TV Review: GUNPOWDER + THE END OF THE F***ING WORLD

This article was originally published in The Courier on 28th October 2017.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

GUNPOWDER: Saturday, BBC One

THE END OF THE F***KING WORLD: Tuesday, Channel 4

It’s a scene we’ve witnessed a thousand times before.

A group of villains descend upon a house and demand entry. Before they can get in – they have to bark threats through a locked front door first – the inhabitants shoo their illegal refugees into various secret hiding places.

The villains search the house but find nothing. However, just as they’re about to leave, the leader of the gang notices that something isn’t quite right. He taps some walls to reveal a suspiciously hollow sound.

Cut to the terrified faces of the refugees hiding within. One of them makes a conspicuous sound, thus confirming the bad guy’s suspicions. Curses! Our heroes have been exposed!

That GUNPOWDER, a new retelling of the Guy Fawkes saga, began with a 15-minute staging of this hackneyed scenario didn’t bode well. This unintentionally Python-esque drama is a compendium of clichés.

Classic groaners under review included: the condemned prisoner eloquently refusing to renounce their supposed sins; dastardly noblemen skulking deferentially around a boorish monarch; a wise mentor (bonus points here for casting Peter Mullan) warning his hot-headed young charge that violent revenge is inadvisable; and Mark Gatiss turning up, as he must do by law in productions of this kind, as a serpentine hunchbacked villain.

Gatiss does deserve his position as the go-to guy for these roles, he never disappoints. I couldn’t fault the cast at all, in fact. Game of Thrones star Kit Harington, who also co-produces, broods sufficiently as the Gunpowder Plot leader, and Liv Tyler pulls off an acceptable English accent. However, a cameo from the great comic actor Kevin Eldon exacerbated the aura of straight-faced spoof.

The suitably grey, grubby, reeking production design was quite impressive. It also didn’t stint on the gruesome violence. There was, I must admit, something perversely pleasing about the BBC scheduling a grim period drama full of torture on a Saturday night after Strictly Come Dancing.

But the script by Ronan Bennett, while not outright bad exactly, was fatally mired in genre tropes. Bennett is an acclaimed Irish playwright whose work for TV includes the excellent Top Boy. This, however, is not his finest hour. Perhaps he’s too close to the material.

During The Troubles, he was convicted of murdering a policeman and plotting to cause explosions. Both convictions were eventually overturned, but it’s not unreasonable to view Gunpowder as his way of explaining why an angry young man might commit acts of violence under an oppressive regime.

Potentially fascinating territory, clumsily traversed.

A new black comedy about two dysfunctional teenagers, THE END OF THE F***KING WORLD wears its quirky darkness on its sleeve. However, that’s what quirkily dark teenagers do, so the tone feels fitting. It’s an intriguing show, funny, cruel, deadpan and sensitive. I admire its uncompromising vision. It’s honest, it has soul. It’s awash with romantic ‘50s pop.

James isn’t just quirky, he’s an actual psychopath. A suburban English Dexter. Or is he? Alyssa is an abrasive antisocial outcast suffering secret sorrow. She’s drawn to his weirdness. He sees her as his first potential murder victim. They’re a lost, vulnerable duo.

Despite the extreme subject matter, it’s a morbidly engaging meditation on how it feels to be a bright, difficult, alienated teenager from a boring town perpetually bathed in flat early evening sunlight. The two young leads strike just the right balance between sad, awkward innocence and blunt cynicism.

This British Badlands is an unconventional love story worthy of your time. 

TV Review: GEORGE MICHAEL: FREEDOM + CHRIS PACKHAM: ASPERGER'S AND ME

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 21 October 2017.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

GEORGE MICHAEL: FREEDOM: Monday, Channel 4

CHRIS PACKHAM: ASPERGER’S AND ME: Tuesday, BBC Two

The celebrity curse of 2016 struck one final tragic blow on Christmas Day, when George Michael died.

Only the day before he’d been putting the finishing touches to an autobiographical documentary. GEORGE MICHAEL: FREEDOM now stands as an elegy.

It focused on the period when, after dissolving Wham, he became one of the biggest pop idols on the planet.

George was very private, but always candid in interviews. This final testament was no exception. He discussed losing his first true love to HIV, his mother to cancer, his high-profile battles with the industry, and his persistent feelings of insecurity and loneliness.

Celebrities whining about the pressures of mega-fame can often stick in one’s craw, but George’s innate likeability tempered the blatant hubris of producing this tribute to his own talent and artistic integrity.

