Doctor Who (BBC1) | BBC iPlayer
An Inspector Calls (BBC1) | BBC iPlayer
Countdown to Life: The Extraordinary Making of You (BBC2) | BBC iPlayer
The Gamechangers (BBC2) | BBC iPlayer
Frontline Fighting: The Brits Battling Isis (C4) | C4 On Demand
Last night’s Doctor Who managed to grapple with an astonishing number of Big Issues and small, delightful cultural references, but made me wince momentarily for the sophistication visited on and expected of today’s young. Or perhaps wince for my own lack of same. There was a time, in another Doctor age, when viewers (old and young) had to deal with no ethical dilemma greater than whether it was entirely meet to send some ageing, underpaid thesp in a crocheted swamp creature cossie, presumably scented rather funkily with despair and mothballs, careening into the corner-trap where the shaky scenery met the iffy script.
But my, they do grow up fast these days, and thus had to deal with the following questions: if you could go back in time, would you kill Hitler? And: is compassion ever a weakness? Essentially, we were asking Saturday-night kids to fetch us answers to both the second world war and the migrant crisis, and solve the logically implicit paradox of time-travel: challenges not noticeably muscled up to most weeks by The X Factor or, for that matter, Question Time.
It came, of course, dressed in immense fun and charm, and the Doctor never looked better, particularly when on the last day of his existence (or is it?), indulging a long-held desire to invade a medieval banquet, perched on a tank, playing thrash-metal guitar. Peter Capaldi looked as if he’d seldom had more fun since childhood. Sadly, I’ve always found Daleks as troubling as a field of damp goats. Far more scary – terrifying, actually – were the hand-mines. Hands, groping from the mud. And the very idea of “suicide moons”.
It grew blood-dark towards the end, and cliffhung: both Clara and the Tardis apparently annihilated. Our Doctor has a huge decision to make. But most troubling, most scary, was the simple assertion that “compassion is wrong”, mainly because it can resonate, with such a lazy and an easy chime, with otherwise diffident, right-thinking people.
A generally masterful An Inspector Calls didn’t so much tap gently at this theme as thwack its door repeatedly with a blackthorn cudgel. But we can still, 70 years after JB Priestley’s expose of Edwardian hypocrisy, surely all take a telling. The play, in which it remorselessly dawns that one nouveau-posh family has collectively ruined a blameless young working woman, is clever, but it’s not subtle. What was subtle was the acting: David Thewlis, Ken Stott and Miranda Richardson, naturally, will give every am-dram group around the land sweaty 4am armpits. By far the best Sunday-night Beeb offering since Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but the final five minutes had me as thoroughly bewildered as would be Prince Andrew on Only Connect.
Priestley had left it unstated: was Inspector Goole a Christ? A ghoul? An augur? A conscience? Thing is, you can do that in books – leave an unreliable ending. Director Aisling Walsh, despite her triumph last year with A Poet in New York, couldn’t do it on telly; instead, there was (beautifully shot) guesswork as to authorial intentions. This should have ended with a silhouetted Inspector, a ringing telephone and entertainable doubts.
An astonishing and immensely followable programme arrived, unheralded, in the shape of Countdown to Life: The Extraordinary Making of You. Equally unheralded BBC stalwart Michael Mosley took us flawlessly, stylishly, through the first eight weeks of our lives from the moment of conception. Terrific, unshowy graphics, and just a clever man talking, telling an extraordinary tale, of how we are defined, in so very many ways, by those first weeks in the womb, from life expectancy to number of fingers. Given the infinite – literally infinite – number of variables that have the chance to throw a genetic googly, it is all the more remarkable I’m here, and privileged enough to have seen this, and not least the brave and remarkable model Melanie Gaydos, born with a mildly shocking mutation to her TP63 gene, which buggers development of, basically, skin and teeth. She’s gorgeous, despite, and says, “I do feel beautiful. If I could turn back the clock to the womb, I don’t think I would”. Do watch this. Do watch Mumsnet throw a Twitterfrenzy as its members stockpile green beans and hypercalculate the rainy season in Gambia, for a child to have another 30 years of life.
The Gamechangers told the faintly tawdry true story – involving relatively unlovely computer geeks, and deeply ditto lawyers – of a battle between video gamers and the US right, who were seeking to prove a link between games and gun crime. Daniel Radcliffe played, and played well, the chief geek behind Grand Theft Auto, blind to all but his “genius”. Bill Paxton, as the evangelical, actually had some of my sympathy: he just wanted a change of age rating. But to this day, the link is utterly unproven (as opposed to the link between guns and gun crime), hence what was the point? This was a half-interesting Wiki footnote crammed into 90 minutes of prime-time TV.
You may not see a more searing documentary this year than Frontline Fighting: The Brits Battling Isis, the tale of three highly unusual men gone to fight in Syria. Harry, Jim and Jac had chosen to leave safe (if surely unrewarding?) lives here to join the Kurdish YPG, seeking freedom from terror. The trio were a truly random bunch, motivated by varied principle, united only in the rarity of a highly developed backbone. The Channel 4 cameramen, no less brave, captured, breathlessly, the honest sound of war – that strange dull thunk of real gunfire rather than the video-game simulacra; that strange dull sigh when someone is really shot in the leg. Terrifying, and terrifyingly good. Not least when the band of brothers stumbled on a nest of Isis suicide vests, many apparently designed for teens. Harry called Isis “the greatest menace the world has ever faced” and there might be a few quibblers there, but the menace is greatest towards their own young, and that certainly hasn’t been seen since the Hitler Youth.
