Hotel Portofino – ITV

This didn’t tick too many boxes for originality, but it definitely ticked the box for glorious scenery (mostly filmed in Croatia, but let’s pretend that it’s the Italian Riviera) and plenty of different brewing dramas.    A posh-ish British woman has opened a hotel in Portofino in the 1920s.   Could we have a bit more about her family’s background, please?   I’m curious as to whether being called Ainsworth means that they’re from Lancashire.  She’s got an alcoholic husband who spends all their money, a grouchy war widow daughter with a child, and a dilettante son who’s a) scarred by his experiences in the war and b) possibly the object of affection of his best friend.

There are a lot of other stock characters.   Two Innocent Young Ladies, one accompanied by a snooty mother, the other by a hypochondriac aunt.  Two Flashy Americans.  Two Northern Servants.  Some Charming Italians, but also some Dodgy Italians with links to the rising fascist movement.

It’s not very original, as I said, but the shots of the coast were stunning, and the shots of local streets and markets were gorgeous as well.  There’s a lot going on, and we’ll see how it goes.

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The Larkins (Series 2) – ITV

It’s wonderful to have this back.  There’s been nothing on on Sunday nights for weeks, other than the Strictly Come Dancing results show!   It’s just nice, gentle, easy watching.

The posh new family are rather silly and caricatured, but never mind.  In fact, a lot of it’s a bit OTT, even farcical, but the village setting’s so lovely, and there’s no doom and gloom.  It’s just nice.  And there aren’t a lot of “just nice” things about.

Camilla’s Country Life – ITV

This was a really lovely programme, about the Duchess of Cornwall guest-editing the 13th July edition of Country Life to mark her 75th birthday.   Camilla hasn’t put a foot wrong since she married Prince Charles, despite having to put up with a lot of vilification from sections of the media and Diana fanatics.  She does a great deal of charity work and, as the programme pointed out several times, she *is* set to be our Queen one day.   It was great to get to know more about her, starting with seeing her with her sister and hearing about their Blytonesque childhood summers at their maternal grandparents’ country pile in Hampshire.  And it was also lovely to hear that the Duchess of Cambridge had taken the magazine cover photos: they obviously get on very well.  I can’t abide dogs and I’m nervous of horses, but she’s obviously very keen on both, and also on gardening, giving her a lot in common with Prince Charles, the Queen and Princess Anne.

Jeremy Clarkson also got a look in!   So did roast chicken.  And Philip Treacy’s hats.  But much of the programme focused on her charity work – with domestic violence charities, disabled service personnel, the Big Lunch project and a riding school in South London.   I thought that she came across very well, and it was a good opportunity to learn more about her.  A very nice programme all round!

 

 

 

 

Sanditon (Season 2) – ITV

 

I’m not quite sure how to judge this.  On entertainment value?   On being something Jane Austen might realistically have written?  On historical authenticity (it’s set in 1820)?

As far as entertainment value goes, the sets and the costumes were all excellent, and I do want to know what happens to the characters.  But how about being Austen-esque?  Well, it hasn’t gone ridiculously OTT this time.  There were no bare bottoms, although one bloke was walking about with a bare chest.  The introduction of a company of soldiers, albeit regulars rather than the militia, has obvious echoes of Pride and Prejudice, Georgiana’s silly chaperones are similar in character to the likes of Mr Collins, Mr Woodhouse and Mr Elliot, and Charlotte’s sister Alison gazing up into a handsome man’s eyes after an accident isn’t dissimilar to Sense and Sensibility.

However … whilst the need for an heir is central to more than one of Austen’s novels, she’d never have gone into the medical details, as the writers here have done with Esther Babington.   But it’s hard to criticise the inclusion of an explanation, rather than just vague comments about not having had a child.   And what about the sugar boycott/free produce movement, which both Georgiana and Charlotte actively support?   Well, Austen certainly never mentioned it, but it was a big thing for a long time, and it was something which women were particularly involved in.   No mention of the Peterloo Massacre, the Cato Street Conspiracy or anything else connected to the difficulties of the times, but then Austen never mentioned anything political either.

