The Television Blog

There’s a sadness and bitterness beneath the laughs in the one-of-a-kind TV wonder of PorridgeMemory plays tricks, of course. Mine tricked me into believing that Porridge ran to countless episodes. In fact, there were just three series, of six episodes each, plus a couple of Christmas specials and a pilot. To put that in perspective, Ronnie Barker spent less time on our TV screens as Norman Stanley Fletcher, habitual criminal, than Alec Guinness did as wily spy George Smiley. I was also convinced that the most memorable characters were constants, but they weren’t. Genial Harry Grout, the lag who runs HMP Slade’s rackets, appears in only three episodes, for example.Nearly 40 years after it appeared – it ran on BBC1 from 1974 to 1977, before Barker decided he didn’t want the role of Fletch to become a millstone – Porridge is still an extraordinary programme. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais created something that crackles with finely observed characters and dialogue that sparks, underlaid with a mordancy that stops it ever being cosy – if a sitcom dealing with prison drug-dealing, enforced sexual frustration, psychological brutality and the debilitating effects of time passing could ever be cosy.Porridge’s opening credits are justly famous. No music, just pictures of slamming prison doors as a judge, also voiced by Barker, intones: “Norman Stanley Fletcher, you have pleaded guilty to the charges brought by this court, and it is now my duty to pass sentence. You are an habitual criminal, who accepts arrest as an occupational hazard, and presumably accepts imprisonment in the same casual manner. We therefore feel constrained to commit you to the maximum term allowed for these offences – you will go to prison for five years.”If Fletcher is a habitual criminal, we know from his five-year sentence he’s no rapist or murderer. We are allowed to side with him in his daily battle to achieve little victories over the system, personified by Mr Mackay (Fulton Mackay), his uniformed nemesis. Mackay has no time for rehabilitation: he believes in punishment. His face twitches and jerks with the rage he clearly doesn’t really want to contain.And on the other side is Fletch, always trying to keep a half-step ahead – and with his own range of facial expressions. Barker is brilliant, performing without vanity. He’s aided by his sunny-natured cellmate Lennie Godber (Richard Beckinsale). The pair don’t actually become cellmates till the third episode. The show doesn’t work until then: it’s too lemony and sharp without the softening effect of Godber. Fletch needs a straight man, in an ethical as well as a comedic sense, and that’s Godber.As I say, memory plays tricks. Porridge is remembered as a comedy, but the laughs are not as thick as one might expect, and when they come, there’s a sadness and bitterness beneath. But as a one-of-a-kind character piece about the struggle against hopelessness, it’s a wonder.ComedyComedyTelevisionMichael Hannguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
this is bogus, who would think

Dr Thomas Asbridge’s documentary on the Crusades was storytelling of the highest quality”The story of the crusades is remembered as one of religious fanaticism and unspeakable violence,” said Dr Thomas Asbridge in the opening sequence of his new three-part documentary series, The Crusades (BBC2). “But now fresh research from both the Christian and Islamic worlds sheds new light on how these great religions waged war in the name of God.” Hmm. I’m not sure if I ever knew enough about the Crusades in the first place to appreciate all the subtleties of Asbridge’s revisionism – the opening episode was still waist-deep in religious fanaticism and unspeakable violence – but I was more than happy to go along with it, as this was storytelling of the highest quality.It was also storytelling on the cheap. Unlike the many other history documentaries that go in for expensive special effects and re-enactments to make an impact, The Crusades was mostly just one passionate man and a camera. And whether it was Asbridge leafing through an Armenian text that even he couldn’t read, or him standing in front of an imposing piece of rock that he insisted was the last standing gate of the ancient city of Antioch but which could have been anything for all I could tell, he was never less than utterly engaging. Above all, it worked because Asbridge struck a perfect balance between the broad-brush and the personal, with half-remembered names such as Godfrey of Bouillon and Raymond of Toulouse coming alive in the imagination if not on screen.If it had a fault, it was that Asbridge sometimes assumed more knowledge than I had. I couldn’t help wondering why, if it took at least a year after Pope Urban II’s proclamation of 1095 for the First Crusade to reach Asia Minor, the Muslim world was so taken by surprise. And since 90% of the Crusaders had died or deserted before they reached Jerusalem, why didn’t some of the richer ones save themselves the effort and sail there? I’m sure the answers are obvious and I’m merely parading my ignorance, but I’d still like to know.The programme ended with the Christians in control of Jerusalem and Asbridge foreshadowing 200 years of jihadi vengeance, though the unspoken subtext throughout was that the violence had never really ended. Nor was that the only piece of pattern-recognition on offer, as it became clear that starting a war to divert attention from domestic problems at home is a long-standing tradition rather than a 20th- and 