Care (BBC One) |iPlayer
The Good Place (E4) | All 4
Billy Connolly’s Ultimate World Tour (ITV) |itv.com
Dynasties (BBC One) | iPlayer
I can only imagine that, a little like that Matt cartoon about panto disappointment in the Telegraph a few days ago (“we’re closing… can’t compete with the Commons”), the television schedules could only shrink last week in shrivelled detumescence at the full, real-life horrors unfolding before them. It was about the weakest non-midsummer week of the TV year, nothing but repeats and endless shiny-bauble-shake-shake people trying to sell to you or cook for you or sell you things to cook with or to put in your mouth. That’s if (other, very different) people weren’t telling you precisely how bad it all was for you.
So a relief, in a way, to escape to a reliably non-tinselled, thorough, 90-minute excoriation with a spiky, tarred rope of abject, unending misery. Fortunately Mr James McGovern can be relied upon to write drama that’s time and again head and shoulders above most other telly drama, even if the torso is rather too often one of abject unending misery. Care, a one-off drama, also featured Alison Steadman as a bright, mischievous gran suddenly, instantly, having the rug ripped from under her – first a stroke, then fast-onset dementia.
Sheridan Smith was one daughter, coping with two (actually delightful) kids, a useless ex, a lost job, hospital car-parking charges and the like and, suddenly, a keening, wailing, nonsensical woman who used to be her mum. This being McGovern, we got the usual perfunctory raps over the head about NHS finances. Though woeful as they surely are (and the council care system a thousand times worse off), surely some protocols need addressing: one scene, in which four nurses and a doctor try to set out their findings while being interrupted constantly by the cries and moans of the wheelchaired mother because it had been deemed – by far-off, anonymous edict – her “right” to sit in, hence rendering the crucial meeting a palpable nonsense, was almost unwatchable. And odds-on true. Blindingly well-acted, valuable, fine drama, and a big, stressy, tearful reminder of the general woefulness of this vale of tears. And what a nice time of year to show it.
Finally, The Good Place arrived on terrestrial. Now, this is fun. Netflix has been bouncing along with this for a couple of years – it’s still endlessly inventive – but the E4 opener (ie the first ever episode) not only has a terrific premise but is, actually, genuinely, funny.
Young woman dies, goes to sort-of heaven. The Good Place thinks she’s a lawyer who got innocent people off death row. She knows better; there’s been a mistake. Which she’s in no rush to bring to anyone’s attention. Cue a standout, grownup, blindingly sharp script, and gorgeous performances from Kristen Bell and Ted Danson.
Yet many of the delights of this come from the incidentals, and the watch-agains, almost like the old-day Simpsons. Scroll again through the opener’s backdrop of judgments made in life, for good or ill, and you read, for instance, “fix broken tricycle for child indifferent to tricycles: +0.08”; “use Facebook as a verb -5.55 per infringement”. At the end of life they’re totted up: “never discussed own veganism unprompted: +9883.22”. Glorious, and not even that filthy: Eleanor finds herself unable to swear in the Good Place. No matter how hard she tries, it’s still all “shirts” and “forks”.
Billy Connolly’s Ultimate World Tour was nothing of the sort, of course, but just a kind of excuse to remind us that Billy is a) alive, and doing rather better than his “friend” Parky has suggested; and b) still free to play banjo in the Everglades, fish for tarpon in the Gulf, join a game of dominoes in Little Havana.
A mini-travelogue – it was really just a wee drive up the road from Key West away from Pamela, intercut with old 90s footage of Connolly dancing naked in Orkney and Antarctica – it still reminded us of his splendid life force. All that his travel has told him is that “the world’s a joyous place, and should be treated as such. It’s supposed to be fun. You can see all the sights in the world, but if you don’t kind of make a friend you haven’t really done it right. People are pretty much the same, everywhere you go; and fear of the foreigner is something we’ve got to get over. And religious people have to calm doon a bit, y’know. Tolerance is the answer.” And, for one of the funniest men ever to have bestrode the globe, and now based in America, not one Trump joke. Now that’s class.
This page sadly went to press before the last Dimbleby airing of Question Time, which I would like to have marked. A full 25 years at the helm, many marvellous moments, and I personally think he has, when in his more tetchy and caustic moments dealing with the… softer… brains on any panel, tried to snap at left and right with at least a semblance of balance. He’s probably pulling his fangs in at about the apposite moment: never mind political discourse, public discourse has become more savagely frothed, more disastrously discourteous, than at any time I, and surely Mr D, can ever remember. Fortunately, he should have a quiet departure, maybe spare time at the end for some mutual clinking of glasses, marvelling at crazee ties, perhaps even a singsong. Let’s face it, little else going on in UK politics.
I am never going to be underwhelmed by anything to which David Attenborough lends his imprimatur (let alone that now richly oaked voice), and Dynasties didn’t disappoint: how could it? But I felt that maybe the whole premise was a little… off, or perhaps just a little small. I suppose, given that these series are famed for tackling planets, globes, whole-blue-worldnesses, a wee family of tiggers or dugs, while as ever peerlessly filmed, is always going to come across as relatively small (if relatable). But there was a small, irrepressible voice at the back of my mind which naughtily harked back to all those public information films made by something like the National Film Board of Canada in the 70s, at the end of which a sonorous voice would always intone: “But the greatest enemy of all… is Man.” True, true, but when does a truth become a truism? And whatcha gonna do about it, buddy?
The 70s are fled, and Attenborough, and some governments, when we eventually get them, know rather better what to do about it. Whether they do… rather depends on whether you’re in Camp McGovern or Camp Connolly.
