Capital (BBC1) | iPlayer
I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here (ITV) | ITVPlayer
MasterChef: The Professionals (BBC2) | iPlayer
Toby Jones is in imminent peril of becoming a national treasure, a category of rabbit-hole down which he’ll surely have to be hauled kicking and screaming, albeit in his unassailably gentle fashion. At 49, he’s hardly even got going with his talent, but is already being billed in opening credits as “And Toby Jones”, the kind of accolade normally reserved for a Morgan Freeman, a Judi Dench.
And Toby Jones, or indeed “And Toby Jones”, headed up a deliciously strong cast in Capital, the BBC’s three-part adaptation of John Lanchester’s bestselling 2012 novel, and we have all, unless busy all week snickering over our house prices, probably heard at least some of the story by now. Denizens in one blandly so-so street of a south London hamlet go about their quotidian lives, wholly unremarkable apart from the (still) soaring property values, and their own special twist of being the single street targeted by bizarre posted letters that announce: “We want what you have.” A threat? A joke? An art, or “art”, or anti-capitalist, stunt? No matter: the residents are spooked to varying degrees. Behind them looms the great city, but more specifically behind them looms their own bricks-and-mortar cage, which by fate or fluke or cold-eyed opportunism has come to be worth more than ancient castles.
It was an immensely readable book. Lanchester, who also deserves credit for making sense in his earlier journalism of the 2008 financial crisis in a way the Peston never quite did, managed in his one-street novel somehow to distil the twitchy cross-cultural coexistences of all homeowning Londoners, both delighted and hogtied by the simple fact of their being sat cross-legged on a golden elephant. Remarkably little of this dichotomy – of being trapped by one’s own postcode riches – is lost or even diminished in Peter Bowker’s adaptation, directed by Euros Lyn, and there is much squirming fun to be had along the way.
This is mainly at the expense of banker Roger (Jones) and his wife, Arabella, and goodness doesn’t Rachael Stirling eat the scenery as the diametric opposite of her character in Detectorists (also starring And Toby Jones, and shaping up for a gleeful finale). She manages to encapsulate much of London life, class, marriage, in one sneering sentence: “Don’t suppose you remembered to pick up the pomegranate molasses?” When Roger needs to cut budgets, his £1m Christmas bonus having been unexpectedly cut to a scrotum-shrivelling £30K, he suggests mildly that Joshua and Conrad might attend “state schools… for primary at least”. “Have you gone out of your mind?”
She’s not the only one to get a kicking. There’s a terrific portrait of a lovely Bangladeshi shopkeeper (Adeel Akhtar) struggling stoically to rein in his brother’s infantile jihadi angers, which manifest themselves by, for instance, lashing out at the impossibly nice DI investigating the letters (brother Usman insists petulantly, idiotically, “just deconstructing his imperialistic mode of discourse”).
The sinister letters have continued, worsened. Collateral damage happens, and happens nastily, to the most sympathetic character of all, Zimbabwean parking warden Quentina, played with gentle brilliance and the occasional uppity streak by Wunmi Mosaku. All the disastrous unfairnesses of London, and England, will come to rest unsettlingly here, rather than in and on more deserved targets. Many special mentions – Gemma Jones, of course; Dru Masters for the music – since this is a delight that works equally well on the levels of satire, thriller or potboiler. One of many too-telling scenes occurs when Toby Jones sits on a park bench with Quentina’s churchy boyfriend, bemoaning his own privilege.
“Why do you always apologise for what you’ve got?” “’Cos I’m not sure how I got it.”
Lady Colin Campbell doesn’t feel the need to apologise for anything. She should. As far as I can work out, Lady C, as she loves to be called on I’m a Celebrity…, was once a “society beauty” who married (after five days) and divorced (after 14 months), in 1975, a scion of the Argyll dukedom, and has traded on it ever since, using connections to pen a “private” portrait of Diana, and a book about the Queen Mum, in which scurrilous rumours had the more sensitive members of Boodle’s chundering into their oysters.
That the concept of unearned class – long sigh – still hasn’t permeated hoi polloi was self-evident when Ferne McCann, off of Towie, struggled three times to say the word “aristocrat” (still didn’t get there), but yet, while “Lady” C looked imperiously askance, still gazed up at her with cow-eyed deference. Still, there’s no denying that Ferne, and Vicky Pattison, have, along with Lady C, jump-kicked this year’s penis-eating contest into a new gear. Along with someone called Fach Kinnell – no, my mistake, that’s just something I wrote in my notes to remind of Chris Eubank’s ineffable ridiculousness.
Monica Galetti, my second favourite TV dreamboat after Alex Polizzi, should by rights be nailing it in this series of MasterChef: The Professionals. She’s got the charming if somewhat rabbit-eyed Marcus Wareing, she’s got talent by the skipload, she’s got all the BBC’s money (not literally. She’d do a runner. With me, wink wink).
All let down by the fact that, this series, a huge percentage of the pro chefs are simply abominable. Tip: if you don’t know how to make something, don’t lie. There’s a mild chance you’ll be found out, possibly when it appears on the plate as a squirm of tramp’s vomit rather than the specified mille d’augustine rochefeuille sabillone mes nitres d’Habilacc ’vec jus de canard batard. Too many “journeys” being undertaken by spotty youths. Not enough “cooking” being undertaken by adults.