21st-century phenomenon. Pope Urban’s proclamation that kicked off the Crusades had little to do with the Muslims and a great deal to do with the growing schism between the eastern and western Christian traditions. God help us all. If there is one.On a good night for minimalist factual programming, one man and a camera were also out and about in Jonathan Meades on France (BBC4).I’m not sure why Meades insists on looking like an ageing roué from Reservoir Dogs by wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie and Ray-Bans for most of the programme – dark glasses don’t exactly improve eye contact with the viewer and it all feels a bit deliberately try-hard and wacky – but I guess every presenter is entitled to their shtick. Meades’s is to be wilfully idiosyncratic.”No onions, no Dordogne, no boules, no Piaf and no Gallic shrugs,” he said at the top of the programme. “I am going to stick to the letter V.” Mr Violet, perhaps?Tics aside, I can forgive a lot in any programme about France that doesn’t resort to familiar tropes, though much as I came to enjoy my hour in Meades’ company – not least for the surreal, quasi-subliminal images that flashed on to the screen from time to time for no very good reason – I wasn’t entirely sure I really understood what it was he did want to say about France. We started with V for valise and an accompanying shot of an old suitcase before cutting to the Algerian war of 1954-62 and Meades dead-panning that it was this threat of violence that had lured him to France as a 15-year-old.We then raced through various other random Vs – Vichy, Verdun, Vauban and Vaudémont – though not before going off piste into the Ns for Nancy, the Ms for the Mistral font, the Ls for Lorraine, the As for Alsace and the Ts for Les Trentes Glorieuses. Still, it was fun to watch and I came away feeling better informed if not wiser. And if Meades’s point was that ideas of identity are often incoherent, transitory and contradictory, then his film was the ideal format.TelevisionJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
this is bogus, who would think

With its portrayal of violence and cruelty this film pulled no punches and left me reelingThere’s a scene in Gypsy Blood – True Stories (Channel 4) that is at first confusing. The camera is jumping around all over the place and it’s all very close range. There’s some brown fur in there somewhere, plus heavy breathing and a pathetic whimpering noise.Slowly it becomes clear what’s going on. The scene is actually being filmed by a dog, which must be wearing the camera around its neck. So we’re looking out along the underside of the dog’s snout. In the dog’s mouth is a deer; I know it sounds implausible but the dog is a very large one (it looks like a greyhound but it may be some kind of lurcher) and the deer is very small (a Chinese water deer, as it happens). The dog is shaking the deer from side to side. This is killing, up close and personal. The viewer almost feels as if they’re being shaken to death by a dog.The scene is characteristic of Leo Maguire’s powerful observational documentary, both in the artful way it is filmed (maybe a teeny bit too artful, I thought, at times: I could have done with less lingering on poppy fields etc and the whole thing fitting into an hour) and the cruelty and violence of the subject matter. There are other violent scenes involving animals. Like hare coursing, and a horrible cockfight in which one bird is on the point of collapse as the other pecks away at its head and one of the men watching shouts: “Kill him then, you fucking useless cunt. Oh, he’s gone, finish him son, finish him.” (No cameras around the cocks’ necks, thankfully.) But most of the violence is between men. And between boys.”Box, box,” says Hughie Doherty to his son, who’s pounding the pads his father is holding up. “See, he won’t give, go on, Charlie, upper cut, Charlie, uppercut, do an upper cut, Charlie, up the way, quick, over the top, hook, bish bash, bing bang …”Charlie is 18. Months. Charlie’s older brother Francie, seven, is already an established fighter. “When I’m in a fight, I have to remember it’s not just for me, it’s for my family and my name,” he says. If dad Hughie ever saw Francie not standing up for himself, running away, or crying, then he’d give him – his own son – a good slapping, for letting the name down. Names mean a lot around here, especially if it’s Doherty.Or Butcher. Fred Butcher seems unsure about whether he wants his sons to be fighters or not. “I’ll train them myself when they get a bit older,” he says one minute. But then the next he says he’s not going to encourage it. “I don’t really want them to be fighters.”I’m not sure they’ve got much choice really. It’s going to be ingrained. Later we see Fred, covered in blood, having been beaten, and kicked, and carved up with a machete, very nearly killed. Now he’s looking for revenge. We also witness a terrifying display of fight power from Hughie, who destroys a man much bigger than himself. And – most disturbing of all for me because they’re children – we see little Francie sparring with another boy, for ages and ages, getting floored, standing up again, finally knocking the other kid down, and being hugged and kissed and congratulated by his family.This is very different side to the Irish Traveller and Romany Gypsy communities from the one we saw in Big Fat Gypsy Weddings. That was about the flouncing and frills; this is about the fighting and the fists.And again there’ll be criticism, I’m sure, that these people are being misrepresented. I