‘The Undoing’ – HBO

I watched The Undoing on Now TV catch-up during a really busy week; as busy you can get in a Tier 2 lockdown. It was an awkward stop/ start way of doing things, which sometimes you’ve just got to do, to squeeze some prestige TV into your week, and I ended up watching episode one on two different devices. The major problem was I just couldn’t remember what the show was called, even after watching about 40 minutes . Oh Magic 8-Ball, will this show stick in my mind long enough to make any kind of impression? The 8-Ball says “Don’t count on it.”

The Undoing is led by a pair of very big names – Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant as a very believable rich and successful married couple. The show is based on the 2014 novel You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz and adapted as a six-part miniseries by David E. Kelley, whose most recent big hit was Big Little Lies, with which this series shares a whole lot of DNA.

Kidman plays the very elegant, almost regal, Grace Fraser, a successful therapist who lives in a super-fancy part of New York City with her husband Jonathan (Hugh Grant, doing exactly what you’d expect of him) , a superstar paediatric oncologist, and their son Henry (Noah Jupe), who attends the elite Reardon School – that’s and eye-watering $50,000 per year in tuition fees, and a school run that’s just a short walk through the beautiful wintery park. Grace helps some of the other Reardon parents plan an auction event to raise funds for the school and at a planning meeting Grace meets Elena (Matilda De Angelis). She’s new to the school and to this heady social strata – her son Miguel (Edan Alexander) is attending on a scholarship – and even before Elena rather proudly breastfeeds her baby at the table with a bunch of very buttoned-up small-c conservative women, she’s marked out as an entirely creature to her new peers. She seems to glare when a woman at the table jokes about hating her children. I think the theme of what makes a good mum and what it means to be a ‘real’ woman is bound to be explored in later episodes.

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‘Noughts + Crosses’ – BBC1

Important dramas are, well, exactly that. They’re important and that’s good. But have you ever said “I watched something last night and you’d really like it – it was very important”. Whatever the subject, a drama has to be thrilling, filled with relatable characters in extraordinary situations.

It’s clear from the start that the much anticipated adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts + Crosses is important. The series is a dystopian Romeo and Juliet, following the lives of two young people Sephy (Masali Baduza) and Callum (Jack Rowan, recently seen in Peaky Blinders), who are divided by their colour but united by love. Sephy is a Cross, a member of the black ruling class and daughter of a prominent politician – played perfectly by a steely Paterson Joseph. Callum is a Nought, a white member of the underclass, suffering daily prejudice in a segregated society. The two have been friends since early childhood but their relationship grows ever more complicated as they come of age.

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'Roast Battle' – Comedy Central

Comedy roast are not all that common in the UK, despite this being the home of the Archbishop of Banterbury, Bantom of the Opera and the Bantersaurus Rex (lads! lads! lads!). While we’re very much at home with taking the piss out of each other in the pub, the playground and all-office emails, this kind of vicious verbal sparring in front of an audience is a format that we’re just not used to in merry old England. We leave that to the Americans, and a proud history they have of it too. Instantly this new Comedy Central show is a bit out of step for the British audience looking for funnies, with a post-apocalyptic set, macho gunshot sound track, and the studio audience expected to shout and point as well as drink and laugh. It’s all a bit too much to believe we can multitask like this.
I love stand-up comedy, on tv and especially live (shout out to the excellent Fat Penguin club nights in Birmingham – if you’re in the Midlands check them out), but I turned this on and watched it through my fingers. I didn’t was this format to fail, but it was bound to be a disaster, right? As The Guardian said “Roast battles and insult comedy? No thanks, we’re British”. But despite the silly gunshot noises and the heavy reliance on Paper Planes by MIA, the battles themselves were not as aggressive as I’d thought. If anything the style is collaborative; usually solo comics acting as a team, building on each other’s jokes, laughing at themselves and visibly enjoying the experience. I was all set to hate it but the four comedians in the first episode did such a good job they quickly won me over.
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'Kiri' – Channel 4

It’s always exciting to see Sarah Lancashire back on TV. I’ve been a big fan for a little while, since Happy Valley really, and drama lovers will agree that she’s a big draw for a new series. Writer Jack Thorne has another ripped-from-the-headlines story for us and hopes are high as he wrote National Treasure broadcast in 2016 which won the best mini-series BAFTA. That was about historic cases of sexual abuse, drawing on various high-profile scandals involving celebrities. This is about vulnerable children under the care of social services and calls to mind some recent real-life cases.
Sarah Lancashire plays Miriam Grayson, a Bristolian social worker who decides to offer unsupervised visits between 9-year-old Kiri and her grandparents. Kiri is a young black girl about to be adopted by a middle-class white family and social services agree she ought to know “where she came from”, and have a chance to develop links with appropriate members of her birth family. While Kiri is on her visit, she goes missing, apparently abducted by her ex-con birth father Nathaniel. This is all made clear in the first 30 minutes, so knowing the laws of TV drama, this means literally anything could have happened to her.
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'Mo Farah: Race of his Life' – On the Box

On the eve of the Rio Olympics the BBC had an exclusive look at the life of one of the heroes of the London 2012 games. Mo Farah’s broad grin and winning enthusiasm was a highlight of one of the best cultural experiences this country has ever had. Can he retain those two incredible gold medals and help us regain that confidence in our national abilities that, four years on, is sorely missing?
Our British hero was in fact born in Somalia. We see him greeted as a celebrity in Djibouti where he lived for a short time as a child. He has extended family there and his twin bother Hassan lives there too. He’s a regular visitor to Africa, training every winter at altitude which he says is key to his success. When he was a small child his family decided to move to live with their father who worked in London. Sadly Hassan was left behind as he was too ill to travel to the UK. This was only meant to be for a few weeks but then war broke out and his family couldn’t find him. The two men talk about it on camera for the first time. It’s painful to dredge up; they were best friends as children and were apart for twelve years but it’s hazy on detail. It would have been more interesting to have the complete story…
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'Gladiators' – Nostalgia Trip

In wich guest blogger Jontosaurus has something to admit…
Jet was well fit. That is how I’m going to start my article – with a whole-hearted confession that yes, I did find her to be the best of all of the female Gladiators. I was probably too young to really understand what to do with my youthful hormones but I understood that Jet was young, attractive and ever so flexible. That was enough for me.

jet
Jet: the object of many boys youthful hormones!

But I digress- it’s that time again where I delve into the annals of television history with very little protective gear and emerge with another artifact from television’s glorious past. It’s another nostalgia trip and, as you’ve probably worked out for my ever so subtle introduction, it’s the time for Gladiators to be put under the microscope. The show actually earned itself a reboot on Sky in the not too distant past.
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