What isn’t quite so authentic is the strident feminism around which much of the plot hangs.   Would Georgiana really have been so rude in turning down an unwanted suitor?   OK, Elizabeth Bennet told Mr Darcy exactly what she thought of him, but he asked for it!   Georgiana’s admirer didn’t seem to have done anything worse than be boring.  And would Charlotte really have declared that she never wanted to marry, and taken a job as a governess, lecturing her new employer about the need to educate girls?   Emma Woodhouse said that she never wanted to marry, but she had a place in society as a result of her family’s wealth.   And the Dashwood girls were well-educated.  But, still,  wouldn’t Charlotte have been desperately trying to find any husband at all, as Charlotte Lucas did?  Well … whilst Peterloo wasn’t mentioned, the bad harvests and their effect on the Heywood family’s finances  were, so I suppose it was realistic that Charlotte had decided that she *had* to find a job.  And, as she said, that meant a job as a governess.  And all her talk about being free and independent wasn’t all that dissimilar to comments made a generation later by Jane Eyre.

So, OK, maybe it was all possible.   This first episode certainly wasn’t completely overboard, as much of the last series was.  All in all, it wasn’t bad.   And I love the fact that they’ve brought in a character called Alison: my name doesn’t generally crop up in period dramas!    I’m still narked about the way the last series ended – and, I think because the actor was unavailable, Sidney Parker was killed off at the start of this one – but I’ll be sticking with it.

 

 

The Larkins – ITV

This seems to have been a mixed reaction to this, but I rather liked it.   It was like The Durrells: no-one was saying that it was particularly intellectually challenging, or even particularly realistic, but it was a welcome bit of comfortable, easy viewing.  Given that practically every programme these days begins with a warning that it contains scenes which some viewers may find distressing, and ends with a list of helplines for people who have been “affected by issues raised in tonight’s episode of X”, I for one am well up for that.   It’s going to be very hard to match up to the iconic David Jason/Pam Ferris/Catherine Zeta Jones series from, unbelievably, thirty years ago, and it *didn’t* manage that,  but it was all right.  The TV listings seem to be filled with series about murder, domestic abuse, children being abducted, and so on, and even soap operas are filled with doom and gloom.  This is a bit of light relief.  Bring it on!

I don’t know about nostalgia for the 1950s, but I would certainly love to get back to a time when aggressive, abusive people didn’t try to turn absolutely everything into a culture war.  I was already feeling a bit fed up earlier, after I’d had to complain to the moderators of a children’s book discussion group I was in after two individuals tried to turn it into class war.  One of them apparently thought it was OK to object to working with anyone who had a “plummy voice” and a name “like Piers”.  Since when was it OK to hate someone just because you don’t like their accent or, for heaven’s sake, their name?!

Then I idly Googled “The Larkins”, and up came a review written by some vile individual called Sean O’Grady, for the misnamed “Independent”, saying that it was “a Brexit television abomination” and that Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries wrote “opioid atavistic tosh”.  Excuse me?   What on earth does a fictional TV series about life in a village in the 1950s have to do with either Brexit or Nadine Dorries?   O’Grady is clearly one of these bittter types who can’t accept that they aren’t entitled to get their own way on anything and everything, but what on earth has that got to do with the Larkins?  And this was in what used to be a mainstream, middle-of-the-road newspaper, not some extremist political tract!

Then there’s the debate over the fact that the Larkins live in, to quote journalist Anita Singh, a “racially diverse utopia”.  It’s completely unrealistic for a rural part of Britain in the 1950s.  But, had it not included any ethnic minority characters, people would have been shrieking about a “lack of diversity” and demanding that it be taken off air.  When the BBC showed their adaptation of A Suitable Boy, which had a predominantly Indian cast, people complained about stereotyping.  I feel sorry for scriptwriters and producers.  Whatever they do, they can’t win.  But, again, why does a bit of light Sunday evening TV have to be turned into a culture war?  Seriously, folks, just try being nice.   It’s not a crime.  Stop having a go at people.  And please stop bringing your personal political views into something to which they have absolutely no relevance!

Heigh-ho!  OK, rant over.  To get back to The Larkins, not an awful lot actually happened.  Mariette wanted to go and work as an au pair in France.  Ma and Pop weren’t keen.  Pop advised Miss Pilchester on a house sale.  Some lad upset Primrose, and Mariette had a go at him.  There was a fuss over who should be the Master of Foxhounds.  Pop bought a car.

