The TV shows you need to watch this week: From Alan Partridge to Soft Cell
Back of the net! I’ve now had the pleasure of previewing the first episode, and can do no more than beseech thee to watch it. It is very funny. It is as funny as anything Steve Coogan has come up with so far in his near three-decade long Partidgean progress. That, just to recap, has taken our favourite lightweight broadcaster from a few sports inserts on BBC Radio 4’s On The Hour, through to his own chat show, various documentaries, including the landmarks Anglian Lives and Scissored Isle, a feature film dramatising a near lethal siege at his radio station, and some highly revealing studio cam footage of Alan on his hit local radio show Mid Morning Matters (on North Norfolk Digital, later Shape, then North Norfolk Digital again).
Fans will be pleased to see that Alan, loyal as ever, has managed to get a spot on the new daytime sofa TV show This Time for the slightly gifted Simon Denton (Sidekick Simon as was, played by Tim Key), while PA Lynn Benfield (Felicity Montagu) appears as a more assertive sort of “adviser” nowadays, an evolution from the usually timid PA we recall from Alan’s days living in the Linton travel tavern and then his static home. Lynn is, one feels, still very much in love with Alan. As is Alan.
Susannah Fielding is a preternaturally convincing co-presenter as Jennie Gresham, and there are excellent supporting performances from “guests” Cariad Lloyd, Priyanga Burford, Lolly Adefope and Liam Williams. Direction, giving the viewer a sort of gallery-eye view of proceedings, is accomplished with remarkable realism and precision. As with all of Coogan’s stuff, the attention to detail is unstinting and produces a rich viewing experience. Regular script collaborators Neil and Rob Gibbons have done the usual delightful award-winning job.
So it all works, and it is worth watching. He really has... bounced back. Again.
The Real Marigold on Tour sounds a bit like one of Alan Partridge’s famously terrible programme ideas (of which, by the way, Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank actually got commissioned). Syd Little (Google the name), Wayne Sleep (ditto), Stephanie Beacham (ditto) and Rosemary Shrager (ditto), go to Vietnam to find out how the last country that won a war against the Americans looks after its old folk. Expect scenes of communal exercise.
The weirdest thing about Channel 5’s genuinely unmissable and enthralling Edwardian Britain in Colour is that it makes archive footage from over a century ago actually resemble a really carefully produced period drama – modern but old-fashioned at the same time, as if all the pioneering activities of early 20th-century filmmakers were mere trailers for Downton Abbey.
It of course follows Peter Jackson’s superb They Shall Not Grow Old, where the director and his team spent many years meticulously adding the colour lost in monochrome news footage of Great War battlefields and the home front. It’s a cliché to say that simply adding colour makes everything come alive, but it is true. It is perfectly possible (this viewer dearly hopes so) that anything recorded in black and white – newsreels, feature films, “what the butler saw” mutoscope images – can be processed and rereleased in colour. Nosferatu; The Birth of a Nation (as an artefact, nb); Frankenstein; the Marx Brothers; King Kong; Citizen Kane; Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Psycho… just think. Maybe they should leave the film noirs alone, though.
Anyway, here’s an hour of 120-year-old toffs, mill girls and street urchins. Channel 5 should be proud of the television they are producing nowadays.
It is now three decades since the Iranian ayatollahs declared holy war on Salman Rushdie for the crime of publishing a book about the prophet Mohammed which, frankly, hardly anyone would have heard of had it not been for their call on the Muslims of the world to assassinate on sight the mild-mannered intellectual author. In The Satanic Verses: 30 Years On, Mobeen Azhar reminds us about those strange days of book-burning and religious extremism. Meanwhile, Rushdie is still with us.
Vice Live promises to be “loud, irreverent, and funny with a group of culturally obsessed hosts and contributors”, who will be taking a, well, live look at the world’s news from Vice offices all over the world. Such hyper-topical news satire shows are always, by their much pressured nature, tough to make and rarely succeed for long, so we can but wish the Vice Live team all the best in their efforts. The “sharp, funny and pop-culture-obsessed polymath panellists” include comedian and actress Marie Faustin; writer and comedian Zack Fox; comedian, director and photographer Sandy Honig; and rapper and host Fat Tony.
Just to make some of us feel extra old, the BBC has decided to mark the 40th anniversary of the innovative new romantic group Soft Cell in the rightly reverential Soft Cell: Say Hello, Wave Goodbye. Dave Ball and Marc Almond, the men behind “Sex Dwarf”, “Tainted Love” (cover), “What!” and “The Art of Falling Apart” tell us all about the adventure.
This Time with Alan Partridge (BBC1, Monday 9.30pm); The Real Marigold on Tour (BBC1, Wednesday 9pm); Edwardian Britain in Colour (Channel 5, Saturday 8pm); Satanic Verses: 30 Years On (BBC2, Wednesday 9pm); Vice Live (Vice TV, Tuesday to Friday, 11pm); Soft Cell: Say Hello, Wave Goodbye (BBC4, Friday 9pm)
