The TV shows you need to watch this week: From Don't Forget the Driver to Our Planet
It must have been like this in the Italian renaissance or the Enlightenment. Despite (or perhaps thanks to) Brexit and national malaise, we are living though an astonishing blossoming of comedy creativity, something of a golden age. From This Country to Derry Girls, form Fleabag to People Just Do Nothing to a reborn Alan Partridge, to name only a few, we have rarely been so well supplied with humour.
We must hope that Don’t Forget The Driver adds to the roster of success. This latest offer from the BBC is, surprisingly, the first piece of television writing by Toby Jones, who scripted it with Tim Crouch.
Set in Bognor Regis, the show “observes the beauty and ugliness of life in small-town Britain, following a group of people struggling with their sense of identity and place in the world”, according tp the BBC. So plenty of character-based humour as the personalities play on and against one another.
Jones stars as coach driver Peter Green, who lives a life of ordinary routine but one also troubled by his odd family. The trip for today is to Dunkirk, as symbolic a destination as any for this era. Very funny.
Kate Beckinsale in back on the telly in ITV’s The Widow. Or not the widow... for three years, ever since the love of her life Will Mason (Matt Le Nevez) died in a plane crash in the Congo, Georgia Wells (Beckinsale) has lived as a recluse in the Welsh countryside.
Yet one evening she’s idly watching the TV news and she sees the presumed deceased Will alive and well in the background of a news report about the Congo.
What does she do? Why, she boards the first flight to Kinshasa and forms a posse to track down Will and discover, at least, the truth. Martin Benson (Charles Dance), the closest person to family Georgia has, searches for answers elsewhere. It’s a sort of modern-day Heart of Darkness, but none the worse for that, with child soldiers, insane army officers and constant terror. Through it all Beckinsale still manages to look very glam.
Based on the memoirs of Gerald Durrell, The Durrells returns for a fourth and final series. Keeley Hawes picks up her role as the family matriarch, Louisa, presiding over a menagerie of unruly humans, including her children, and other animals in 1930s Corfu.
An owl, some lemurs, a pair of ballet dancers and Miles Jupp also star in this adaption by Simon Nye.
As if it wasn’t overwrought enough already. Britain’s Got Talent promises even more emotional scenes with the reunification of Ant and Dec. A small component of the fabric national life is restored.
Urban Myths is a brilliant series based on a very smart premise – dramatising those popular stories that get passed around and embellished so much that, with a certain element of plausibility, they assume the status of hard fact. One such is deliciously presented here – the bizarre and almost believable notion that Princess Diana (played by Sophie Rundle) was once taken for an incognito night out to a fabulously camp pub in south London, the Vauxhall Tavern, by no less than Freddie Mercury (David Avery here) and Kenny Everett (Mathew Baynton). A princess surrounded by screaming queens, I wish it had happened like this.
I must say I am warming to Joe Lycett, who has just finished his first series as presenter of The Great British Sewing Bee. As if to prove his ultimate versatility here he is in Joe Lycett’s Got Your Back, as consumer-rights champion, using his rapier wit and sardonic tone as deadly weapons against the likes of Britannia Hotels, which has apparently some things to answer for. Joel’s gotten himself a “squalor squad” to take swabs from various surfaces to find out the truth about what kind of microscopic organisms have checked in to the hotels. I look forward to seeing Joe introduce Match of the Day, and, who knows, get signed for Aston Villa.
Sir David Attenborough continues his crusade against human-made climate change in his new Netflix series Our Planet. As rich and real as any of his previous landmark series for the BBC, this Netflix outing should help a still wider audience get an appreciation for the creatures we happen to share this earth – and the jeopardy we are so carelessly placing ourselves in. Spectacular, as you’d expect, and important.
Don’t Forget the Driver (BBC2, Tuesday 9pm); The Widow (ITV Monday, Tuesday 9pm); The Durrells (ITV, Sunday 8pm), Britain’s Got Talent (ITV, Saturday 7.15pm); Urban Myths (Sky Arts, Wednesday 9pm); Joe Lycett’s Got Yor Back (Channel 4, Friday 8.30pm); Our Planet (Netflix, from Saturday)