don’t know how representative it is, or even if it needs to be. There’s no doubt that Hughie Doherty and Fred Butcher and their families are real, and that this is how they are, and this is how they say they do it in their community. Gypsies and Travellers have settled disagreements with their bare knuckles for ever and they continue to do so. And to teach their sons how to.Some people will say it’s not a bad way. You have a disagreement, so you have a fight, and that’s the end of the matter. It just looks – to us softies who don’t have wheels underneath our houses – a bit bloody scary and brutal.TelevisionSam Wollastonguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Room 101 isn’t quite ready to be consigned to Room 101 yet, writes Sam WollastonThe broadcaster Danny Baker is like a suicide bomber. How so? Because one of the things he tries to send to Room 101 (BBC2) is “panel shows with bottom-of-the-bill comedians where half-way witted people are pretending to find things funny”.Whoa! Room 101 in other words, surely? The show has only just come back after a four-year sabbatical, and he’s trying to do for it, from the inside. It’s like he’s ripped off his coat, and there it all is, strapped on and wired up, ready to take them all out, himself included. No wonder the others – fellow panellists Fern Britton and Robert Webb, along with new host (and bottom-of-the-bill comedian?) Frank Skinner – are looking seriously worried.Fortunately, Frank Skinner is an ice-cool bomb (and situation) disposal expert. Well, it’s not hard, to be fair; as host he has the right to say no and send something else (the Jeremy Kyle Show, as it happens) to Room 101 instead.And that’s just about right, I think. Room 101, back after its long break, probably isn’t quite ready to go to Room 101 (though you could well argue that it has less right to survive than Shooting Stars, which the BBC really has sent to Room 101). It may not be state-of-the art, cutting-edge television any more (frankly, it never was), but there’s something quite nice and reassuring about it. The new format, with three guests, makes it more dynamic, with more banter and jollity. And Skinner is a good host, too. He may not be Jack the lad anymore, but nor is he really bottom-of-the-bill. I like the maturer Frank, Jack the middle-aged man – he is softer and wiser, less snarly.So Jeremy Kyle goes instead (hard to argue with that). And Fern Britton gets to send homework. Yay! Children everywhere rejoice … if only it was real. Fern doesn’t like the amount of time her own kids spend on it. And Robert Webb’s bald patch – which he’s funny about – goes. All consigned to Room 101, which itself is reprieved.ComedyTelevisionSam Wollastonguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Everyone got fed up with supermarket robots, science had wonders to share on Stargazing Live, and someone said the ‘w’ word on CountdownRoom 101 (BBC1) | iPlayerThe One Griff Rhys Jones (BBC1) | iPlayerRichard Wilson on Hold (C4) | 4ODStargazing Live (BBC2) | iPlayerCelebrity Big Brother (C5) | Demand 5Countdown (C4) | 4ODSerious TV can change things for the better, if a little less often than it might like to think, but can TV humour ever change anything? Can any humour change anything? I have on my shelves the recent Private Eye 50th anniversary issue, whose cover splash, headed “How Satire Makes a Difference”, has head-shots of Harold Macmillan from 1961 and David Cameron from today. Under Macmillan’s photo the text runs: “1961: Magazine pokes fun at Old Etonian prime minister surrounded by cronies making a hash of running the country”; the Cameron text runs “2011: Er…” And, famously, the more filthy wine-soaked walls of Berlin’s maddest baddest suburbs wept with laughter throughout the 1930s at lampoons of Hitler, the insane little corporal, and this wise laughter famously… er again… prevented the second world war.Sometimes, though, you do wish it could change something. It can be no coincidence that self-service supermarket tills – I’m not quite going to elevate their nefarious hatefulness to the evil-level of the Holocaust, though it’s tempting – featured in no fewer than all of the funniest programmes this week. A revamped Room 101, with a tinder-dry Frank Skinner stepping bravely into Paul Merton’s shoes and playing a blinder, is a winner in its new format, having all three guests there simultaneously, and categorised rounds. Robert Webb roughly won, mainly by sending Jeremy Kyle – goodness but there were some worrying clips – into the masher, though Danny Baker, with his honestly newfound if existentially confusing hatred of TV panel games – “just a Jeremy Kyle show that’s been though college” – was the true hit. That’s not the point. This is. During the titles of this programme, which if you’ve forgotten is about things we all hate, up popped the phrase “unexpected item in baggage area”.As Griff Rhys Jones made much of, in an unexpected one-off celebration of, well, him. This was old-fashioned sketch stuff, none the worse for it really but therefore traditionally hit and miss, but his “unexpected item in baggage area” was the second-best bit. Rhys Jones’s slumpy hangdog angry-old-man shtick gets better as he gets older (possibly aided, I seem to remember, by a period of depression) and never more so than when having to deal with, basically, a greedy robot programmed by a moron. There was also – this was the best bit – a reunion of Rhys Jones and Mel Smith, doing their men-in-white-shirts-blathering face-to-face stuff, which was very subtly scripted