The TV shows you need to watch this week: From Glastonbury to Catch-22
Once upon a time Glastonbury was just another British music festival. Some decent bands. A bit of weed. Inadequate toilet facilities. It was an event, but it certainly didn’t dominate what passed for the media in these days – three television channels, plus something called newspapers.
Not any more. Now it’s a huge sprawling imperial vampire squid of a thing, If you wanted you could spend the reminder of your life catching up with everything that is going on the various stages, and the stars get flown in to what, I imagine, are luxury hotels, Range Rovers, and on-site special posh mobile loos with scented water, Molton Brown toiletries and no risk of a catastrophic blockage. It’s all over BBC2, BBC4, BBC iPlayer and the web and some of us will doing our best to avoid the whole swampy mess.
Jo Whiley, among others, presents.
What little broadcasting bandwidth that is left over from Glastonbury is given over to another behemoth of the summer season – Wimbledon fortnight. This year they’ve put another roof over the place, so there is even less chance of some respite from an outbreak of rain and the substitution of a repeat of Teletubbies. Sue Barker, who used to play tennis herself you know, bats off (or whatever the expression should be) on Monday morning.
Much more to my taste is Year of the Rabbit, Channel 4’s latest vehicle for the considerable talents of Matt Berry, who should be on TV even more than he is now, if anything. As noted previously, it’s a cross between Ripper Street and The Sweeney with a few crumbs of Toast of London serving as the croutons in this deliciously amusing broth. As usual, Berry and his co-writers (Andy Riley and Kevin Cecil) have succeeded in rounding up yet more superb talent, including Keeley Hawes (criminal mastermind), Alun Armstrong (professional Yorkshireman and copper) and, this week, Sally Phillips and Matthew Holness turn up as some Ruritanian royalty, washed up in London. There’s been a murder, obviously…
There are a few decent documentaries, too. For some reason Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, decided to discard decades, not to say centuries, of studied reticence and allow a fly-on-the-wall camera crew to film Inside the Bank of England, and at a time of unusual political controversy. Much of it is the usual harmless stuff – men in pink frock coats and blokes counting £155bn worth of gold as if they were doing the stocktaking at the Co-Op. But we may also see a few moments of tension as Carney tries to deal with the fall-out from Brexit. I’m hoping to hear what he thinks about Boris Johnson. You can imagine, though, can’t you?
Britain’s Next Air Disaster? Drones seems such an obvious thing to do, even before the shenanigans at Gatwick, that you wonder why it’s not been done before. It does seem to be the most obvious and hugely disruptive a weapon a terrorist might easily acquire – the maximum amount of disruption and economic dislocation for a tiny investment, minimal training and, frankly, not much chance of getting caught. Not only that but a simple cheap drone could be used, presumably, to commit mass murder. You probably won’t be entirely reassured by this programme
Catch-22 continues on Channel 4, as an adaptation of Joseph Heller’s acclaimed 1961 novel, which popularised the expression. The story concerns Bombardier Yossarian, in the American Air Force during the Second World War. The catch goes to the slightly absurd situation in conflict zones, where the authorities always express their concern for the safety of their personnel, but nonetheless send them into battle. In Yossarian’s case, his superiors keep increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to avoid his military assignments, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22, a bureaucratic rule which specifies that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers which are real and immediate is the process of a rational mind. A man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but a request to be removed from duty is evidence of sanity and therefore makes him ineligible to be relieved from duty. The cast includes Christopher Abbott (as Yossarian), Kyle Chandler, George Clooney and Hugh Laurie.
Glastonbury (BBC2, BBC4, from Saturday 3.30pm); Wimbledon (BBC2, BBC1 from Monday 10.30am); Year of the Rabbit (Channel 4, Monday 10pm); Inside the Bank of England (BBC2, Tuesday 9.30pm); Britain’s Next Air Disaster? Drones (BBC2, Monday 9.30pm); Catch-22 (Channel 4, Thursday 9pm)
