Lovecraft Country (Sky Atlantic) | sky.com
African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power (BBC Four) | BBC iPlayer
Handmade in Africa (BBC Four) | BBCiPlayer
Derren Brown: 20 Years of Mind Control (Channel 4) | 4oD
Manctopia: Billion Pound Property Boom (BBC Two) | BBC iPlayer
Lovecraft Country was, in its ambitions and its potential heft, already a phenomenon just on paper. Add in the presence of JJ Abrams and Jordan Peele as executive producers, along with a sublime cast of strength in depth, and it landed on our screens last week with a burnished gleam of unmistakable triumph. It is that rare thing: a show that can deliver gut-punch messages of contempt (and hope), yet which remembers throughout that it’s a drama, keeping one thrillingly on the edge, ripe and reeking with surprise.
The plot, developed by Misha Green after the 2016 Matt Ruff novel, is rather more complex than the average episode of, say, Death in Paradise. But all you really need to grasp is that there was a writer called HP Lovecraft, famed equally for his weird tales of macabre monsters as for his remarkable racism, in which he was primus inter pares even for early 20th-century America. Lovecraft Country, then, is the fictionalised 1950s area, centred largely on the white suburbs and villes of New England, where the author’s grotesques meet the very real Jim Crow laws that kept black people segregated in some states until 1965: human monsters meeting the more fanged and splattery type.
Atticus “Tic” Freeman, a Korean war vet, accompanied by his well-read, lovely Uncle George and spirited family pal Leti Lewis, set out to search for Tic’s long-lost father in this benighted land, the clapboard churches and down-home diners outwardly charming but home to the vilest of thoughts, the forests home to a different kind of threat. The build-up takes its nice time to establish a skilful premise: it’s not until minute 45 or something that we get the first real shock, and the race for the county line before nightfall, pursued by a truly vile sheriff with one lazy hand on the wheel and a lynching eye on the clock, is genuinely heart-in-mouth stuff. Cue sundown. Never been happier to see monsters.
I’ve been lucky enough to have seen the first five episodes (of 10) vouchsafed me by HBO and can promise it simply gets better and better: Jurnee Smollett and Jonathan Majors are standouts in the lead roles, and this will also feature, increasingly, our own, ever-watchable Wunmi Mosaku. Expect for this garlands of justified praise.
Rather more grounded in reality was the first outing of BBC Four’s African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power, Afua Hirsch’s idea being to explore, via case studies in Ethiopia, Senegal and Kenya, the cultural confidence of the future of the planet’s youngest continent (six in 10 Africans are under 25). In general, Hirsch was a delightful and wise host, and fairly galloped through a sprawl of deep history, though the programme never felt rushed. In Ethiopia, the first episode, she did a bang-up job of bringing emperor Haile Selassie to life, and showing how his influence on the 20th century was every bit as telling as the likes of Castro. And how we might attribute to Ethiopia a little more than a telly famine.
If Hirsch was occasionally in mild danger of editorialising with her questions – “Are you seeking to heal the wounds inflicted by slavery and colonisation?” – she could be forgiven much justifiable griping. The great civilisation of the Aksumites, for instance, converted to Christianity in the 4th century. To the Victorian missionaries who arrived some 1,500 years later, determined to convert savage heathens in the “dark continent”, I’d have said: “Read the room, chaps.”
It was preceded that evening by the first episode in three of Handmade in Africa, one of those winning slow-TV fixtures – no voiceover, just careful subtitling that lets you know, for instance, that we’re 7,800ft above sea level (the winters are cold. There will be snow in Africa…) – set in the highlands of Ethiopia.
After 46 years and five children in the same hut, Dasanshi’s home is now beyond saving. The elders of the small Dorze community agree to build her a new hut in which she can proudly die. And that’s pretty much it, for plot. Everyone muscles in to split and clean and train bamboo for the new hut.
When she first entered her new home, Dasanshi was beaming fit to split. “Inside the new house I will drink honey beer with my neighbours!” was translated for us. Amen to that. What a delightful programme, which could have happily lasted for hours, and quietly taught us a little about reverence for the aged and selfless communitarianism.
From bamboo to bamboozle. Mark Gatiss once said of Derren Brown: “[He is] the nation’s chief tease, a slightly unsettling national treasure”, and so Channel 4 celebrated 20 years of the arch manipulator, still the only “magician” who can consistently make my jaw drop. Were we ourselves being manipulated, with this very show? Undoubtedly: 20 Years of Mind Control was an uncritical puff piece for Brown. Yet for all that it was never less than endlessly intriguing, and he did most of the decent questioning of himself.
Can all his stunts be entirely justified by an exploration of the human psyche? Are they psychologically valuable or just snake-oil entertainment? I’d go roughly half and half, and Brown has himself matured, as we could see in this show, towards a fine understanding, not least of self: long may he continue to invite us to pick our jaws from the floor. The programme was followed by a viewers’ vote for the favourite show, and Armageddon, if you’ve never encountered Derren Brown, is an astonishing piece of work and the best place to start. There ain’t no magic, but this comes uncomfortably close.
Manctopia: Billion Pound Property Boom was an ugly title for a less than pretty programme. Ostensibly an objective analysis of how Manchester city centre has recently been gentrified, it featured one pleasant-ish tycoon trying to do his best for the city, a couple of greedy spoilt graspers, some nice homeless souls, several charming shots of rats and condoms.
But filmed before lockdown, it (so far) hasn’t taken into account the sweeping changes besetting every city centre, nor, in the wake of global economic meltdown, what’s going to happen to the empty thrusting towers, home to little, exactly as in London, except for anonymous foreign gold. It just made me not want to go to Manchester. Coming on top of the seethingly illegal Gorton rave, and the threat of an Oldham lockdown, there have been adverts for the Manc tourist board that were surely better timed.
