Camilla's nightmares

I do hope next week's Radio 4 Appeal will be on behalf of a charity that helps newspaper critics recover from watching BBC TV programmes. I for one would donate, especially after reading Camilla Long's deeply moving column in today's The Sunday Times:

There’s no shortage of programmes about race on television — turn on any channel and you will see Samuel L Jackson flying to Gabon or someone in a slavery drama having their skin flayed off. This month alone there has been Lenny Henry on the Caribbean [BBC Two] and a decent new iteration of the reality show Back in Time for Birmingham, about Asians [also BBC Two]. Our televisions are host to a dizzying range of what producers believe are provocative takes on race and diversity, except none of them is surprising, curious or even new.

None of these programmes says anything different; none of them deviates from the blunt narrative that, for a minority, life is appalling and must be turned into a fetishised form of entertainment. No one white is ever seen as anything except cynical or ill-educated, even though the vast majority of these programmes are produced by concerned white people for concerned white people. Frankly, it’s a nightmare to review them.

I'm so glad I'm not a newspaper critic.  

Bloodbath Reviews

 

I much preferring reading reviews of TV dramas these days to watching those dramas. My loss maybe, or maybe not. Anyhow, here are two Times reviews of BBC One's latest moody drama, first from Carol Midgley:

I watched the first half of Bloodlands, possibly like you, with a sense of “been here, done this” ennui. James Nesbitt was a brooding, sad-faced detective with a tragic backstory (tick). He was put on a case that he thought was connected to another (highly sensitive) one, but was told to “just leave it. It’s in the past” (tick). That case involved his murdered wife (“She’s gone. Nothing’s gonna bring her back”) and now he was on an angry mission to solve it (tick). Pass the déjà vu tablets, I think we’re going to need them.

The second came from Camilla Long and was slightly less charitable:

What is even more embarrassing than having produced Bloodlands, the most lumpen, graceless, cheapest cop drama in living memory? The answer is: scheduling it in the same week as [ITV's] Unforgotten, one of the best and most elegant, complete with its subtle script, understated acting, and, of course, Nicola Walker. 

There is no comparison, for example, between spending an hour with James Nesbitt, grinding his awful gears as some detective in a shockingly basic, bothy-strewn, Nor’n Irish crime drama, and giving yourself over to the finely tuned Walker, who returns to Unforgotten for a fourth series and one last unsolved murder. 

It felt loved and cared for, unlike the incomparably ugly Bloodlands, which felt as if the BBC only ran it because they’d lost a drunken bet. The script, we’re told, was nurtured by Jed Mercurio, the creator of Line of Duty, which suggested a tight, fraught drama with backstabbing and bent coppers, not a vanilla cop-style product that felt as if it had been written by a 15-year-old Jed Mercurio fan, which the BBC then showed out of pity and guilt. 

I think I'd stick with reading the reviews. 

Running hot and cold

 

Camilla Long in The Sunday Times writes today about how last Tuesday, prior to the EU uniting most of the British Isles in fury, "anti-Brexit stories were still running hot and cold on the BBC website":

We learnt, for example, how poor shoppers were being charged more for goods from the EU. 

One woman paid a whole £30 extra for earrings from Greece. 

“My model car cost £12 more,” moaned Londoner Sascha Grillo. “Second-hand pottery on eBay was more expensive,” ran another sob story. 

I bet the average person who voted leave must be feeling devastated knowing that used pottery, model cars, designer leather goods and gold trinkets are costing people in London ever so slightly more.

Camilla isn't wrong. 

And in the days between Tuesday and Friday's EU fiasco, the anti-Brexit stories kept on coming, with one particularly ironic one - NI Protocol 'obstructs free movement of military' - coming on Friday itself.  We also got Brexit causes ferry travel issue for guide dogs, Brexit difficult for my firm - Samantha Cameron, Brexit means NI eels can't be sold in Britain and Post-Brexit plant problems are an 'urgent issue'.

The Sunday Papers

 

The Crook O'Lune (near Morecambe)

The Sunday papers have arrived on my laptop, so here's a selection of today's top stories:

1. Charles Moore isn't going to be the next BBC chairman

The Sunday Times reports that Charles Moore has ruled himself out of running for BBC chairman on "personal" grounds. He's not even applying. Unfortunately. Incidentally, John Simpson isn't impressed with the way the paper has covered this:

Last week's Sunday Times reported that Boris Johnson wanted Charles Moore to be the chairman of the BBC. Today, in a much less prominent story, it says Moore has ruled himself out, on personal grounds.'