by John O’Farrell and reflected the real-life schism between the two, begun 16 years ago and now, at least face-to-face, resolved. Tantrums can, with age, become wearying.But the most woefully witheringly genius deconstruction of self-service tills came from the one-off rant, Richard Wilson on Hold. This could have been awful, by having a standard Old Git just grumpily Bemoaning. Instead, this was clever and passionate. It was also splendidly researched. I suspect the lovely Mr Wilson may be remembered now not for the catchphrase “I don’t believe it” but for a new one, voiced with slowness and honest despondence and gravel, and bass notes of undeniable righteous anger, as he tried to simply pay for a parking meter or a cauliflower. “I’m fed up and I don’t want to play any more.”The total waiting time, for Mr Wilson and a team of volunteers – some whizzy-young, some wise-old – placing 400 calls over a couple of days to their energy providers, all on automated telephone systems, came to 27 hours and 42 minutes. It’s a lot off anyone’s life. The cinema-booking automated phone call stuff was beyond laughable, as we all know, particularly if your voice doesn’t come from the south-east. Most terrifying, of course, was the rather sophisticated survey, with good unbiased researchers, which he made of automated supermarket moron-robots against the idea of gently queuing for a human, which revealed that Morrison’s robots take five times as long as human people serving, the ones in Sainsbury’s with their crackpot technology four times as long as human people serving, Tesco’s are two minutes slower than humans, and Marks’s android refused to process a bag described as “too heavy; you have blocked the computer”.”I’m doing all the work, I’m taking all the pain, and I’m paying for the privilege,” said Mr Wilson. The supermarkets came back with the usual. “This system is more efficient, quicker,” said one supermarket. “It’s quicker and easier, which our customers like,” answered another. These are, patently, lies. And one of the “spokespersons” used the phrase “In the long-run term,” which makes them thick, too: thus, thick lies. The truth came – and this is not a phrase I ever thought I’d write – from someone at Which? magazine, who said, simply: “In the long run they [automated checkout tills] will become the norm, because it will save supermarkets a fortune.”They will also stress us to levels beyond – well, I was about to say imagining, but if you can imagine having to check in at Heathrow, in a wheelchair, with seven children, one of them determined to ride a unicycle, one insisting on shouting Lady Gaga songs while to your certain knowledge he’s carrying down his child-pants a hidden AK-47, and your own crotch heavy with a bucket of cocaine, five times a day, you might appreciate the propensity towards myocardial infarction being engendered. Plus: don’t we have something of a problem with youth unemployment at the moment? A modest proposal: might it make sense for supermarkets to think of employing humans at tills, thus allowing fewer of us to have heart attacks in front of thick robots which don’t, as it happens, work, and incidentally acknowledging that three programmes in one week signally ripping the weasel out of their grubby policy demonstrates that comedy can, sometimes, surely, change things?Bizarrely, of course, while dead-eyed marketing managers insist on their scientists making their machines deliberately and profitably impenetrable, the clear-eyed types go on and invent stuff which simply enthrals. Isn’t it nice to live in a world where you have clever people too?I don’t necessarily, with the enthralment, mean just the people behind the satellites and telescopes: I mean the production team which paired Brian Cox and Dara O Briain in Stargazing Live. Synergy beyond brilliance, and the happiest pairing since Morecambe and Wise, fish and chips, the head of E.ON’s customer “service” policy and any available guillotine. So we had one of them wise, bulbous, unafraid and funny; another one wise, slimmer, and telling the world, perhaps especially the female world, that it’s OK to be clever.In three nights of this – the spooky orbits of the Jovian moons, the interesting ways in which “balls of ice and dust and rock” are sometimes attracted to and sometimes repelled by mass, like bad boyfriends, the oddly ever-attested fact that the moon smells of gunpowder, a billion other things I’ve forgotten but now intend to explore, including dark matter and the second second of the Big Bang – I think I learned more than in 40 years of Patrick Moore’s The Sky at Night. This was television as good as it gets, and I hope you too stood and applauded.Television as bad as it gets used to be C4’s Big Brother, but the Channel 5 reworking is actually working.This week’s was pure and simple drama, as Denise Welch and Michael Madsen – the wisest of the group, cheeky sweetie former EastEnder Natalie Cassidy, said “They’re the oldest, and they should know better” but they certainly didn’t – fought and fought and tiger-fought. “Pretentious, incomprehensible, drunk,” said Madsen – he who once razored off a policeman’s ear to Gerry Rafferty and the Sounds of the 70s. Denise, whom I had slowly begun to like for her feist on Loose Women, couldn’t accept that an American actor couldn’t “get” her, that anyone couldn’t “get” her, and that, in his words, her constant “me me me me me me me” backdrop, and inability to listen to anyone else, was less a character asset than a need for attention.She tried to make up to him. By lifting up her top. Not sure, dear Denise, about that, or its emancipated signals. This is an ancient man-woman battle, and going very badly wrong, and intensely watchable, and I hope Denise’s husband, that nice Tim Healy, has been locked in a box free of knives since the beginning. Denise will soon need vast therapy, the hugs of Loose Women, a stiff glug of glug; Michael will need a plane back to the relative sanity of Hollywood, and Natalie will win.TelevisionDanny BakerBrian CoxCountdownBBCBBC1BBC2Channel 4Channel 5AstronomyEuan Fergusonguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
