Before Grenfell: A Hidden History (BBC2) | iPlayer
Flowers (Channel 4) | All 4
Poldark (BBC One) | iPlayer
Queer Eye (Netflix) | Netflix
The Wright Stuff (Channel 5) | My5
Into the predictably fractious year-long aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire – OTT reactions from social justice warriors, backlashes from tabloids, and all conducted in the tones of the times, which is to say like someone ugly spitting out their own teeth – arrived an hour-long documentary which, in its calm and objective sanity, invited you to reinvest a little faith in human nature.
Produced and directed by James Ross, Before Grenfell: A Hidden History told the history of Notting Hill and Notting Dale since London developers first expanded west on to what was then farmland. It was told with lucid voices, both black and white, and intelligent, quiet old footage. And the tale it told was of an actual 1864 wall, between hill and dale, that was also metaphorical – between pig pen and gentry. North Kensington went through a ruckus of changes, including slum clearance, and (post-depression) jerrybuilt subdivision of lovely old houses, along with unscrupulous landlording – Peter Rachman was one of the very few to offer rentals to the Windrush generation, leading to the irony that the capital’s first truly multicultural community was established thanks to simple venality. But the original wall remains, both real and figurative, and two years ago Britain’s richest borough returned to levels of income inequality last seen there in the 1850s.
We saw how the hopeful 1960s architectural vision was hijacked. Ponds and pools, gardens and shops, places for people to work were quietly scrapped by council jobsworths. And, without being browbeaten or handbagged, we were led gently to the conclusion that successive administrations, especially since the 1980s, have had only one vision for the future of their bright and shining borough – one in which the concept of social housing became, rather than a core principle, an embarrassing afterthought, to be sacrificed on the altar of extreme property prices. In so many ways it was unsurprising that Grenfell burned. And to be led through the historical context in this way, rather than with catcalls and slogans, was all the more powerful.
Flowers returned for a second one-off, glorious, maddening week (all six episodes shown on consecutive evenings). First shown over a similar week in 2016, it is, if you remember – and if you watched it back then, you will – an exceedingly quirky week in the company of the Flowers clan, with a dank underbelly of quietly desperate depression. It is almost indefinable, certainly impossible to shoehorn into any known genre – but it’s constantly and crazily inspired, inventive, gloomily funny. It will drive some people to dark places. It will drive some people to reach for the off button.
This outing was even odder, and even better. Julian Barratt and Olivia Colman excel as a depressed children’s writer and his increasingly estranged wife, who is struggling to remember what she’s for, apart from caustic disillusionment, which allows her to come out with some winningly cruel lines. After Barratt has mused again on his “major depressive disorder”, she snaps: “Oh, just call it depression, Maurice. It’s not a Nobel prize.”
But they are relatively in the shadows as regards their children, the unimaginative failure Donald and his sis Amy, who was struck by lightning last time round. Daniel Rigby and Sophia Di Martino are sublime in their characters, with Amy hard to watch as she descends – via some crackling lines (“At least I don’t have to watch you piss your scent all over the moral high ground like some demented incontinent barn animal”) – to febrile madness.
As to what it’s about, apart from Amy’s visions of cursed German ancestors… I think it was, in the end, about something rather serious happening to Shun, the Japanese houseboy/illustrator played by Will Sharpe, the writer/creator, and himself bipolar. But I can’t be sure. And I only think this because, after Shun was left contemplating, with quickening melancholy, a tall tree in the penultimate episode, the entire last one was a series of his flashbacks to his first few days in the Flowers household – a joyous, flowery, celebration of a loopy, tangled, untidy English family in the English countryside, all dusk and drink and beauty and looming shadow. As I say, indefinable, but sometimes indefinably lovely. And a brave recommission from C4, with brave issues tackled.
At least I know what Poldark was about. Ross and Demelza made up, despite her still getting soppy poetry from lovelorn bumfluffed Hugh; Ross bravely saved a couple of local lads from a hanging; George schemed villainously, though still not quite as cartoonishly as the Rev Osborne leered licentiously. But isn’t that roughly what happens in every episode? Why do I not get what the rest of you all see in this potboiler?
In Queer Eye, which returned for a new series to Netflix and to which I am now an utter convert, the lads went (courageously I thought) to Gay, Georgia, population 89, to give makeovers both to a delightful black woman, her gay son, and to a church, for a Baptist homecoming. They were there at the invite of Gene, an unashamed good ol’ boy with Stetson’n’boots (“I’m pretty sure we’re a bit clean round here on both gays and Muslims”), who was soon dispelling every lazy myth about the redneck south. Gene, the community, even the church, welcomed and celebrated the five exuberant gay men and their chapel redecoration, and this made for the most redemptive, surprising, uplifting half hour on TV all week.
A blue farewell from this sofa to Matthew Wright, who’s just left his eponymous morning Channel 5 show after an astonishing 18 years, for pastures yet unknown. The Wright Stuff has pretty consistently been the best thing on Channel 5 at any time of the day. Recurring guests with just the right mix of wit and spit – the likes of Scott Capurro, Shazia Mirza, Terry Christian, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown – have often had me cursing that I’ve suddenly missed an entire morning that should have been better used on actual work: and Wright in particular has held it all together with a truly rare (for TV) mix of empathy, irony and a sense of intelligent fun. Jeremy Vine is taking over. And it just won’t be the same.
