Les Misérables (BBC One) | iPlayer
Das Boot (Sky Atlantic)
Don McCullin: Looking for England (BBC Four) | iPlayer
Africa With Ade Adepitan (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Catastrophe (C4) | All 4
How untickled I have grown at constant comparisons drawn between Les Misérables, which drew to a sombre, score-settling, ultimately triumphant close last week, and War and Peace, the Beeb’s big January drama three full years ago. Other than the fact they were both bog-blockingly big reads - Les Mis ran to 1,900 pages in the French – and adapted, with nothing less than a genius for abridgement, by the very same man, Andrew Davies, Tolstoy’s tight sprawl fused place, time and character indissolubly, whereas Hugo’s was the story of two men that just happened to be set against the Parisian barricades.
Plus, I was very, very meh about War and Peace, chiefly the acting. Whereas Les Mis truly enlivened my cold January: absolutely loved it.
And the acting. Ever since Dominic West first hefted his glistening shoulders in the prison hulk, he and his beard – even shorn to pretty boy mayordom, it still somehow seemed there – have dominated scenes, bestrode them with seven-league boots, and with eyes, and with anger.
David Oyelowo, too, was unmissable: Javert’s essential, if unimaginative, goodness was finally, finally allowed to be shown, just in time for him to top himself, unforgiving to the end.
But it was the strength in depth, mainly: David Bradley as the conflicted Gillenormand; Erin Kellyman as the cynical, doomed Eponine; chiefly Adeel Akhtar as rat weasel Thenardier, who, like Zelig or Forrest Gump, gets to bear uncanny witness to every major plot twist, although Tom Hanks was covered in significantly fewer lively-looking turds from the sewers of Paris. My, you could practically smell them. History will be far kinder to this winning marvel of storytelling than early viewing figures suggest.
Purists are going to hate the rebooting of Das Boot. A big Sky Germany production, generally also Euro-heavy in its Frenchness, it seeks to recreate (presumably) some of the cachet of Wolfgang Petersen’s 1981 triumph, which is still regularly ranked among the best war films ever made. In this vaulting ambition, it seems almost laughably destined to fail.
This latest mini-series splits, almost equally, its time between underwater, in the days when (with Enigma cracked) the U-boats’ dominance over the Atlantic in that fat arc centred on La Rochelle was starting fast to crumble, and above the bubbles, where the plucky, sexy Resistance was doing intriguing things with codes and murder and berets. And it is… imperfect.
Among the things that could be said against the Nazi war machine – and there were downsides, admittedly – rank disobedience and diva-ish flouncing were not often chief, least of all in the ranks of the Kriegsmarine. And the device of splitting the action means there’s ever the danger that when you’re watching topsides you just want to get back to the torpedo action; and vice very much versa. Little of the cloying sense of claustrophobia remains from 1981; the glistening nausea, your heart pumping red in your ears in a black and airless tin can. For all that, if you can forget the original, this is (eventually) a galloping good watch – three episodes in, it improves immensely and one starts to care. But that’s a big “if”.
Two very different, equally marvellous, hosts popped up in radically disparate circumstances last week. Photographer Don McCullin, now 83, went back to try to find the England he has been so steadily chronicling ever since his first break (on the Observer), and made it all look so damned easy, taking (still) quietly brilliant medium-format monochrome pictures of unobserved life. As anyone who’s ever tried to emulate him knows, it is, absurdly, not. You don’t need genius: just unfailing gentility, dogged persistence and a capacity for nonjudgmental interaction and conversation, which is so rare in one package that it might as well amount to genius. A delightful waltz of a watch, it deserved a series.
And for all McCullin’s undoubted bravery – though he’s roundly dismissive of the label “war photographer”, and I can’t have been the only one reflecting that I’d rather walk into Kosovo than Glyndebourne – I’m not sure whether the “hero of the week” award shouldn’t garland Ade Adepitan’s capacious shoulders.
Adepitan, who contracted polio in his infancy, took it upon those shoulders to tell us some new stories about Africa, and did so impishly, informatively, winningly, occasionally angrily. Yet so often he struggled, on grit, on pebbles, on slippery fish decks, to haul himself uncomplainingly (or be hoist and carried, grinning), that it also told a new story of its very own, of perseverance, humility, laughter: an eye-opening series, for all the right reasons but many more.
The penultimate episode in this season of Catastrophe – tragically, the last – kicked off with such a sublimely off-colour gag (about another Channel 4 show, Sunday Brunch) that I mused, mildly, that standards could only trickle downhill thence.
Should have known better. A guest appearance by Chris Noth as Rob’s misogynist boss, all geezerish complicity and freezing out women (because they obviously don’t have a sense of humour), was sexist in a way I had thought had been made illegal in America, but on reflection probably remains rampant (if not mandatory) in most States.
How half our own population must have cheered, then, at Sharon’s calling-out of her own new and faintly creepy headmaster, in a way which surely can be done most skilfully with a soft County Meath accent and fast sense of sweary humour. Most women don’t enjoy such luxurious wish-fulfilment – but, for all that, this somehow managed to achieve message with nuance, without ever losing sight of Sharon Horgan’s primary objective, which is to be caustically funny throughout.
I said weeks ago that Silent Witness showed signs of becoming regrounded, giving up on its dream of having the first forensic pathologists on Mars, or whatever; and so this series, one of the best yet, happily proved. Now all they need to do is write a handful of tenth-way credible cops.
They could learn a lot from Vera, which also drew to an oddly wistful, ultimately redemptive, close. My, how the north-east tourist board must brace itself for every new series, and a renewal of its love-hate relationship with DCI Vera Stanhope. On the one hand, she continues to unearth bodies – in slurry pits, burnt discos, watery culverts – and to confront slab-faced, wife-beating men against backdrops of barbed wire and abandoned cement factories. On the other hand, there are those perennial skies…
