Dynasties (BBC One) | iPlayer
Operation Live (Channel 5) | My5
Mirzapur Amazon Prime
James Bulger: The New Revelations (Channel 5) | My5
Running Wild With Bear Grylls (ITV) | ITV Hub
We Are Most Amused and Amazed (ITV) | ITV Hub
Watching chimps fight, it turns out, is no tea party. They gouge, claw, drop half-tonned from Senegal’s frazzle-dry branches to chitter and bite with guilty glee and yellowed sabre teeth. In Dynasties, the latest slice of Attenborough splendour, their victim was the self-appointed alpha male in the band (technically “congress”) of chimps who had been named David by researchers. Young, male, maggoty chimpanzees Jumkin and Luther, driven to distraction by the exuberantly protruding vaginas of the womenfolk, were the gorers and gougers and filthy biters, and put the “nasties” in Dynasties, and left David for dead.
David finally blinked and rose from the dust after three days. Licked his wounds, as they had been so touchingly, lovingly licked by his harem (trying to mend him with spit. For about two days. Before taking their infants miles away to look for water, the feckless hussies). But David crawled, limped, fought, thumped many miles to retake his scarred and bristling place at the head of the clan. The BBC must pray nightly for a similar longevity for their own David, who’s always struck me as someone who could manage alpha status with more simple charm, and (one might reasonably hope) less recourse to scars and spit and thumping.
The BBC’s Wildlife Unit obviously spent quintillious oodles on this. On the co-funding of a large group of researchers in Africa for two years, the expertise of those who have followed the chimpanzees for 18 years, the crew and their quarterings. And just think what we might have got for that money instead. Two thousand comedians’ self-congratulatory panel games? Three thousand? I suspect posterity will have an answer. This series is masterly, rewarding, intelligent, sublime.
As, in its entirely different way, was an entirely different thing two nights later. “Lot of love coming in for the NHS,” said host Nicky Campbell, halfway through Channel 5’s groundbreaking (and I don’t often use that word, though lying PRs often do) Operation Live: and he wasn’t wrong.
Nicky wisely kept his hosting to an absolute minimum, interjecting only with relevant, quiet questions. It was a wonderful two-hour watch; I could have watched acres into the future. It was also life’s mix of the brilliant and the laughable: while surgeon Kulvinder Lall unbroke a man’s heart, scrub nurses later told of scrabbling on the floor to find a lost 8mm needle. Eight millimetres.
Mirzapur is a reworking, in Hindi, of every gangster film of the 50s – two brothers, a lawyer father, one brother drawn to gangs. It’s fierce and foul. Even the subtitles don’t shy from the C-word. It’s terribly, if only occasionally, violent, and terribly good, and I suspect going to go global.
James Bulger: the New Revelations was nothing of the sort, of course. Merely an excuse to rehash, 25 years on, the misery and the outcry. There was a predictable enough backlash from Liverpudlians on Wednesday’s Jeremy Vine (also Channel 5), currently getting hugely into its stride despite the departure of Matthew Wright from my daily go-to morning fix of news and nonsense. Vine, rather ably aided by Storm Huntley – now there’s a woman to watch – has almost stopped me missing Matthew. Almost.
Anyway, before they’d even had a chance to watch the programme, Merseyside’s finest callers had made up their minds. “I will not be watching the documentary because it upsets me too much,” said one. “I’ve never read any of the coverage, cos I always know it would upset me too much.” Yet, somehow, she “knew” that it was it was premeditated, and that they were “evil”. Wow. Gifted with that kind of insight, who needs documentaries or, indeed, newspapers?
I did, rather old-fashionedly, watch the programme: I also covered the original story, walked the grim route, repeatedly, bereft and wondering. Thompson and Venables obviously had a cloying three-mile fear of how to dispose of a kicked two-year-old baby. What did come out of this was the fact that Thompson remained too scared to speak up, to ever explain: he could see the media, and mob of his own home town, baying for his blood. So: we’ll never understand. Many thanks, fiercely brainless mob!
The curse of Bear Grylls continues. Three years ago, he dragged Barack Obama through an Alaskan wilderness bristling with more Secret Service snipers than bears: within months his beloved Democrats suffered a shock loss that has haunted them, and the world, ever since. On Sunday, it was the turn of Roger Federer to be hauled through a series of Swiss gullies on Running Wild With Bear Grylls. He has since slumped to a straight-sets loss against the world No 9, Kei Nishikori. Coincidence? You go, Bear! Rog came across as, simply, lovely. Bear came across as, simply, ever too gleefully insistent on having people putting rotting fish eyeballs in their mouths when they’d already had a quite decent enough breakfast, thank you. Which is to say Bear came across, as ever, as the kind of benign-yet-hyper public schoolboy, high on adrenaline and eyeball juice and inane platitudes, who in older and better days would long since have been at least strapped down and sent to matron, if not forced to end his days on Shutter Island.
There was a genuine one-off on ITV this week: a royal variety show that the royal in question appeared to actually enjoy. We Are Most Amused and Amazed, in which a cravatted Armstrong and Miller both appeared to want to celebrate Charles’s 70th birthday, was, pretty much, an all-round delight. The cravats, and Rowan Atkinson, and especially Omid Djalili, were funny; magicians Penn and Teller, and especially the still-young Dynamo, genuinely mind-boggling; Kylie and her like didn’t sing, but instead paid relatively uncloying tribute to the Prince’s Trust, which has so far helped over 900,000 youngsters find their feet, a number and an intent that should be impressive to even the most anti-royalist of social justice warriors. Bill Bailey was magnificent as ever.
Charles (always my absolutely favourite royal despite his insanely misjudged championing of homeopathy) and Camilla howled and wiped their faces throughout. I find it impossible, despite my strident republicanism and allergy to mawkishness, to be at all cynical about any of this: the boy’s done good, and the last couple of weeks should perhaps stay the hands of the credulous calling in their millions for the crown to skip a generation. It is, after all, and until (rightly, politically) overturned, a constitutional monarchy, and not, thank all the saints, the piddling and increasingly self-demeaning X Factor or a witless Twitter poll. Or a referendum.
