we’ve seen who aren’t having a gruesomely bad one. After that brief blast of jollity, the show moved to a nearby barn where the groom Niall (Jamie Bell) and his old chum Ruben (Gadd) were renewing their acquaintance in what would prove a characteristic way: with Niall looking terrified as Ruben menacingly recalled their former intimacy, menacingly caressed him, menacingly taunted him and menacingly smashed him repeatedly in the face.

When following up a successful sitcom, should a writer head off into new territory or not? That was the question facing Dan Levy after Schitt’s Creek and John Morton after WIA – and now we have their answers: ‘yes’ and ‘not really, even with a change of country’ respectively. Curiously, both seem to have made the wrong choice. ‘Schitt’s,’ Levy has explained, ‘was so warm and sweet and cuddly. My natural curiosity was to go somewhere else more dangerous’; specifically, to provide ‘a story that’s thrilling but never not funny. That became the big challenge of the writers’ room.

It’s not easy for a drama to be over-cautious and clumsy at the same time. Or to turn a real-life story that shocked (and, let’s face it, titillated) the nation into an oddly flat piece of television. So how did the much-hyped Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards manage to do both? The answer, I’d suggest, is by failing to interrogate – or even engage much – with its own material. Instead, it opted to simply pass on the facts drawn from its own research, making only the most half-hearted and sometimes contradictory attempts to explain them. The programme began with Edwards (Martin Clunes) in his voice-of the-nation pomp, as he announced the Queen’s death.

The Other Bennet Sister is to Pride and Prejudice what Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet. The events of the original novel are all there, but the focus is on a character Jane Austen mostly neglected and occasionally scorned. One effect is that the other sisters, including the sainted Lizzy, come across as smug and snooty According to Mary Bennet’s opening voiceover: ‘It is a sad fact of life that if a young woman is unlucky enough to come into the world without expectations, she had better do all she can to ensure she is born beautiful. To be poor and handsome is misfortune enough; but to be penniless and plain is a hard fate indeed.

Judging from the two biggest new streaming dramas around, the taste these days runs towards the kitchen sink – not as in gritty northern blokes smoking Woodbines and moaning a lot; rather, as in the writers throwing in everything but. A fortnight ago, I reviewed Lisa McGee’s How to Get to Heaven from Belfast: a Netflix show that doesn’t so much combine slapstick, violence, cheery banter, mean banter, mystery, media satire and dark broodings on life, as simply shuttle between them. Now comes Young Sherlock, directed by Guy Ritchie, where again anybody searching for dramatic unity will search in vain.

The Fabulous Funeral Parlour ended with possibly the least necessary caption in TV history: ‘Filmed in Liverpool’. Whenever I go back there (quite often these days for family reasons), I’m struck all over again by how the whole city seems engaged in the production, distribution and promotion of Scouseness. Yet, even by normal Liverpudlian standards, the people in this old-school, narrator-less documentary put in an impressive shift. Leading the way was Hayley, the owner of both the parlour in question and, despite fierce competition, the most extravagant trout pout we saw. Hayley’s mother died five years ago aged 59, and it was then that she decided to set up Butterflies Rising Funeral Care.

When it comes to Agatha Christie adaptations, there are normally two possible responses to the denouement. One is a deep satisfaction that the unlikeliest suspects were the inevitable culprits after all. The other’s the same as that – except approximately a quarter of an hour later you suddenly find yourself thinking: ‘Hold on a minute…’ But with Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, neither was the case. The unlikeliest suspects remained laughably unlikely even as their guilt was revealed – and the ‘Hold on a minute’s came not after the show finished, but with pretty much every twist of a plot that, almost impressively, kept finding new levels of preposterousness to scale.