Dunblane: Our Story (BBC2) | iPlayer
The Aliens (E4) | All 4
Let’s Play Darts for Sport Relief 2016 (BBC2) | iPlayer
Doctor Thorne (ITV) | ITV Hub
Twenty years ago – Sunday is the anniversary – it was a bitterly cold but beautiful morning in Dunblane, south-central Scotland. One parent remembers that he was running late for the school drop-off because it took longer to clear ice from the car windscreen. “Snowdrops were out in profusion,” recalled Ron Taylor, the headteacher of Dunblane primary school, in the at times hard to watch BBC documentary Dunblane: Our Story. A five-year-old girl argued with her mother over whether she should wear wellies (the mother’s preference) or a new pair of Kickers that she had recently been given. The daughter, as young girls tend to, won.
By 9.30am, all of these people would have their lives forever upended by the deadliest firearms atrocity in British history. Dunblane is a small town but its primary school was the largest in Scotland. Thomas Hamilton, a 43-year-old local man, arrived with four handguns and enough ammunition to kill all 700 pupils. In the event, 16 children – all aged five – and their teacher died, before Hamilton shot himself.
“Evil visited us yesterday,” Taylor told the press in the immediate aftermath, “and we don’t know why, we don’t understand it and I guess we never will.”
Dunblane: Our Story proves Taylor correct: Hamilton’s motives remain opaque. The focus of this film, rightly, was on the victims and their families, some of whom spoke at length for the first time. The detail in which they all remembered even inconsequential events from the day, two decades on, was telling and painfully moving. Nothing has been forgotten.
But also so poignant was the testimony of two young women who have no memory of 13 March, 1996: one wasn’t born, the other was only a few months old. They spoke of the siblings they have been deprived of and how, for example, they will never know what it feels like for their sister to brush their hair. “I wonder,” says one, “what relationship I could have had.”
For the opening quarter-hour of the entertaining but disorienting The Aliens, you wondered how deep this new science-fiction comedy drama was going to get. The premise was that 40 years ago, an unlucky mob of aliens crash-landed in the Irish Sea, were captured and then dumped in a walled holding pen somewhere in Britain called Troy. These “morks”, as they are known, look like us and talk like us, but their existence provokes suspicion and hostility because humans worry they will traffic drugs, commit crimes and so on. Echoes of the migrant crisis, the “Jungle” in Calais, and Daily Mail fear-mongering filled the air.
But then you remembered you were watching E4. Alongside the obvious topicality, The Aliens is mostly played for laughs and the first episode was reliably funny. The main reason for that was Lewis, an incompetent border guard played by Michael Socha. Best-known as Harvey from This Is England and werewolf Tom McNair in BBC3’s Being Human, Socha resembles a 16%-more-handsome Colin Murray, if that’s helpful. We learn that Lewis didn’t have an easy upbringing – “I say family. It’s more a collection of horrible people” – and the serious-ish strand of the plot looks set to follow the identification of his real father. Socha plays Lewis with a doleful, put-upon bewilderment that is both appealing but also hints that he will be further abused, beaten and degraded before anything remotely positive happens to him.
The Aliens has considerable pedigree, coming from the production team behind Misfits. A good cast, too: with Michaela Coel’s Lilyhot, an alien webcam girl that Lewis seems to personally bankroll, and Horrible Histories’ Jim Howick as Dominic, a gay mork. Special praise though for writer-creator Fintan Ryan. His last solo project, Never Better, a sitcom starring Stephen Mangan back in 2008, was mauled by some critics and little watched; The Aliens, smart, fun and slick, should certainly receive a better welcome.
There truly is something for everyone these days on Sundays at 9pm. Actually not 9pm, but “darts o’clock” as presenter Gabby Logan called it during a breathless, near-hysterical link for Let’s Play Darts for Sport Relief 2016. It was semi-final week from the Lakeside Country Club in Frimley Green – the final will be screened this evening – and the notables still in contention (with their professional partners) were former rugby player Mike Tindall, ex-Springwatch presenter Kate Humble, and comedians Tim Vine and Greg Davies.
Now, watching famous people play sport very poorly is one of my go-to guilty pleasures. A YouTube viewing of the actor Dominic Cooper, not a preternaturally gifted footballer, attempting to score from fully 35 yards at Old Trafford will revive me from the bleakest mood. But Let’s Play Darts… wasn’t really like that. That’s in part because Sport Relief is clearly raising money for some excellent causes. But mostly, it is because the action was very tightly edited. And I’m not complaining: watching celebrities fail to hit double-16 for hours on end is not even entertainment for the red button era.
Most of the laughs in the Let’s Play Darts… semi-finals came from Greg “the abominable throwman” Davies. Davies, a giant of 6ft 8in, hurled the arrows so ferociously that the commentators feared for the dartboard; after the battering of the match, they imagined the board “living on a farm in Lincolnshire, saying ‘Why, Mummy?’” But sadly, the abominable throwman was no match for “the titan” Tindall and, after a 6-1 trouncing, Davies announced his retirement from the sport.
Logan admitted that, as a sports broadcaster, she’d always dreamed of a moment where a competitor revealed out of the blue that they were quitting. “It’s cruel that it’s from me,” Davies replied. “But the incredible indifference of the crowd means that I’ve made the right decision.”
If darts isn’t your thing, then Doctor Thorne might be the answer, though I suspect not. This is ITV’s new costume drama, an adaptation of the third of Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire series by Downton Abbey’s Julian Fellowes. The first episode was deathly dull – lots of toffs sitting around National Trust properties, mewing about how poor they are – and so derivative that even Americans are likely to see through it. The background of aristocrats versus industrialists in the 1830s could have been interesting but not with characters this hoary. Only the presence of Tom Hollander as the eponymous doctor and Community’s Alison Brie as an American heiress offer a very faint hope that Doctor Thorne can pull it round in its three-episode run. But, good advice where corsets are involved, don’t hold your breath.
Alternatively, you can just stick, as most sensible people will, with The Night Manager – with bonus Tom Hollander – over on BBC1.
Euan Ferguson is away