And Ma gave Montgomery, Primrose, Zinnia and Petunia a lecture about how they always should kind and polite and treat other people with respect.  I couldn’t agree more.

 

Back to School with Alison Hammond – ITV

This programme, shown as part of Black History Month, was very interesting, and a much more positive approach than that shown by certain other TV channels and certain newspapers.  It was also very encouraging to see a black history programme that didn’t focus on either slavery or the US Civil Rights movement: obviously those are important, but it was good to see other subjects being raised too.  Alison Hammond is a very engaging presenter, and the stories she investigated – including one about a trumpeter and one about a footballer 🙂 – were all fascinating in their own way.

The trouble is that schools only have a very limited amount of time in which to teach history, and it would be very challenging to incorporate modules specifically on the history of all under-represented groups into that.  As far as I’m concerned, PE and art lessons should be abolished and replaced by extra history lessons, but I’m not sure that the authorities would go for that.  Shame …

She started off by looking into the story of John Blanke, a black trumpeter at the court of Henry VII and Henry VIII.  He certainly sounds like quite a character: he even asked Henry VIII for a pay rise!   However, I think it’s quite hard to argue that lessons on the Tudors should be focusing on trumpeters rather than on the Reformation, the development of the “king-in-parliament” principle, the Anglo-Scottish Wars, etc.  Nobody’s trying to exclude John Blanke from history, of course note; but trumpeters, with all due respect to them, don’t normally get that much attention.

We also heard about Ira Aldridge, a black actor in Georgian and Victorian times.  Again, he sounded very interesting, but Alison Hammond and Adrian Lester, to whom she spoke about him, questioned why they’d never learnt about him at school.  We never learnt about any actors at school, in either history lessons or English literature lessons.  His story was probably a lot more interesting than some of the stuff about medieval monks which we did have to learn about, but actors are just not usually part of a school history curriculum, and I’m not sure why we were expected to be shocked that neither of them had been taught about him.  Fascinating story, but there are so many fascinating stories about individuals, and schools just can’t fit them all in in two or three lesson periods a week.

Walter Tull, however, was someone of whom I’d certainly heard – most football fans with an interest in history will know the name of one of the first non-white footballers to play in the then First Division (for Spurs), and know that he became an officer in the British Army during the First World War but was sadly killed in action.  But – very unfortunately – footballers, regardless of ethnicity, don’t feature on the school history curriculum.  Again, it was a great story, but I wasn’t sure why we were meant to be surprised that his name wasn’t more familiar.

The two most prominent people mentioned – although, TBH, I know more about Walter Tull than I do about Septimius Severus – were Mary Seacole, the Crimean War nurse, and Septimius Severus, Roman emperor from 193 to 211 AD.  I think the name of Mary Seacole is pretty well-known now, and that most people are familiar with her brave and wonderful work during the Crimean War.  We didn’t learn about her at school.  But nor did we learn about Florence Nightingale.  We didn’t “do” the Crimean War.  I wish we had, because my great-great-great grandfather fought in it, and I have actually been to Sebastopol and Balaclava.  But we didn’t.  It’s just not usually on the school syllabus.

Nor is the period from 193 to 211 AD.  We don’t actually know whether or not Septimius Severus was black: we know that he came from Africa, but it was probably from North Africa.  No-one really knows.  We do know that he died in York, and the fact that a Roman emperor – in fact, two Roman emperors – died in York isn’t well-known at all.  But it’s just not a period that’s covered in school history – as in all these cases, it’s nothing to do with racial prejudice, any more than the relative lack of women in history books, as Catherine Morland famously moaned about in Northanger Abbey, is to do with gender prejudice.

All in all, this was a very enjoyable programme, and each of the stories in it was fascinating, and told in an extremely enthusiastic way – Alison Hammond really is great, and always seems so interested in everything she’s talking about.   And, as I said, it was wonderful to see a programme on black history which didn’t focus on slavery or the Civil Rights movement, and which reminded us that “black history” in Britain goes right back to Roman times, and probably earlier.  But the issue is how you would fit that into a school history curriculum, especially bearing in mind that there are other groups who also feel under-represented in history teaching.  Personal histories are great, as the popularity of programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are and My Grandparents’ War shows, but I do think schools have to concentrate on major events, major developments, and the movers and shakers involved in those, regardless of ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality or anything else.  There just isn’t enough curriculum time to include everything.