The Sunday Times is behaving like the BBC there. 

2. BBC journalist Martin Bashir "misled" Diana’s brother to secure bombshell interview

So claims The Sunday Times. The paper alleges that Martin Bashir, now the BBC's religious affairs correspondent, "obtained the scoop under a false pretext and by using fake bank statements". It says the allegations "will raise difficult questions for the BBC" as the Corporation conducted its own internal investigation at the time and cleared itself. The BBC says Mr Bashir is "unwell and unable to respond" but has issued a statement reiterating its defence of his behaviour. 

3. Camilla Long on BBC Four's Black Classical Music

In her Sunday Times review column, Camilla Long notes that the presenters (Sir Lenny Henry and Suzie Klein) had "to keep reminding us what dreadful victims these talented people were":

At the end of nearly every scene, there would be a ceremonial confronting of the material, in which they demanded to know from various guests, and I paraphrase, “Why isn’t he more famous? Who were the racists who suppressed his cantatas? You began to think, why don’t they just let the music speak for itself? But as it went on you realised, it wasn’t about the music at all.

True.

4. The BBC tells off Dame Jenni Murray one last time

After her swift, post-BBC attack on the BBC in yesterday's Daily Mail, the Sunday Telegraph quotes the BBC's official response. It's a final dig at the opinionated former Woman's Hour presenter:

We wish Jenni well in her new career as a columnist but the public will understand the importance of impartiality whilst working at the BBC.

5. Michael Gove on Frankie Boyle's New World Order

The Mail on Sunday has an interview with Michael Gove. Here's what he says about Frankie Boyle's New World Order:

You have a group of comedians who engage in a 30-minute seminar informed by Marxist ideas and they think jokes about 'killing whitey' are worth the licence fee, then you have to ask a question. And the question is, why should it be the case that people in Middlesbrough and Mansfield should pay out of their salaries so that Oxbridge graduates can trash their values in that way?

A good question.

Sunday Morning Reading I: "At approximately 9.45am last Sunday, something awful happened to the political interview."

Here's Camilla Long in The Sunday Times on last Sunday's Boris Johnson/Andrew Marr debacle: 

At approximately 9.45am last Sunday, something awful happened to the political interview. It took place on the sofa of The Andrew Marr Show, after days of furious speculation about whether the prime minister would consent to being interviewed by Andrew Neil. By the time Boris had his one-to-one with Marr, we had somehow got to the frenzied point of believing it is the primary duty of prime ministers during an election to offer themselves to an interviewer of our choosing at a time of our calling, to submit to a ritual humiliation for the purpose of our entertainment — and if he doesn’t, he is a “disgusting coward” and a “traitor to democracy”. 

The BBC, and in fact every channel, have whipped up this storm in the service of what they call “the public interest” and I call “ratings”. As I watched Marr attempt to monster Boris in the manner of Neil — a bizarre experience in itself — I thought, why would anyone sign up to this madness? Why would any decent politician stoop to being dragged into a pointless slanging match, harried and humiliated to the point that even Boris’s charm seemed to be on the ebb? 

“When are you going to let me finish an answer?” he complained. “When you give me an answer,” Marr snapped, which was straight-up unreasonable. 

And what questions was Marr asking? Ludicrously specific ones, designed to trap Boris into a mistake. “Do you know how many magistrates’ and crown courts have been closed?” he snarled. Obviously, Boris didn’t, and looked stupid. Whenever Marr failed to trap him, he demanded, like Neil, that Boris apologise. He did this four times, or was it six? There will be a tally on the internet. It should have been win-win for Marr, but it felt like lose-lose for everyone. 

Boris doesn’t need defending, of course, but the presentation of our politics on television does. It is currently a Wild West of competing interests that leads to febrile showdowns or irate audiences full of mad activists, and the result is terrible television. If there’s one thing the past fortnight has shown us, it’s that debates during elections need to come under some kind of debates commission, with set fixtures and audiences picked independently.

Killing off Killing Eve

Following last night’s showing of the first episode of the second series of Killing Eve, Camilla Long reviews it in the Sunday Times. (£)

It’s a good analysis and I agree with much of it. I know not everyone liked the first series, but I did. However, the new series is looking kind of lacklustre, which is all the more disappointing after the BBC’s relentless hype and bombardment of promotional material. Damp squibs come to mind. I do hope that as the episodes unfold things take a turn for the better. 