this is so true

It’s taken 20 years to reach the screen, but this glorious tale of love and war has been worth the waitA man with a tin helmet and a faraway empty look stands amid the madness, the mud, and the misery of the western front, northern France, 1916. Suddenly the screen brightens, comes alive. There are trees, leaves, water, light, elegantly dressed women and chortling pheasants. We’re still in northern France, just a few miles from where we were before, but we’ve gone back in time, to 1910. The same man is there, no helmet, younger and more focused, less tarnished.That’s how it goes in Birdsong (BBC1, Sunday); we yo-yo backwards and forwards between Claude Monet and Siegfried Sassoon. The war scenes are extraordinary – a meticulous portrayal of life in the trenches. Perhaps you don’t get as great a sense of the scale of what’s going on as you might have done if Sebastian Faulks’s novel had been given the big-screen, multi-million dollar Hollywood treatment. But this adaptation by Abi Morgan has the detail – the terror and the tedium. And, a sort of hell beyond hell, the terrible tunnels dug under the trenches that could – and did – fill with water at any time if a mud wall was breached. Or fill with Germans, so close did they go to the enemy’s own tunnels.Eddie Redmayne is an excellent Lieutenant Stephen Wraysford, the man with the tin helmet and the faraway look. Complicated, lonely, not especially likable nor especially liked by his men or his superiors, his whole focus in the war scenes is on the other time before the war. Now he is an empty shell, living only on memories.He’s good in the early prewar scenes too, though at first he only really has to be posh and pretty (not hard for Redmayne, I’d have thought). Actually he says very little throughout, it’s really about that look – not staring into the middle distance here, but staring longingly at his host’s wife, Isabelle (Clémence Poésy), who is trapped in a hollow loveless marriage. Longing, then lust which, when reciprocated, soon reaches simmering point.The atmosphere is stifling and highly charged. Poésy doesn’t say much either, she stares back at Redmayne, wide-eyed and catlike. There’s actually something feline about both of them, beautiful, silky, aristocratic cats, longing to get their claws into each other – in a good way. Well, good unless you’re Isabelle’s bullying husband, René (Laurent Lafitte, also fabulous, very nearly steals the show; well at least he says something).Anyway, Redmayne and Poésy are perfect together, they’re credible, they fit – emotionally and physically. I remember finding the sex in the book awkward; here it seems natural, right. And very sexy. [Exhales, wipes brow.]While the younger Redmayne becomes more and more alive, the opposite is happening to his older self in the trenches. Death and devastation close in from all sides, like the collapsing walls of the tunnels he now has to work in. The contrast between the two settings gets wider and wider, and more and more dramatic as we jump between the two.It’s not fast: this is trench warfare, not a quick raid. But it gradually builds up to an intensity and power that takes hold of you. Both the war, and the love. This adaptation, which concludes next Sunday, has been an awful long time coming – there’s been talk of filming Birdsong since the novel was published almost 20 years ago. But I think this is worth the wait.You’ll probably know affable long- haired archaeologist Neil Oliver from Coast. Here, in The Last Explorers (BBC2, Sunday), he has traded the white cliffs and windy beaches of the outside of Britain for the heat and the vastness of the inside of Africa. Just as the presumptuous Sir Henry Morton Stanley did more than 140 years ago, Oliver is off in search of a fellow Scot, Dr Livingstone. Well, his story anyway.It’s a fascinating one, of a fascinating man. David Livingstone wasn’t simply a blundering colonialist missionary with a bible in his hand and a pith helmet on his head; he was a reformer and a passionate anti-slavery campaigner. He was also a complicated man, who often misjudged situations and took optimism to the point of delusion.Livingstone’s reputation took several severe bashings. It was actually only after Stanley found him, and reported back, that his reputation was in some way restored and his legacy cemented. The only pity is that Stanley probably never actually said those famous words. That’s disappointing. Next they’ll be telling us that Sherlock Holmes never actually said: “Elementary, my dear Watson.”TelevisionFirst world warSam Wollastonguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
never miss a day, thanks for the blog