That’s a great shame.

Maybe we could scrap PE and art lessons, and have more history lessons instead  …

 

The Singapore Grip – ITV

I hope that this gets better, because, despite the attractive sets and the interesting historical context, the first episode wasn’t particularly, well, gripping.  Whilst I understand that it’s supposed to be a satire, the nasty businessman, the temptress daughter, the spoilt brat son and the nice but dim new business partner were so caricatured that it was hard to take them seriously.  That sort of thing works brilliantly in Carry On films or ’80s sitcoms (speaking of which, all the references to the rubber industry kept making me think of the Union Jack Rubber Company in You Rang M’Lord), but not in something which is supposed to be a drama.  The best character was Webb senior, played by Charles Dance, but he’s been bumped off already!   And the jumping about with the timeline was confusing.

But the sets are nice.  There were no historical/anachronistic blunders.  And maybe it’ll get better, once we get into the love triangle between Mr Nice But Dim, the temptress daughter, and the “mystery” Chinese woman played by Xin from Coronation Street.  And I assume that we are actually going to see the fall of Singapore to the Japanese – I think we’re meant to be in 1941 at the moment.  I hope it gets better, anyway.  There’s nothing else on on Sunday nights at the moment.

We’re in Singapore.  Obviously.  Charles Dance, Mr Webb senior, sadly died part-way into the episode, although not until after he’d struck a blow for the older generation by wandering around the garden topless.  Without a scythe, though. So his nice but dim son has inherited his share of the rubber company which he owns jointly with Mr Blackett/Nasty Businessman, who has two giddy daughters.  The elder daughter told her dad, to whom she’s creepily close, that of course she’d marry the nice but dim guy, and it didn’t matter what he was like, followed by lots of tittering and giggling.  However, it appears that the nice but dim guy is involved with the mysterious Chinese woman, whom the Blacketts met a few years earlier and who has now arrived in Singapore as a refugee, and is suspected of being a communist.  I’m not quite sure what the point of the other daughter and the spoilt brat son is.  Or the wife, which is a shame, because Jane Horrocks is wasted playing a character who hardly does anything.

I shall persevere.  I’m hoping that young Mr Webb is not as dim as he seems, and I’d quite like to know what’s going on with the mysterious woman.  And it might get better …

 

Anne: the Princess Royal at 70 – ITV

I would love to be like Princess Anne.  Nothing seems to faze her: she just gets on with it.  She also seems to be completely comfortable in her own skin.  She doesn’t moan, she doesn’t use annoying buzzwords, and she never seems to be feel that she needs to prove anything.  I thought that she came across really well in this documentary – every bit as hard-working and no-nonsense as she always does, and also very good-humoured and with an excellent sense *of* humour.

Like everything else this year, this didn’t go to plan.  The original idea was for the cameras to follow around for a year – but then, of course, lockdown put the kibosh on that.  However, it was typical of Princess Anne that that wasn’t allowed to mess the programme up; and, instead, it was turned into an opportunity to discuss her life at Gatcombe Park, and for her to talk about spending time with her grandchildren and joke about offering to help with home schooling as soon as people were allowed to meet up with those outside their own households.  There was even a brilliant clip of her trying to explain to the Queen how to use Zoom.

A lot of it had been filmed before lockdown, though, and we got to see her in a range of different situations – royal visits, charity work, investitures, acting as colonel-in-chief of military regiments, and also relaxing on a boat with Tim Laurence.  It was great to hear from Tim Laurence, because he’s normally so low-key.  We heard from Peter and Zara as well, and they all came across brilliantly – very natural and very affectionate.

We even heard from the Prime Minister, and there was a brilliant moment when a sculptor who was producing a bust of Anne showed her a bust that she’d made of Boris, and Anne joked about how difficult it must have been to get his hair right.  It’s hard to imagine any of the other Royals actually saying that!

