Blood (Channel 5) | channel5.com
I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! (ITV) | itv.com
My Brilliant Friend (Sky Atlantic) | sky.com
Informer (BBC One) | iPlayer
Dynasties (BBC One) | iPlayer
Doctor Who (BBC One) | iPlayer
Hell hath no fury, surely, like an habitual liar disbelieved when telling the truth. This was one phrase bumbling around what I shudder to call a brain throughout much of the early stages of Channel 5’s new six-part drama, Blood. Another was – begorrah, broth of a boy, catch yersel on (etc) – for such a lyrical and big-hearted nation, aren’t there some rampaging charmlessnesses at the very heart of your rural Irish small-town life.
Also, secrets. I won’t spoil too much, as some will want to binge on catch-up – and should, for it’s a class act, claustrophobic and gripping, almost Scandi in its noir – but our antihero Cat’s sister is hiding the fact she has motor neurone disease, her brother hiding the fact that he’s pretty much the only gay in the village, father Jim Hogan (a chilling Adrian Dunbar) hiding the fact that he might have bumped off his wife. Cat herself (Carolina Main) is splendid, caustic and raging yet with hints of trembling vulnerability, such as in the very opening scene when she has to stop the car to throw up, so wary is she of even setting foot back in the home village. Does she really have a lifelong history of lying to all, or is that just a clever myth somehow made to stick by Jim over the years of her absence: is she, in fact, being gaslighted?
Young writer Sophie Petzal has given us a close, cloying, immensely mature thriller which relies not a twitch on gimmickry nor cartoon violence but very much on the habits which a family, a society, can fall into, when it looks too often the other way, and a reminder that there are many swathes of these islands in which a brutal patriarchy can still hold sway. And they don’t come much more brutally controlling than Dunbar, all warm words and warm whiskeys as the local GP, yet a smile which never, ever, quite reaches his eyes.
It’s also Channel 5’s first piece of truly new commissioned quality drama. Coming on top of a couple of valuable documentaries and the continued urgent morning relevance of Jeremy Vine, it’s quite the rebranding indeed: hats off to someone.
I almost didn’t watch I’m a Celebrity… because of constant rumours of Noel Edmonds’s threatened appearance. While now tragically confirmed, at the time of writing he was still absent, so the show was still watchable. Hugely so, in fact: the campmates are by and large remarkably splendid folk, for now; no obvious tearful screeching divas; and crucially Dec hasn’t suffered (one whit) from Ant’s enforced absence, teamed up instead with Holly Willoughby. Their easy repartee doesn’t seem one stitch forced; I’d be mildly concerned if I was Ant.
And Anne Hegerty’s still standing, hurrah. Having won plaudits for revealing her late-diagnosed autism, she has winningly dismissed them with her customary level-headed scoffs. I suspect this is going to be the first time I’ve really enjoyed a reality-TV thing since Second Chance Summer. Until The Edmonds.
My Brilliant Friend, an HBO adaptation of the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan novels, is certainly going to be the most lush thing on our sets as winter settles determinedly in for the bloody duration. Not that it’s bright or gaudy or overfancied: quite the opposite. Set in the Naples of the 1950s, it’s grimily impoverished, shot through a shot-glass darkly, all black serge and dirty feet and soot-smuts: but it’s also been done with immense love: you can practically smell the dust-mites dancing, the charcuterie and cheap-leather odours of the streets. Truly absolutely gorgeous.
Ferrante’s wildly successful series remains stupidly unread by me (festive hint), but I can only assume, given the care taken with the rest, they haven’t settled for a sub-par adaptation. It’s slow, certainly slow to build, but this allows much time to acquaint ourselves with young Elena and classmate naughty Lila. And the streets; the struggling families, the low-level violence always threatening, and as it moves into the 1970s we will see violence and greed on different levels, and women coping, as women ever cope, with consequences, and men’s choices. A gem.
Informer ended with a senseless killing as, arguably obviously, it was always going to. Thankfully not Raza, the most wonderful find in newcomer Nabhaan Rizwan, who would appear to be free to try for a second series (though what he’d do in that is hard to fathom at the moment. Um … just more, different, informing?), but an important death nonetheless. It’s been quite the curate’s egg of a series – too confusing throughout, occasionally with the most clunking of scripts and wilfully red of herrings, lacking most of the comparative straight-blade plotting of The Little Drummer Girl now it’s fully in its stride – but has certainly shown us, sweatingly, some realities which must surely be true for those undercover, in London, since about 2001. And given us a few appalling heart-in-mouth moments.
I keep longing to dismiss the BBC’s wildlife unit with similar faint praise, but Dynasties just goes on impressing until the world runs out of adjectives. The emperor penguin show was elegiac, majestic and tragic in equal measure.
Apparently there were grown men blubbing at the sight of the hairy wee dead chick. While not similarly overcome myself, there was no denying its power as an emotional watch, and thank goodness the background strings were subtle, muted: a orchestral heartswell of mawk would have been as pointless as a man with a hanky on the side of the screen.
Glad too the crew dug steps for the shanghaied penguins, and they must have debated long and hard about that, running wholly counter to their training to never interfere, to let nature take it course. Gone are the days when wildlife crews would just let down a rope; gone, thankfully too, the opposites; I’m sure in the black past some wee beetles would just be … nudged … into the path of a mamba.
Doccy Who ratcheted back on form, and how. After last week’s gloomy Indian partition mournfest, we remembered that the Doc and her companions are sometimes, actually, meant to interfere, that’s their whole point (and the problem with the timeshift/real history plotlines). I have one problem with the new series, and it’s this: I still can’t remember being less scared of any aliens, ever. I think they’ve all just been given a pat on the head, or forgiven, or worse, understood. Where’s Sigourney Weaver and an acid-dripping, chestbursting nasty when you need them?