Who said the age of adventure was dead? Now mind those pylons!Antony Woodward was involved in a plane crash in Lockerbie, Scotland. Yes, that Lockerbie. But not that plane crash. Obviously not, otherwise he wouldn’t be in this documentary, The Real Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (BBC2). How strange though, that it’s there that he crashed his plane – a bit like getting involved in a minor, non-fatal shooting incident in Dunblane or Hungerford.Antony’s crash wasn’t minor to him. He drove his microlight into some power cables, and came to the ground in a crumpled, twisted heap with petrol trickling down his neck while the sparks flew above. He still has nightmares about it, 15 years on.Antony admits he has no instinctive feeling for flying, no spatial awareness, or understanding of anything technical. Two instructors have told him he’s the worst pupil they have ever had. He only got into it in the first place to pull girls, he says. And he seems to have pulled a nice one; they have three lovely children.So that was it then, the end of his flying career? With the extra responsibility, and the nightmares, and the total lack of skill, you’d have thought he would have hung up his flying goggles for good. Oh no, though; he’s taking it up again, starting with the Round Britain Microlight Rally, the very race he crashed in.Antony’s incompetence is immediately obvious. He faffs about. They – he and his long-suffering co-pilot – are an hour late for the start. As soon as they are in the air, they are lost: Antony can’t read the map properly. When they come back to land, they do so like a skimming stone on a lake – down and then up again, and again, and another bounce.Something Antony is good at though is being on television. He’s one of those bumbly posh people who is self-deprecating and hopeless, though not quite as hopeless as he makes out. Clever, open, honest, impossible not to like. A lot of the charm of this charming film is down to Antony.It’s not just about him, though. There are the McMahons, Paul and Mikey (pictured above), father and son, from Ireland , who have to fly over the Irish Sea just to get to the start. “Hey Dad, is it all right if I say a little prayer?” shouts 16-year-old Mikey as they leave the coast behind. It’s clear that though Mikey is totally devoted to his dad, he really isn’t devoted to flying. In fact, he’s absolutely terrified, poor lad – says he’s feeling a “streak of panic”.And Richard, another aristocratic eccentric, hairy and dishevelled, who flies with two petrol cans instead of a friend, so he can refuel without coming down. He comes down at night, sleeps under the wing. Richard has flown his microlight to Australia, and South Africa, and over Everest. Round Britain is a walk in the park.Their flying machines are ridiculous – “effectively a chainsaw attached to a deckchair”, says Antony, cheerfully. But the men are indeed magnificent, adventurers in an age when adventure is almost dead, recapturing the true spirit of amateur aviation. The film is lovely, too, as documentaries in the Wonderland strand tend to be – warm and human, a celebration of eccentricity. Beautiful to look at as well. Britain looks amazing from not very high in the air – patchwork farmland, Cape Wrath right at the top, the coast of Wales so welcome after an hour over the sea (but maybe don’t look down, Mikey). And Antony, please, watch out for the bloody power lines. Hard to see I imagine, but (and I don’t know anything about this) I’m thinking maybe the pylons are a clue as to where they might be …Party Paramedics (Channel 4) makes you glow with a different kind of national pride. We’re in Colchester, Essex, which on Friday and Saturday nights turns into a kind of madness. Large, predatory groups roam the streets, in search of love, or a fight, or both. As the evening goes on, they come flying out of doorways, some dressed as Oompa Loompas, most hardly dressed at all. They try to kiss or punch each other, miss, and end up falling on the ground, groaning or out cold. The gutters run with vomit and blood.In the old days we (Colchester was once my home town) were left there – to wake up wondering what the hell happened if we were lucky, more likely to choke or freeze to death. But now there’s something called an SOS Bus, a warm place, staffed by saintly volunteers and paramedics, who revive, patch up and mop away. They’ll even drive you home if no one else will. Pah! Health and safety gone mad. See what I mean about adventure being dead?TelevisionSam Wollastonguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
if people only knew

Prefer to stay alive? Then here are the rookie doctors you might want to avoidAh, one of my favourite games today: doctors and nurses. First then, a new series of the thoroughly entertaining docusoap Junior Doctors: Your Life in Their Hands (BBC3). We’ve moved from the north-east to London, from Casualty-meets-Geordie-Shore to Casualty-meets- Made-in-Chelsea if you like (actually we are at Chelsea and Westminster hospital so that almost works). And more importantly we’ve got a new batch of young docs in, fresh meat.So here’s Andy who’s 22 (Jesus, he’s a child, he must have started becoming a doctor when he was still in nappies). Andy’s first job is to fit a cannula into a Mr Straw in Trauma and Orthopaedics. Sharp scratch coming up, he sticks the needle into the back of Mr Straw’s bony hand … No, missed the vein, let’s try the other hand. Oops, missed again.After several failed attempts, Andy decides to give his patient a well-earned break from being a pin cushion guinea pig.Laidback Amieth’s first job is to stick his lubricated finger up an old man’s bum, which he does with good humour and a smile. Not much seems to faze Amieth. Then he too needs to get a needle in, to pump adrenaline into a patient who’s had a