Most of it was about her life as it is now, but there was also plenty about her life up until now.  It’s certainly been eventful – from the kidnapping to the Olympics.  It was nothing we hadn’t heard before, but it was still fascinating.  I particularly enjoyed hearing her say that going away to boarding school was her idea.  She actually asked to go, just like a princess in a school story!

I remember the period during which Princess Anne got a rough ride from the press, but I don’t think anyone has a bad word to say about her these days.   This programme didn’t have anything negative to say, but it wasn’t even remotely sycophantic: it was just honest.  And that’s Princess Anne all over.  There never seems to be anything fake about her.  She just tells how it is, and gets on with whatever comes along.  As I said, I wish I could be like her!   And I wish certain other members of her family could be like her.  She’s great, and this programme was great!

Absolutely India: Mancs in Mumbai – ITV

Now there’s something I missed doing when I went to India – teaching a class of very cute primary school kids, all in smart uniforms, to say “Hello, our kid”.  Why did I not think of that?!  This half-hour programme, the first in a series of six, was a strange combination of Who Do You Think You Are?, Long Lost Family, The Jeremy Kyle Show and a travel programme, but it worked pretty well, probably because the three lads and their dad all came across as such likeable characters.  I’m extremely sad that none of us will be travelling to Mumbai, or even to Muncaster, Malham, Matlock or Morecambe, any time soon, and am actually still struggling to take that in; but we can look at film of the Gateway of India, which I’ve always wanted to see, and of wonderful, colourful, crowded Indian food markets, and hope that better times come again soon.  Meanwhile, this programme was genuinely entertaining.

The idea of this programme was that the three lookalike Thomas brothers, Ryan (Jason from Coronation Street), Adam (Adam from Emmerdale and Donte from Waterloo Road) and Scott (who was in Love Island), along with their dad Dougie (whom they all look like!) were visiting Mumbai, where Dougie’s dad Nolan came from.  Nolan Thomas moved to Manchester around the time of Indian independence, and seemed to have lost touch with his family back in Bombay/Mumbai.

None of the three lads had ever been to India before, and they didn’t really seem to know much about it, so it was partly a connecting-with-your-heritage trip.  Inevitably, there were a load of jokes about not being able to cope with the hot curries, but they also enjoyed seeing the sights, especially the gorgeous markets.  It was also partly a family bonding trip.  Dougie had split from the boys’ mother when they were young, and had very little contact with them for several years after that, and they were very open about the fact that they’d effectively grown up without a dad, and that Ryan had been more like a dad to his younger brothers than Dougie had.  They all seemed to be getting on pretty well, but there were obviously some wounds that ran deep there.

However, the main aim was to try to find out more about Nolan Thomas, who’d been very close to Dougie but had died when the three lads were very small, and to see if they could find any relatives still living in Mumbai.  I’d really like to have known more about the family background, and am hoping that that’s coming in the later episodes.  It was clear from what they said that he was ethnically Indian, but “Nolan Thomas” is hardly a typical Mumbai name, and (being nosy!) I’m hoping we’ll find out more about his family history.

They found out that he’d worked at the Times of India, which sounded exciting.  And they found out which school he’d gone to, and that one of the teachers there had known his brother.  So they went to visit the school … and that was where the lesson in Mancunian dialect came in!   They also met a little girl there whose surname was also Thomas, and whom they assumed was a relative.  But they didn’t go into how they might be related, and we haven’t yet really found out very much about Nolan Thomas and his Mumbai family at all …  but, with five more episodes to come, hopefully we will.

This was really good fun.  I didn’t know if it might end up being a bit too stag party-ish or Jeremy Kyle-ish, but they all came across very well and it was genuinely entertaining.  I’m hoping we learn more about both Mumbai and the family history in the episodes to come, and I’ll certainly be tuning in to find out.

