The Border (C4) | All4
Game of Thrones (Sky Atlantic)
Frat Boys: Inside America’s Fraternities (BBC2) | iPlayer
Celebrity MasterChef (BBC1) | iPlayer
“Get Grzywaczewski,” muttered the boss in a subtitled aside. Grunted vocally, it emerged (obviously) as “Hmm… trigwa.” Those marvellous Poles. Had I had to even look at that script, let alone wrestle with it, all my teeth would have exploded.
So: a fascinating new language to learn. And none of your easy Scandi tak and hej: Poles will stretch a simple “cheers” to an anagram you’d be working on for weeks, yet can reduce the (perhaps common in those parts?) concept of “being stalked by a wolf in the snowy moonlight while mourning your sexy loved one with your arm in a sling” to a simple “dz’oh”.
And there is much mournfulness in The Border, along with wolves (a beautiful few), ugly rough vodkas (a gulped heartburn too many), slow anger, crazed geopolitics and the very lovely, if very other, high, high hills of Bieszczady, on Poland’s border with Ukraine. Subtitles have opened our minds to so much, not least the fact that Europe, the second smallest continent on the planet, remains exuberant with the unexplored.
And the other good news is that The Border is terrific, a great addition to the Walter Presents strand of Channel 4 international imports, which has not of late been totally above the scraping of barrels. The tale of border guards in those hills is not told with pace, and so allows us to experience the slow, tramping, muddied footsteps of real people doing a real job, yelping dogs falling into ditches, and the very smells – the mucky metal trash-burning furnaces, burning everything from dirty underpants to fierce rancid food; the fresh mountain hints of high wild garlic – can enter one’s mind. Nominally, it will be about one man, sole survivor of a bombing of outpost border guards, seeking personal redemption in a war against people traffickers. Hopes are high that it expands to explore aspects of Schengen, and the venality of trading in refugees. I do know that it’s the most gripping foreign drama since Trapped.
Game of Thrones. Wow. Simply wow.
The battle scene for which we’d all been waiting was director Miguel Sapochnik’s Spielberg moment. It didn’t, quite, eclipse the opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. But it added horses, thudding horses.
Coming – thud – out of the corner of the screen. Coming – thud – from the camera’s side. The shock of the thud was all, the thud and the blood. Was there any more visceral reminder of the filthy randomness of war? You can prepare all you want to, but just as you’re about to plunge a dirk into a Winterfeller … thud, horse, you’re suddenly eviscerated, and all from the bloody sudden sidescreen.
Finally, also, we’d had Daenerys, doing, finally and rather robustly explosively, the stuff with the dragons, though not the stuff with the script, which, for once, limped. Little matter. These were beyond doubt the finest and most claustrophobically unsettling 15 war minutes I have ever seen on a small screen.
BBC2’s Frat Boys was savagely depressing, on a small scale. It was also the most fascinating documentary of the week. Privileged chaps in America, but only if they have enough family money, can elbow their way into fraternities, the American equivalent of Eton-gone-wrong. They bond, stupidly. They talk, endlessly, about money and cars and pretty girls and going into sports PR. They do not talk, ever, about creativity, or love, or art, or books, or anything else splashingly interesting. As you might imagine, they go on to great things.
There was a montage featuring former frat-boy film stars (Costner, Ferrell, Harrelson), who between them have contributed so much.
It is estimated that there are 100,000 frat boys in America. No matter how successful, they have statistically in their later years an astounding record of sexually assaulting women. Basically, Masonics reborn, but without the redemptive caring or brains.
We and the BBC’s cameras followed a posh boy chap, originally from Leicester, who underwent a “hazing” on a beach in Miami. He couldn’t have had a worse idea if he’d spent his entire life working on it. I so wanted a horse, a random horse, to emerge from sidescreen and suddenly batter the tawdry, cheap, thick Phi Beta whatevs on their beautiful beach. Thud.
Celebrity MasterChef lived down to its own expectations. Sinitta made an asparagus and snot confection. The snot was raw. Torode and Wallace were, are, as ever, forgiving at this stage of the game. “Cooked, it could maybe be quite nice.” “Not good, I’m afraid.”
“I think I’m going home today,” burbled Sinitta, on her way from about the fifth reality show she’s been forced to grace because of her supreme, um, celebrity. Yet too much has been made already of the Q-list celebrity quotient in this series – the drama remains terrific, in terms of people learning, under inordinate pressure, to cook, and sometimes rather well. I have high hopes for Alexis Conran, a smart man and always a winning fixture on C5’s The Wright Stuff.
I didn’t think I’d have time to write this, normally having to file on a Thursday, but the BBC won the referendum. David Dimbleby visibly aged throughout the night, but survived coordinated, all with sublimely grumpy affability; Laura Kuenssberg remained impossibly perky and wise and, if possible, seemed to actually shed years as the long night turned to dawn. It’s all over now. Bar the shouting.