cardiac arrest and needs urgent resuscitation. The poor woman hasn’t got any obvious veins in her hand, but Amieth finds one in her foot, and gets the needle in first time. Good job. I’m thinking if you need a jab in Chelsea and Westminster, ask for Amieth every time (and avoid Andy like MRSA). Amieth then helps out with the CPR – come on, a bit faster Amieth, now’s not the time to be laidback. Oh, the lady sadly dies, but that’s hardly Amieth’s fault. He can hold his head high.Less so Aki, who is busy breaking all the rules of confidentiality and giving private patient information out over the phone to … well, he doesn’t really know who to, actually. If you’re a tabloid journalist, and you ring Chelsea and Westminster hospital after a story, ask for Aki every time. Meanwhile posh Milla, who really wouldn’t be out of place in Made in Chelsea, has to certify a death – her first, and she doesn’t know how to do it. There’s no suggestion that the death was caused by one of Milla’s junior doctor colleagues, but this day in August when they first join the wards is known as Black Wednesday. Death rates rise by around 6%.So let’s see how Andy’s getting on with that cannula. Mr Straw’s had his break, and Andy’s back for (literally) another stab. “We’ll get it in, first time, promise,” he says with a new confidence. A new, unjustified confidence it turns out because he then breaks his promise, and breaks it again. And finally the patient loses patience and sends Andy away. Poor Mr Straw, punctured and bruised, he looks like someone out of Trainspotting.To be fair to Andy, he does better later with someone else. They all improve; one day they’ll help form the backbone of our health system. Possibly even Andy. But if you find yourself in hospital in the first week of August, ask for none of them. Probably best to stay away all together.Also excellent, Confessions of a Nurse (More4) is less about what happens and more about who it happens to – the people, rather than the procedures, which is probably a fair reflection of the difference between the professions. By people I mean the nurses, and the patients, and the relationship between the two. Like the night sister Sarah and Alice who is deteriorating fast and says she’s tired of breathing and ready to go now. Sarah strokes her hand and talks to her in the middle of the night.This is more intimate and sympathetic than Junior Doctors. Well, doctors are an easier target – they’re on their way to power and wealth. It’s harder to have a pop at people on £14,000 a year (which is what Latoya, the healthcare assistant, gets).In many ways being a nurse is a shit job. It’s not just that the pay’s shit, but you also have to take a lot of shit, from doctors sometimes, often from patients. As well as cleaning up their actual shit, of course. Look, this one horrid old man is flicking his all around the ward. And he’s exposing himself. Oh yes, he’s also a sex offender.And yet Debbie and the other nurses have a laugh, and get on with it. And they say they love their work. Because it is an amazing job, and they – Debbie, Latoya, Sarah – are amazing people.TelevisionMedical dramaSam Wollastonguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Rome wasnt built in a day!

Yes, the rainforest has many possibilities – falling down a ravine, leopards, being bitten by a snake …Meerkats are just so last year. After a YouTube clip of a slow loris stretching went viral, the endangered Indonesian primate has become the new, must-have exotic cute pet. It’s the big cartoon eyes that are irresistible apparently. Not that I know anyone with a slow loris – or have ever heard anyone expressing a desire for one – but Natural World – Jungle Gremlins of Java (BBC2) said it was true, so it probably is.And that’s one of the great pleasures of the Natural World strand. I find out a lot of stuff about things I know nothing about; stuff of no immediate importance to me, stuff that will probably only ever be useful as a University Challenge answer and yet stuff that leaves me feeling more enriched for knowing it. Which is more than can be said for the countless other documentaries on subjects I didn’t even know I didn’t know about.So what I learned about the slow loris is that it is not as slow as all that – an adult can cover 8km a night, it produces its own insect repellent, it is the only venomous primate and struggles to survive if fed on bits of cake rather than toxic, brightly coloured creepy-crawlies. It also turns out that the slow loris gives off a repulsive smell, which might help to deter anybody thinking of getting one as a pet.What I didn’t learn, but was keen to find out, is why Dr Anna Nekaris, the slow loris expert, goes out of her way to dedicate herself to a single species. Not that I don’t admire her focus, or am ungrateful for her work, it’s just that I genuinely don’t understand the mindset of someone whose idea of a good time is disappearing into a rainforest on her own for months at a time.”The night is so much more peaceful,” she said as she tramped through the dense Javan jungle in pursuit of a slow loris. “There’s just you and the animals. There are so many possibilities.” Including being attacked by a leopard, bitten by a snake and falling down a ravine. I suspect the failure of imagination is all mine, but I can’t rule out the possibility that it’s hers. Compared to Nekaris, the slow loris is an open book.No such problems for Heston Blumenthal, who seems to be making a deliberate effort to become more and more blokey in How to Cook like Heston (Channel 4). Which