 

Three Royal documentaries – Our Queen At War (ITV), Prince Philip (Channel 5), Princess Anne (Channel 5)

Three Royal documentaries – Our Queen At War (ITV), Philip: the King without a Crown (Channel 5) and Anne: the Daughter who should be Queen (Channel 5).  None of them said anything we haven’t heard umpteen times before, but they were all quite interesting, especially so as I think they must have been filmed after lockdown – the first “lockdown era” documentaries I’ve seen which haven’t actually been about coronavirus issues.  The opinions of the “experts” were either just given by voiceover or else given over video links from their homes.  I think ITV had tarted theirs up a bit, but the Channel 5 ones were clearly home videos made on Zoom or Tik Tok or something similar.  And the ITV one used animated graphics, which was something different.   I’m not sure how the Queen’d feel about her teenage self being shown as an animated graphic, but I’d like to think she’d be quite amused by it!

With no live sport, soaps on ration, and no way of filming new episodes of most programmes until the end of lockdown, TV channels couldn’t be blamed too much if they just showed a lot of repeats – but they’d gone to the trouble of making these new programmes, and they deserve some kudos for that.

The one about Prince Philip was on first, and this really was largely just recycling old stuff.  Out came the video clips of Charles and Diana’s wedding, Diana’s funeral, etc etc, for the umpteenth time!  I’d really have liked to hear more about Philip’s early years, which aren’t discussed nearly as much – but, to be fair, the title of the programme made clear that it was about his role as consort.  The family stuff, whilst interesting, had been said a million times before, as had the sorry tale of his having to give up his naval career, but I enjoyed the discussions about his work, especially the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme.  It was an hour’s decent watching, anyway.

The one about the Queen’s wartime experiences followed a few days later.  Again, a lot of this was, whilst interesting, same old same old – the speech that she made from Windsor in 1940, and the bombing of Buckingham Palace, and she and Princess Margaret mingling with the crowds on VE Day.  I rather enjoyed all the romantic bits, though.  One of these days, history will see the Queen and Prince Philip’s relationship as one of the greatest royal romances of all time.  Walking round the grounds at Windsor hand-in-hand when he was on leave from the Navy.  Bless!   And, as the programme said, having a boyfriend (for lack of a better word) who was on active service gave the then Princess Elizabeth a greater understanding of what so many other women at the time were going through.

The general point of the programme was to emphasise the fact that the Queen, despite her privileged position, shared many of the wartime experiences that other people did, and how the war years shaped her; and it did a good job of that.  For one thing, we were reminded that she and Princess Margaret actually saw a flying bomb going overhead, before it landed very close by, at Windsor Racecourse. There were even some bits I don’t think I’d ever seen before, such as shots of evacuees from Glasgow on the Balmoral estate.  And I loved seeing the film clips of the Queen driving a truck whilst she was in the ATS!   Those clips aren’t often seen.  This was a very good hour’s TV, especially at the moment with the wartime generation proving such an inspiration during the coronavirus crisis.

Just as a slight aside, though, the fact that they’re now the oldest members of society means that the wartime generation have been hit very hard by this horrible virus.  It’s very sad to read about war veterans or Holocaust survivors, who’d come through so much, having their lives finally ended by this awful, awful thing.

Finally, we had the programme about Princess Anne.  I don’t know whether the title was just meant to attract attention or whether someone genuinely thought it was a valid statement.  I can’t imagine for one second that Princess Anne even wants to be Queen, and there’s certainly no “should” about it: she’s not the eldest.  And, whilst I think she’s amazing, it’s probably a job for someone a bit more tactful!  She is great, though!

One of the “experts” mispronounced everything from “primogeniture” to “governess” which was rather annoying, but it was a very good programme otherwise.  We went back through Anne’s early years, and how the media were quite negative about her in the early 1980s, and she was overshadowed by Diana and Fergie as well as by Charles, but how she earned huge respect because of her work with Save The Children and other charities.  There was also quite a lot about her equestrian career.  It didn’t mention A Question of Sport 🙂 , but it did mention her being Sports Personality of the Year in 1971, and competing at the Olympics on 1976.  It also emphasised the fact that she’s often been the first British Royal to make overseas tours to places which are sensitive for one reason or another, notably the Soviet Union – a very good point.

I remember the negative press she used to get, and was very pleased that this programme was almost entirely complimentary about her hard work and no-nonsense attitude.

She does a sterling job!   As do all the other senior royals – and they’ve been doing what they can in these difficult times.  Thank you to them, and thank you to ITV and Channel 5 for taking the trouble to make these new programmes.  I enjoyed all three of them.