The film also felt like a tacit admission that his imperial phase as a solo artist ended in the mid-1990s, after his failed court case with Sony. I suspect, sadly, that George knew he was a spent creative force during the final 20 years of his life.

He always somehow managed to come across as a normal person, even while wearing shades indoors. His public cries for help – getting arrested in that LA toilet, most famously - made him look fallibly human. George always laughed them off, which made us like him even more.

His reputation within the industry was illustrated by contributions from an impressive roster of famous friends and fans such as Mary J Blige, Ricky Gervais (delivering his standard “ironic” homophobe crap), Elton John, Nile Rodgers, Stevie Wonder and, somewhat incongruously, Liam Gallagher, who outed himself as an endearingly sincere fan of the Listen Without Prejudice album.

This fitting tribute reminded me that George possessed a strong, pure, soulful voice – his powerful rendition of Somebody to Love at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert gains extra resonance with the knowledge that his terminally ill lover was in the audience that night.

It also highlighted his gift for writing introspective soul-pop nuggets with mass appeal, and that he was, pop star ego and all, a nice, honest guy. How many feted global superstars can you say that about?

The candour continued in CHRIS PACKHAM: ASPERGER’S AND ME, in which the wildlife presenter opened up about his condition for the first time in public.

Packham has been hiding his condition for most of his life. As a high-functioning autistic person, he’s managed to sustain a successful 30-year career. Nevertheless, he regards himself as disabled. He’s seriously considered killing himself on three occasions.

Packham experiences the world in an intensely hyper-real way. He exhausts himself with his obsessive grasshopper mind, although his encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural world is the source of his success.

He prefers the company of animals, hence why he lives with his dog in the middle of nowhere. His partner, who lives miles away, admitted that his inability to relate to people is very challenging. Nevertheless, they’ve been together for ten years. He’s also proud of his bond with his stepdaughter. Autism has myriad complexities.

While raking over his life story, he investigated some controversial and alarming new American therapies aimed at stripping away autistic traits. They involved electrodes and extreme behavioural modifications for children.

Packham was understandably angered by the notion of “curing” autism. After all, it defines the lives of everyone who has it. It’s who they are. They have a valuable role to play in society, so shouldn’t we adapt to their needs instead of forcing them to change?

This thoughtful programme concluded that it did. I agree.

TV Review: LOUIS THEROUX: DARK STATES - HEROIN TOWN + SNOWFALL

This article was originally published in The Courier on 14 October 2017.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

LOUIS THEROUX: DARK STATES – HEROIN TOWN: Sunday, BBC Two

SNOWFALL: Sunday, BBC Two

When you think of Sunday nights on BBC Two, you probably envision genteel arts documentaries or bittersweet Brenda Blethyn films. You don’t imagine a blizzard of Class A drugs exploding from your screen. Yet that’s what we got last Sabbath, with a heavy narcotic double-bill.

In LOUIS THEROUX: DARK STATES – HEROIN TOWN, our inquisitive interlocutor visited a depressed Appalachian industrial community where heroin use is rife. It’s an increasingly typical victim of, in Theroux’s sombre words, “the most deadly drug epidemic in US history.”

He met tragic addicts such as Curtilia, who spends more than $200 a day on her habit. She confessed to Theroux that her drug-dealing boyfriend, who hovered ominously in the background, was physically abusive. She was essentially his slave.

As Theroux watched her shoot up, he gently enquired, “There’s nothing I could say that would persuade you not to do that?” She shook her head with a weary smile.

Later he met her elderly great uncle. He loved Curtilia with all his heart. She loved him too, but she needed his money. He knew what she was using it for. She wept when this softly-spoken old man confessed to Theroux that he was enabling her demise. It was heart-breaking.

Theroux’s point was clear. Most of these addicts turned to heroin after becoming dependent on prescription painkillers wantonly prescribed by their doctors. Following a crackdown on this irresponsible practice, illegal drugs became their only way of numbing the pain. The multi-billion-dollar Big Pharma companies signed their death warrants.

To give us at least some comfort that decent professionals still exist, Theroux met a doctor who cares for recovering pregnant addicts. His work is vital, as one in ten babies born in this area are dependent on opiates.

He also followed a fire emergency team who were constantly tasked with reviving overdose victims, presumably because the local ambulance service couldn’t cope on its own with the sheer volume of critically ill addicts. The sympathetic agent he spoke to looked understandably tired.