only goes to show that too much self-revelation is probably a dangerous thing, as what made him such an attractive TV chef was his slight sense of mystery. An odd man with an odd name doing distinctly odd things with food. If you wanted to learn how to cook, you watched Delia or Jamie; if you wanted to be dazzled and entertained, you watched Heston.So I can’t help feeling that this latest series isn’t playing to his strengths. I don’t expect Heston to talk a hybrid of Nigella cliche and innuendo, such as “a cascade of mouthwatering pleasure” and “chicken-boosting aromas”, and I certainly don’t want him to do stagey blind-tastings with the Bray women’s hockey team. I want him to do something transformative and totally over the top.In any case, you can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who really are going to try to cook like Heston. Let’s face it, giving everyone the heads up at the beginning of the programme that all you’re going to need is some dry ice and a blow torch was more than enough to encourage me to give up before I had even started. Above all, I don’t watch Heston on television for the pleasure of seeing him cook a roast chicken. For while I’m sure his roast chicken is far, far better than any other I’ve ever tasted, I’m also fairly confident I would never clear 24 hours in my diary to brine the bird overnight before slow cooking it for 90 minutes, taking its temperature, leaving it to stand for 45 minutes and then cooking it for another 10 minutes.If I’m going to cook to impress – a long shot I know: avoiding giving everyone food poisoning is a more realistic ambition – then I wouldn’t bother cooking a roast chicken. Chicken pasta or chicken risotto, maybe, but not a roast chicken. Because even I have culinary standards. If very low ones. A roast chicken is strictly a meal for when I’m home alone with the family and no one feels much like making an effort. And though I do now know how to cook a chicken properly, I don’t feel nearly as thrilled by this as I do by being able to tell you the slow loris has two tongues. Watch and learn from Dr Nekaris, Heston.TelevisionWildlifeHeston BlumenthalFood & drinkFood TVJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
oh i can’t beleive it

Chirpy songs and knockabout humour abound – but there’s a real sense of sadness at the core of this Muppets rebootThere’s something charmingly relentless about the Muppets’ resilience. Animal doesn’t need a reason to drum; Gonzo can’t stop throwing himself at danger; Kermit – the only one of Jim Henson’s creations with any time for introspection – never gives up on his troupe, no matter how bad their act gets. It doesn’t matter if no one is watching, as long as the show goes on.It’s on this sense of boundless optimism (and with a lot of faith in nostalgia) that co-writers Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller peg this revamp of the franchise, which arrives 12 years after the Muppet’s last cinematic outing. Their film comes right out and says it: The Muppets are nobodies now. The world’s moved on, the group’s disbanded. Kermit is hidden away in his Beverly Hills condo, Miss Piggy has wiggled into the editor’s chair at Paris Vogue, hopeless stand-up Fozzie Bear works a Reno bar as part of a shoddy Muppets tribute act, the Moopets. Their old theatre is to be demolished by an evil oil baron (Chris Cooper) and no one – least of all the Muppets themselves – seems to care.It’s left to the fans – represented here by a Muppet called Walter (Peter Linz) and his human brother Gary (Segel) – to foil Richman’s plan and save the Muppet legacy. Their plan: to hit the road and use their love of a TV show that was popular over 30 years ago to convince Kermit and co to reunite for a benefit gig to save the theatre.The film is packed with chirpy songs (for which music supervisor Bret McKenzie – of Flight of the Conchords fame – has been Oscar-nominated) and knockabout humour, delivered with flair by Segal and his co-star Amy Adams (perhaps underused) as Gary’s placid girlfriend. It’s never cloying or too knowing. Cynicism and wariness are real world concerns that have no place among the foam and felt.You might think that James Bobin’s movie takes the Muppets’ relevance for granted – but underneath the enforced jollity there’s a real sense of sadness. There are some fun cameos – including brief turns from Emily Blunt as Piggy’s secretary (a wink to her role in The Devil Wears Prada) and Kristen Schaal as Animal’s anger management therapist. Even if there’s no George Clooney or Matt Damon (both rumoured to be on board when the script was leaked in 2010) to give the unassuming troupe the sparkle they received from the likes of Julie Christie and Liza Minellli back in the day, it doesn’t matter.Jack Black turns out to be the film’s biggest star name – and it’s entirely appropriate that he appears midway as Animal’s sponsor, refusing the Muppets’ offer to host their final show and only appears on stage when kidnapped and tied to a chair. The ropes go on, they play the music, light the lights, totally oblivious to his screams of protest. The Muppets boundless enthusiasm carries them stubbornly on, and if times have changed, they’re refusing to acknowledge it. Life’s a happy song, as the film’s big musical number testifies. Sing it loud enough to drown out the doubters.Rating: 4/5ComedyEmily BluntThe MuppetsKristen SchaalJack BlackFlight of the ConchordsTelevisionComedyHenry Barnesguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
can believe what i am reading, so unfair