The X Factor (ITV) | ITV Player
Cider With Rosie (BBC1) | iPlayer
The Kennedys (BBC1) | iPlayer
You, Me and the Apocalypse (Sky 1)
And so The X Factor lumbers on, now midway through its 6,539th series and just entering the live shows. I jest, of course. It’s actually the 6,540th series – at least, that’s what it feels like – and the countless thousands of wannabes who have taken to the stage are estimated to have cumulatively given 78,346% in pursuing their goal of musical superstardom.
Last Sunday, ITV subjected us to 90 long minutes (actual figure) detailing the final stages of The X Factor “boot camp” – so called because it requires a military level of vigilance to stay awake while watching it and not have one’s spirit broken by the endless advertising idents featuring a schoolboy singing Mark Morrison’s Return of the Mack.
The contestants were paraded like show dogs in front of the stony-faced judges to sing, yet again, some ponderously slow version of a Roberta Flack song with tears in their eyes. Cheryl Double-Barrelled, whose size seems to shrink in inverse proportion to the amount of names she acquires, made the occasional enlightening comment to help us along.
“He’s having anxiety,” she said as a terrified teenage boy trembled his way through his performance. Yes, Chezza, yes. We could see that, what with us having eyes and stuff.
I used to love The X Factor. Truly. I knew I was being manipulated by the emotional backstories and the spirit-raising montages, but I was a willing participant in Simon Cowell’s collusion because it was done so well. It was smooth and slick and it pressed all the right buttons for semi-mindless Saturday-night entertainment.
But the format is now so tired it might as well be in a medically induced coma. The addition of new judges or presenters hasn’t done anything to vamp it up because we’ve seen it all a thousand times before. The woman who works in (insert menial role here) and has lied to her employer to come to the audition. The shy boy with the (insert unfortunate physical shortcoming here) who’s just had his heart broken. The man who’s travelled from (insert far-flung country here) and wins the audience over, despite being, you know, foreign. And so it goes on. And on. And on.
Over on BBC1, 90 minutes were put to much better use in Cider With Rosie, a lusciously evocative adaptation of Laurie Lee’s eponymous childhood memoir. It was beautifully directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, who managed to convey both the rural charm of the Cotswold countryside and the lyricism of Lee’s words. The time frame zigzagged back and forth without ever losing the narrative thread and a judicious use of voiceover kept the pace thrumming along nicely. It never once tipped over into tweeness. In fact, the rural idyll contained dark undercurrents: 13 minutes in, and Laurie’s flaxen-haired sister was already dead.
Samantha Morton as Laurie’s mother was superb, her face shifting like the seasons through nuanced emotion. She is an actor capable of conveying both gentleness and strength in such a natural way that it seems effortless. The supporting cast was excellent and included June Whitfield, Annette Crosbie and Jessica Hynes, as well as young children plucked from local schools.
There was, admittedly, a touch too much wistful folk singing for my liking, but I could live with it. By the end, I felt both fully sated and wanting more. Could there be a follow-up? Real Ale with Rosie, perhaps?
The Kennedys was not, in fact, the soapy American biopic drama starring Katie Holmes as Jackie O, but a new family sitcom set in the 1970s. The opening episode was introduced by the 10-year-old Emma (Lucy Hutchison), a Star Wars-obsessed tomboy who witnesses her parents’ attempts to host a newfangled, mysterious thing called “a dinner party”.
Much hilarious japery is meant to ensue. But it’s basically just a series of cliched jokes about the 70s. When Mrs Kennedy, played by the ever-brilliant Katherine Parkinson, says she intends to make a lasagne, there is the obligatory “pasta in it and not in a tin? That’s madness!”
Of course, one of the guests turns up with a cheddar and pineapple hedgehog. There’s a Space Hopper in the garden, a joke about a woman’s breasts cushioning her fall and an exotic foodstuff called “garlic bread”, which Emma’s father tries to make out of sliced white Mother’s Pride. If the past is a foreign country, this was the televisual equivalent of poking fun at Johnny Foreigner.
Still, it’s a sitcom and probably doesn’t aspire to be subtle or genre-busting. The Kennedys does what it says on the (pasta) tin and it’s jolly and well acted. Probably worth sticking with for Katherine Parkinson alone.
You, Me and the Apocalypse, by contrast, imagines a near future when an asteroid on a direct collision course with Earth puts the world on the brink of imminent extinction. It is set in Slough, which, ever since The Office, has become a TV comedy byword for plodding mundanity and ironic hyper-normality. It’s not the only reference You, Me… has to other television programmes – there are several scenes in a women’s prison in New Mexico that bear more than a passing resemblance to Orange Is the New Black.
This aside, You, Me and the Apocalypse is an unexpected delight. I say unexpected because it’s not every day you see Pauline Birds of a Feather Quirke co-starring alongside Rob St Elmo’s Fire Lowe and the narrative is completely bonkers, incorporating as it does a WikiLeaks-style computer-hacking antagonist, an Italian nun and a foul-mouthed priest whose job it is to be a devil’s advocate (literally) and argue against candidates for canonisation.
Like I said: totally batshit.
But it works, partly because the writing is tight and deft and funny and the acting excellent. Rob Lowe is especially good as the priest, Father Jude Sutton, and delivers all the best lines. At one point, he muses over why the phrase “Christ on a bike” might be offensive to Catholics.
“I think he’d be very likely to ride a bike,” says Father Sutton. “He seems like that kind of a guy to me. What else would he show up in – a stretch hummer?”
It’s a very promising first episode. I do feel a bit sorry for Slough though.
