Who Are You Calling Fat? (BBC Two) | iPlayer
How Europe Stole My Mum (Channel 4) | All 4
Guilt (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Seven Worlds, One Planet (BBC One) | iPlayer
The Morning Show (Apple TV +) | Apple.com
One of the hardest watches of the week, but ultimately redemptive, uplifting even, was the BBC’s two-night special Who Are You Calling Fat?. Nine self-declared larger, or plus-size, or fat, or living-with-obesity (there was even a political nature to the terms they chose to use, and it’s normally a sorry sign when clear communication hog-ties its own feet through supersensitivity to lexicon) souls disappeared for a fortnight to a rather lovely country house to bond, to argue, to cry, to worry. It could have been done irritatingly, even exploitatively; yet, for all that this did remain, essentially, reality TV, there was thought and genuine sensitivity behind both programmes.
But reality TV is chiefly entertainment, and right from the off Victoria was happy to cast herself as the villain of the piece. Victoria life-coaches people of weight to not just accept but glory in their adipose tissue. Her T-shirt reads “Riot Not Diet”. Yet such is her antipathy to any sense of societal fat-shaming that she refuses to countenance children even being warned that their weight might lead to future problems (“Let them be children, for God’s sake”) and says things such as: “This is not about health. This is about perpetuating fatphobic ideas”; and: “Health – you can’t define it. It’s a social construct. It doesn’t exist.” Thus the camp was split from about evening one: dear comedian Jed, worried about type 2 diabetes, and health-jag Jack, and Del, who had paid £10,000 for a gastric sleeve, and sweet, honest civil servant Babs (“I’m not confident. I hate being this size”) worried honestly about whether they were wrong to want to be smaller, healthier, more mobile. While Victoria took her little cabal off to the pub and whispered, drunk on potential power: “I really want Jed not to start dieting.”
I didn’t, in the end, despise Victoria. Far from it: her zest for life shone through. She even persuaded shy body-hating Babs to strip to her bikini in an Oxford pedestrian precinct; and for a little while there was a smile on Babs’s face, happy tears in her eyes. By the end of the experiment, DNA results had been given – in almost all cases, there was genetic predisposition, and I’ll try to think differently from now on, rather than writing some people off as lazycakes. In the end, I felt more sorry for Victoria than any of the rest of this generally lovely, troubled, kind little (big) bunch. Nothing too wrong with zest and a generally positive outlook, but when your “positivity” becomes positively delusional … and I can’t have been the only one who shuddered, given the statistics, at the statement: “When I’m making enough money off my businesses, what I ultimately want to do is to go round schools, for free, teaching body confidence and body positivity.”
I suspect one young Oxford commuter had it about right. “I know what the right thing to say is,” she answered, strangely thoughtful, wise. “The politically correct answer: that’s fine, lovely, go for it … sisters! But I don’t actually think that in my heart. Sorry.” While in no way wishing to join those who blame all their gnarls and ills on ‘“political correctness’”, I can’t help feeling, as a vague fan of the power of words, that this has been one mild error along an admittedly long and difficult way. Just asking people to say different words doesn’t mean they’ll think different thoughts.
A glorious slice of semi-serious fun arrived on meant-to-be-Brexit night in the shape of Kieran Hodgson’s “comedy documentary” How Europe Stole My Mum. The premise was nice. The day after that referendum, the comedian visits his “mum”, Liza Tarbuck, who makes an admission: and the ensuing dialogue just about wraps up life over the last three-and-a-half years.
“I actually voted to leave. Still, I shouldn’t imagine it’ll change anything in our relationship, will it?”
(beat)
“You … you piece of shit, Mum. You racist Chardonnay-sozzled old witch. Don’t you realise you’ve completely ruined my entire future, you immediately-post-menopausal provincially accented moron?”
“Well, I should have expected nothing else from a nasty, snobbish, stuck-up, traitorous, IPA-guzzling disappointment of a son like you. Why don’t you piss off back to … London?
Hodgson had the genius idea of analysing how we joined the EEC (“Brentry”) – Heath, Wilson, Benn, Jenkins, Labour’s earlier civil war, De Gaulle – to try to find some parallels, even answers. He actually got further, with the inspired help of Tarbuck, Harry Enfield and some dusty footage, than an entire slew of Newsnights. An inspired chunk of educative cleverness.
For the last few months there’s been an experiment called BBC Scotland, a dedicated evening channel that seeks to reflect my difficult, thrawn country. It’s a decades-old troubled boneyard of an ambition: dreams and bodies still lie strewn. But, just maybe, this time they’ve pulled it off. In a newly confident nation, the channel seems unafraid to mix the old and unashamedly couthy with the utterly new (sex, race, music) in a way in which, in truth, they blend (mostly) in Scotland herself. There was much riding, though, on new drama: with the four-part dark dramedy Guilt, arriving on BBC Scotland a week ahead of BBC Two nationwide, I think they’ve hit that bell, won that cigar, can swagger off with some candyfloss.
Mark Bonnar and Jamie Sives (trivia: they are old schoolfriends from a Leith primary) are Max and Jake, who run over an old, dying man as they drive back tiddly from a wedding. And, of course, try to cover it up. There are welcome Coen brothers echoes here, though it’s written by Neil Forsyth (Eric, Ernie and Me, the much-missed Brian Cox vehicle Bob Servant), and it’s also got something of Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan about the plot, in the inexorability of tiny lies leading to outrageous, yet just credible, developments. It’s very funny, and inlaid with a bittersweet dose of unwholesomeness, like sucking on a furry boiled sweet from too long under the sofa. Also: much decent music trivia – well, what’s your standout Bowie album? And was there really a fine “early Rod Stewart… before one of the great artistic collapses of our time”?
Another Attenborough triumph. I think. Seven Worlds, One Planet looked, as ever, magnificent – I’d always thought seals lovely, yet somehow that huge leopard seal, that tiny, tiny penguin, bastard, bastard – but I have little idea what the great man might have been imparting. I’d turned the sound all but off. Please let us just look at the animals, gaily playing, and revel, and have our own thoughts, rather than jauntily intrusive soundtracks underscoring every “humorous” moment; after just minutes, every plinky plonk of the glockenspiel, every jokey fart of the cor anglais, starts to sound like the dentist’s drill.
Apple TV+ launched on Friday with a megabudget show that saw Jennifer Aniston back on telly for the first time since Friends. Reunited, in fact, with Reese Witherspoon (Rachel’s even shallower sister, if you remember), in The Morning Show, a drama about the making of a huge breakfast news TV show, and what happens when an anchor is fired post-Weinstein. It’s had damningly lukewarm reviews stateside: partly because of Apple’s reported $15m-per-episode budget, just because they can, and also I suspect as part of a backlash against tech giants suddenly thinking successful hardware equals genuine creativity.
I liked it. Just didn’t love it. Both stars, along with Steve Carrell and Billy Crudup, excel, direction by Mimi Leder is exemplary, and it whizzes at a fair pace and explores current issues. In its story-within-a-story – big tech threatens journalism of integrity, news feeding us back our own prejudices 24/7 – it gets rather meta, for once not a bad thing. But early indications are that Apple is afraid of taking risks with any edgy programming – it’s also launching one about female astronauts, one about Emily Dickinson, one about blind people – in case it hurts the “brand”. Because of course that’s historically the way to make brilliant programmes...
