'Aggretsuko' – Netflix

Hands up if you hate your job. Look around – you’re not alone. Eighty-five percent of workers worldwide admit to hating their jobs when surveyed anonymously, according to a Gallup poll released last summer. That’s an awful lot of people. But even people with what seems to be the perfect job get totally frazzled sometimes. I’m sure even Cadbury’s chocolate taster, Dublin’s chief kitten cuddler and Chris Pratt’s hot yoga instructor have bad days too. So despite Netflix’s new cartoon Aggretsuko being subtitled Japanese anime, this rage is entirely universal.
Retsuko is an adorable kawaii red panda from the people at Sanrio who most famously brought you Hello Kitty. I kid you not. This fluffy female is far more realistic than any mascot I’ve seen before. She’s really struggling. When she gets her first office job aged 20 she’s filled with joy and purpose, strutting her stuff in corporate Japan. Cut to five long years later and she’s stuck in a thankless job, a slave to the wage. She hates her stupid, lazy, gossipy colleagues, really hates her misogynistic boss Director Ton (literally and figuratively a pig) and I bet she hates herself too, for still being single, and not being the big success she always though she would be. This is the internalised hatred of working women who have been set impossibly high standards by society. Whoah – this shit is deep for a super-cute animated red panda.
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'The City and the City'

“Nowhere else works like the cities”. This is the first line of BBC1’s new drama based on the 2009 ‘weird fiction’ novel by British author China Miéville, an exotically named man actually born in Norwich. His book has been adapted for TV by screen writer Tony Grisoni.
The cities in the title are Besźel, which looks like the Eastern Bloc of 30 plus years ago mixed with cafes and people from 1970s Istanbul and Ul Qoma which is glimpsed only briefly in the first episode. These streets look brighter, cleaner, and more advanced. The colour pallets are quite different in each city; dingy yellows for Besźel and clean blues for Ul Qoma. Like the inhabitants, the viewer always knows where they’re looking.
The two cities actually occupy much of the same geographical space, but the inhabitants wilfully ‘unsee’ the areas they’re not allowed to view. Early on Commissar Gadlem (Ron Cook) gets out his overhead projector, and lays two acetate maps on top of each other. That’s a good way to get your head around it.
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'The Generation Game'

A quick word about The Generation Game which started on BBC1 last weekend. I don’t think anyone even raised an eyebrow when Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins were announced as presenters. They’re the perfect pair on paper. And perhaps this was the perfect week to start the series with the nation’s focus firmly on entertainment shows, as poor lonely Declan Donnelly went solo on Saturday Night Takeaway. The Generation Game is a stone-cold classic Saturday night entertainment fixture, so the big mystery was why did the Beeb broadcast this on a Sunday? Do they get confused too about what day of the week it is when there’s a bank holiday?
So on Sunday, not Saturday, Mel and Sue in oddly colour-coordinated outfits welcome viewers to a stadium-sized sequin-bejazzled set. The pair are instantly very comfortable together making desperately cheesy jokes, as you imagine they do off-screen too. You’d go on as a contestant just to be able to give Mel and Sue a hug, despite the embarrassing tasks they have in store for you. The pair ably control the chaos and mak the contestants laugh, wandering around during the tasks, partly encouraging them and partly putting them off exactly like their Bake Off heyday.
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'Ordeal by Innocence' – BBC1

Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries are an international literary language; translated, loved and understood the world over. You know there’s going to be a big stately home, a cast of shifty upper-class characters, a few red herrings and a satisfyingly complicated conclusion. It’ll all hinge on the silver sugar tongs, a classified advert in the Times or the colour of the front door which you knew from the start but discounted as an inconsequential detail. It’s clever, gratifying and reassuring all in one shot. For a real-life example, please see me and Mr H on holiday in Turkey in 2014. We were, I’m ashamed to admit, battered out of our skulls on local raki and dealing with a day-long hangover in a hotel room easily as hot as the surface of the sun. What could be more soothing to the addled brain than finding Poirot dubbed into Turkish with English subtitles? In no small part thanks to Hercule we consoled the little grey cells that hadn’t been murdered by alcohol.
Ordeal by Innocence, the Easter Sunday BBC1 drama, is not your Turkish holiday Agatha Christie adaptation. There’s nothing soothing about this production. From the off it’s clear we’re in a nightmarish gothic horror. Producer and writer Sarah Phelps brings us a sharper, nastier, distilled version of And Then There Were None, her tremendous Christie adaptation from 2016. “Nine elaborate murders based on an extremely dodgy nursery rhyme that drive a young woman to suicide in a mansion on a deserted island is not really terrifying enough. Let’s kick it up a notch guys!”
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