Sorry, but the verdict so far is that the new writer isn’t any good, and the direction is well clunky. The story flits from “Eve’ to ‘Villanelle’ - back and forth, back and forth, in an unexciting, predictable and stifling fashion. 

Here’s Camilla:

“Killing Eve is back, and for a second year running I’m at a total loss to explain why it’s such a wild and exciting hit. You can’t possibly come for the story, which is about as childish and silly as a tale about a female assassin could get (an achievement). You can’t come for the world our female assassin inhabits, a strange, contrived non-world of Parisian apartments and Italian villas and twee Austrian cake shops and the dreariest alcoves of English suburbia, which fans will argue is all part of the offhand, quirky humour, which I don’t get. 

You can’t come for the plot, which meanders, or the script, which in this series isn’t even half-funny, or the acting, which in the case of Sandra Oh, playing Eve Polastri, an MI5 agent trying to stop Villanelle killing businessmen, is the hysterical two-gear kabuki of daytime television. But you can come for Jodie Comer as Villanelle.”

Here, I ought to explain why I think the first series was such a hit.  It was because of the strip-cartoonish style coupled with some original ingredients and ideas. For example, the unpredictable behaviour of psychopath Villanelle played brilliantly by Jodie Comer; her interaction with her handler Konstantin, plus the actress Sandra Oh’s unusual appearance together with sparky, Waller-Bridge dialogue and the performances of a variety of actors, especially the children. The girl who played Konstantin’s daughter was outstanding.  Unlike the second series, the direction in the first series was clever, varied and made Villanelle’s activities seem almost plausible.

My thoughts are that if they couldn’t match the originality of the first series they should have left it there. This is the best bit of Camilla Long’s review:

Woo-hoo, what a sweet, sweet ballet of crazy eyes and chaffering madness and sudden murderous urges she is. Everything about this show is disposable except for Comer, who’s simply the best thing in anything I’ve seen in ages. For someone who’s meant to have zero emotions, she somehow crackles with the full range of human fury, jealousy, spite, bitterness and glee. She makes her passionate and peculiar love for Eve actually seem real. In fact, her obsession appears to have gone up a gear since the first series, at the end of which Eve finally tracked her down and stabbed her in the belly. 

Villanelle has survived and, far from being put off by this gesture, is now referring to Eve as her “girlfriend”. Her wound isn’t a wound, but… a gift. She stumbles out of her apartment, clutching her side, and into a hospital, before climbing into the boot of a car and heading for Basildon, of all places. Back in London, Eve becomes aware that Villanelle is still alive and the chase has been reversed. 

I inhaled the first series and thought I’d inhale the second, but — how can I put this? It’s a bit slow. Its self-aware, self-congratulatory tone is grating, and the only thing left is a great soundtrack and Comer in some eye-catching outfits. (She always goes shopping after a kill.)

The first series was written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who managed to create at least some idea of the tension between Eve and Villanelle, even if their relationship felt like something the characters talked about, but never actually felt. For this new series, there’s a different writer, the children’s author Emerald Fennell, but it’s a shell of a production she has inherited. The entire show now rests on Comer, as Eve is reduced to a subplot about her marriage and her maths-teacher husband, who wasn’t interesting in the first place. 

Comer is as engaging and weird and complicated as ever, garrotting execs and breaking necks, but even she seems to be suffocating under the forced setups. Inexplicably trapped by a creepy guy in his house full of dolls, why doesn’t she just kill him and leave? In the past, she wouldn’t have hesitated.

I haven’t yet binge-watched the remaining episodes, which are available now on iPlayer, and having seen the first one I’m not all that eager to do so. 

I keep asking myself if I’m the only one who doesn’t warm to Fiona Shaw? I didn’t like her in Fleabag either. She always seems like,  well - -  ‘Fiona Shaw’, and I don’t even remember the names of the unconvincing characters she plays, which are supposed to be enigmatic and intriguing, but the only intriguing part for me is why she was ever cast in the first place. She doesn’t fit in. Is she Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s auntie or something?

Jodie Comer has to carry the whole thing on her shoulders and I hope she has the resilience. Oh well; if I’ve got it all wrong I’ll probably let you know.

Update:
I still haven't got round to watching the next episodes on the iPlayer, but according to Carol Midgley in The Times (£)  things are looking up. She says 'after a slow start' it's as "fresh as a new pair of knickers." How fresh is that?