This was a typically sad, humane, unflinching Theroux report. When it comes to presenting visions of unadulterated hopelessness, he has few peers.

Crack cocaine is the drug of choice in SNOWFALL, a new drama from Boyz n the Hood director John Singleton.

Set in South Central LA in 1983, it follows a black teenager as he shifts from soft low-level drug dealing to Devil’s Dandruff distribution. He’s the archetypal good kid getting in over his head. Naturally, his surname is Saint.

Dramas set in the recent past often have a tendency to overdo period details, but Snowfall boasts an authentic sense of time and place. There’s a nice selection of classic rap and soul on the soundtrack. You can feel the ghetto-blasting summer heat.

Comparisons with The Wire are inevitable, especially when TV critics insist on making them. But what can a poor boy do? Any new American crime drama involving drugs, troubled law enforcers and a prominent black cast is destined to be judged against that monumental classic. Snowfall is more generic and less Byzantine in its storytelling reach.

It also shows, initially at least, why people enjoy taking drugs, whereas The Wire was more concerned with the grim realities of addiction, poverty and crime. I’m sure Snowfall will tackle these issues eventually, but for now it feels like a slick facsimile of David Simon’s angry masterpiece.

Despite my nagging misgivings, it does show some promise. It’s well-made, the performances are fine, and even the clichés are acceptable if you don’t take it too seriously.

It also serves as a counterpoint to Theroux’s new series. Snowfall pinpoints a time when hard drugs were beginning to become more commonplace on the working-class streets of America.

34 years later, Theroux raked over the devastating legacy of that narcotic epidemic.

TV Review: THE LAST POST + PORRIDGE

This article was originally published in The Courier on 7th October 2017.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

THE LAST POST: Sunday, BBC One

PORRIDGE: Friday, BBC One

History is an endless spin-wash of repeated mistakes, never to be learned from. That’s the sobering message at the heart of THE LAST POST. It’s a sound point, but I didn’t enjoy this new drama from Peter Moffat (Silk; Undercover; Criminal Justice) in the slightest.

Caked in sweat, violence and despair, it’s set in a British military police compound in Aden, Yemen, in 1965.

Aden was one of the oldest colonies in the British Empire. By the mid-1960s, it was a moribund anachronism, one of the final, desperate shreds of this shameful chapter in our great nation’s mission to civilise the world with politely armed oppression.

Potentially fascinating subject matter, but The Last Post is just another staidly prestigious production in which the usual stock cast of decent actors go through the motions while a writer hits you over the head with their political point. Yes, I get it, Peter. The torture of prisoners in Yemen really did resemble the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Let’s smack ourselves sore on the back for recognising that.

It’s such a boring shimmer of expensive waste. The excellent Jessica Raine does a good, committed drunk-act in a drama that no one will remember in six weeks time. The cinematographer might get a BAFTA. Earnest speeches will be made from the podium. Life marches on.

Last year’s unpromising pilot for a new series of the classic prison sitcom PORRIDGE was greeted with a shrug from most viewers and critics, hence the ensuing bafflement when the BBC announced that it had been picked up for a series.

The pilot wasn’t terrible, but it felt pointless. Although episode one of the new series was an improvement – it felt more comfortable in its own skin - there’s still no way of forgetting that you’re not watching Ronnie Barker and co delivering a masterpiece. It’s difficult to appreciate this Porridge on its own terms.

Of course, everyone involved in the production must be acutely aware of that. It’s written by the estimable Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, creators of the original, who couldn’t write a bad half hour of comedy if they tried. But I do wonder whether, in their heart of hearts, they’d rather be writing a brand new sitcom, rather than a tribute to one of their previous successes.

They haven’t altered the original formula at all, which works both for and against it.

Fletch’s grandson is a chip off the old recidivist block. That is, he’s exactly the same character, albeit played by someone else (Kevin Bishop). The younger Fletch is a cyber-criminal (how terribly modern) serving five years in a prison which just so happens to employ a tough, no-nonsense Scottish warder with a well-meaningly lenient sidekick. History repeating, once again.

Bishop has clearly studied Barker’s performance and delivers a likeable imitation. I don’t envy him having to step into such enormous shoes, but he doesn’t embarrass himself in the slightest. Clement and La Frenais still know how to write for Fletch. Again, however, that only serves to encourage comparisons with the original.

It’s a prison from which they can never escape.

This new Porridge is occasionally quite funny, but it’s essentially a competent facsimile of a superior work. It doesn’t really need to exist.