Taskmaster (Channel 4) | All 4
Dementia Choir at Christmas (BBC One) | iPlayer
The Year That Changed Love (Channel 4) | All 4
Nadiya’s American Adventure (BBC One) | iPlayer
What a boon has been the latest series of Taskmaster in keeping some of us sane these past few weary weeks. A glorious kind of alchemy pervaded from the very first episode in 2015: five highly personable individuals, of undoubted “celeb” status but staunchly non-sleb in outlook, a pair of sweetly bickering hosts (Greg Davies and Alex Horne) and a phantasmagoria of truly outre tasks, the stuff of cheese-dreams – how this recipe somehow magicked itself into unmissable telly still has the more by-numbers tickbox “creatives” of the industry scratching heads.
There were those who fretted a little that it might not survive its transition from the self-consciously wacky Dave channel. That it has done so, and in spades, is surely half-down to a canny producer’s choice of lineup for this first series on C4: Katherine Parkinson, Richard Herring, Mawaan Rizwan, Johnny Vegas and the phenomenal Daisy May Cooper, who did it all while pregnant. It felt by Thursday’s finale as if we’d known them for years as, if not friends, then the loud (more interesting) table a couple of seats away in the pub, full of disparate characters who could giggle together while disagreeing and competing. As used to happen the minute before social media landed.
Mr Herring won, to nobody’s chagrin: I actually got a wee lumplet in my throat at Katherine and Mawaan beaming so delightedly for him. The ever-caustic Davies, whose judging comments have reduced even himself on occasion to helpless fits – Vegas’s karaoke splendour last week had, according to Greg’s notes “channelled Joe Cocker and that man who stands outside the off-licence trying to fight a bib” – and Horne, the show’s sharp creator, who has shepherded contestants through everything from the Christmas tree bagging machine task to “catapulting shoes into a bath” with deadpan grandeur. Indeed, these 2020 tasks lived up to the famous early “painting a horse while riding a horse” challenge. I defy even the most curmudgeonly to watch for 12 minutes with a successfully stony face.
I don’t normally race towards anything such as Vicky McClure’s Our Dementia Choir at Christmas, klaxons tending to trigger whenever something can be described by the Radio Times as “inspiring”, “heartwarming” or “life-changing”, when rather too often the word they are reaching for is “mawkish”. But even my ossified soul relented here: and Vicky and ebullient choirmaster Mark De-Lisser had done a bang-up job last year in Nottingham, making their first programme on this theme.
And 2020 has been particularly bad for sufferers of dementia: their liking for routine and stability thrown into seven blenders, with a concomitant decline in sharpness, particularly in care homes. They cannot all be as fortunate as June, diagnosed at 50 and still blitheringly positive in outlook. “Part of my brain has gone on holiday and left the rest here,” she beamed. “Gradually more of my brain will go and join them on the beach.” Or Mick, 53, on whom much of the programme focused: he and his voice were discovered last year, and he’s still willing, though lockdown and its confusions are now taking a serious toll. On to the stage of the London Coliseum he went, with delightful red bow tie, to do Bring Me Sunshine.
McClure, whose seriousness, intent and veracity are the diametric opposite of mawkish, had persuaded Line of Duty co-star Adrian Dunbar to join Mick on stage at the Coliseum, along with a couple of the English National Opera’s finest, and my but Ted Hastings was suddenly a revelation; smiley and chatty and a fine brogue of a tenor to boot. And it was a fine rendition. Afterwards, Mick’s wife, Karen, quietly whispered to him: “You fight this all the time. Don’t you.” She neither sought nor got an answer: Mick had given his all. Next year more than a million people in the UK will be living with dementia, about 50,000 of them under 65.
The Year That Changed Love came with ambitious stated intentions: to tell the story of 2020’s lost romantic chances. But too often I felt as if I was just peering needlessly, almost vicariously, inside five stories: it might have been telling a story or two, but as for the, or anything definitive, forget it.
The stories might even have sat in another, non-lockdown, year. Claire and Jade, from Edinburgh, who had been on just one date before restrictions hit, and had suddenly to decide to couple together. It seems to be going rather remarkably well. In Wales, Ffion is a stickler for the regs, Ben less so, but they survive on phone chats and chocolate. A single woman and a gay man, and their apps: they too seem to be merely dating, if to wildly varying levels of social rule-following. Louise was basically just enjoying getting out to the pub.
But as for any great Year of Heartache: I got very little sense of the surely teeming teenage boredom, the true dilemmas that must have beset thousands of young couples together on the crux of a six-month relationship, say, and having to make an anguished choice at a tender time. It was warm, certainly, and loving, and the bulk of the characters charming. But what if it’s not “love”, merely a crush, or fomo, or habit? How do you tell? Is a lockdown year as good a way to tell as any? You’d need to ask another programme.
Any new series on which Ms Hussain embarks should simply be entitled Nadiya Pulls It Off! were Nadiya Hussain not so obviously not a product of smug 1950s hockey-princess fiction. She did so anyway, and this time in America. They loved her.
The cooking and baking in Nadiya’s American Adventure took very much a back seat, which was fine, because her tooth is a little sweet for me. Instead she managed to tell, via travels in Louisiana and California, the tale of immigrants, often illegal, who have stuck their feet nevertheless under the table of America. And given it much better food than it deserves. Along the way she pulled out stories from the Guatemalan, the Thai, the Dutch, the Polish and Chinese diasporas on why they had been drawn to this country.
Nadiya, with a toweringly sane sense of balance, could put to shame many reporters who set out to explore similar themes, but with an agenda. Yet it’s a startling mystery why America has been so dependent on, and welcoming of, other cultures but can now seem so relentlessly set against change. This has been a too-short series, now sadly concluded. I’d like 2021’s Nadiya Pulls It Off! to feature an empathetic conclusion to the Arab-Israeli conflict. She could, you know…
