Yahoo Finance The week in TV: Imagine… Lemn Sissay; Miriam Margolyes: Almost Australian; The Last Wave and more
Imagine… Lemn Sissay: The Memory of Me (BBC One) | iPlayer
Miriam Margolyes: Almost Australian (BBC Two) | iPlayer
The Last Wave (BBC Four) | iPlayer
Rodney P’s Jazz Funk (BBC Four) | iPlayer
The Young Offenders (BBC One) | iPlayer
We learned a great deal, sadly very little of it any good at all, about Britain’s childcare system in the 1960s thanks to a terrific, yet not long enough Imagine… all about the times of the poet/playwright Lemn Sissay. Whose life could have kept one medium-size publisher in misery memoirs for happy hand-rubbing decades: instead, he chose to punch up with last year’s raging success My Name Is Why. And, similarly, the man emerges as irrepressible, buoyant, joyous even. This was little less than watching the triumph of the individual spirit, to soar above blaming.
Yet goodness knows there were candidates enough for blame. The Ethiopian single mother who, if for valid enough reasons, left him to the tender care of Wigan social services from his birth in 1967. The social worker who insisted the child be named after him. (Has there ever been less of a “Norman” than Lemn?) The God-fearing white foster parents who, after 12 years with an unusually happy, giggly, clever child who got on with all around, decided they wanted nothing more to do with him – they’d done their charitable bit – and dumped him in a children’s home overnight. The four care homes that followed, the clack of anonymous typewriters dogging him throughout with secret reports. The guttering jobs, the first attempts to publish pamphlets of poetry (angry, yes. Ish. But, also, fun, and funny, and insightful, and questing, and celebratory). The slow arc of success (chancellor of Manchester University, last year’s PEN Pinter winner), so easy to see in hindsight, so impossible to have predicted in that abandoned, shunted, child. The emergence of a proud and happy man. The word “redemptive” is an overused adjective, especially by me, but I’ll watch precious few stories this year more illustrative of the triumph of the will.
National trinket Miriam Margolyes clambered with ungainly determination into a camper van to explore her adopted Australia in Almost Australian, and get to some kind of husk of the heartland of what is loosely the Aussie “dream”, whatever that is. This three-parter could have settled for being another celeb travelogue. Most luckily, Ms Margolyes is an intrinsic factor.
I’ll admit to a frisson of early cynicism regarding her feigned surprise at either the plight of indigenous people or the severity of Canberra’s immigration strictures. Few actors, let alone card-carrying Labour activists who have been Australian citizens since 2013, can have been entirely unaware of either. And she does like to get her retaliation in first every time, half-daring Aussie folk to bridle at her eager and overused description of herself as a “fat Jewish lesbian”, when in truth most just shrugged and passed her a tinnie.
But what she quite excels at is interaction. She draws people’s stories from them, knowing just when to shut up and just when to nod: she might in a different world have been a wonderful Jane Marple. Had Miss Marple been in the loud habit of telling everyone who gently offended her to fuck off.
Margolyes bearded, patiently, young cheerful Afghan orphan Moj in the back room of a cheap’n’cheerful Melbourne knick-knack store, and slowly got his astonishing story. They both ended up in soft tears. And she drew stories from the “grey nomads”, the single older divorced women who now form a huge percentage of Australia’s homeless. She has her heart and her soft eyes and her potty mouth firmly on her sleeve does Miriam and this “journey” promises, for once, to yield wisdom.
The Last Wave, the French supernatural eco-something drama that debuted on Saturday night in a BBC Four double bill, is an extraordinary thing yet for all the wrong reasons. It does, admittedly, begin with promise: a dozen surfers, bitchy or troubled or flirty or happy, set off from lovely (and fictional) Brizan-les-Pins in south-west France to do whatever surfers do to try to win something, which seems little more than skiing sideways with snarky attitudes and buffer bodies.
There’s a huge rolling and roiling cylindrical cloud above them all though, which all the surfers, apparently unaware of all advances in CGI since 1983, choose to ignore. They all die. Except they don’t: they reappear five hours later with mystical powers. Except most don’t. One has healing powers; one particularly priapic and punchable preener can breathe underwater; a kid’s eyes change colour; the rest confusingly meh.
At one stage the huge Brizan lighthouse will, after the roiling loo-brush cloud has descended once again, be found a mile away, on land, planted solidly amid stout pines. The main characters babble to each other about PTSD, and counsellors counsel about mental trauma, but nobody ever wonders how the huge lighthouse set up shop a mile inland through the sheer magic of PTSD. I thought one of the main actor’s names was Fach Kinnell, but, on rechecking notes, can only surmise that that was my barked shout regarding the quality of the acting throughout.
I’ve watched the next two episodes so you don’t have to. I think there’s an environmental message in there but had become distracted for 80 minutes by the exuberant availability online of corn plasters. Surprised at BBC Four, normally so good on Saturday night double bills. More than any No 10 briefing, The Last Wave tells us all to get back out there.
Rodney P’s Jazz Funk (also BBC Four but of vaulting qualitative difference) told, and with style and glee, the story of a criminally overlooked period in UK music, the early 70s adoption of, yes, jazz funk, to which, as proved here, the likes of the new romantics and Stormzy owe unfailing debt. The descending bass lines, ancient as Zadok, jumpy 50s brass, fast-fingered rhythmic witchery honed on 60s Harlem guitars, all underlaid by a wholly new upstart disco beat – it was a unique yet enthralling blend. There were random clubs that specialised in nothing else, and the marginalised of the nation simply flocked, to shimmy and to ballet and to peacock, unjudged. It’s a three-parter, and threatens to get even better.
In this I had an epiphany. I had little – let’s face it, I had nothing – in common with the young second-generation black experience in 1972 London, nor the white dance halls of Canvey Island or Caister “weekenders” at that time, nor the gay clubs of early 80s Oxford Street. Couldn’t have been further away from them had I been being raised by clockwork swallows on the distant asteroid Pluff. Yet it turns out this is, has been, always will be, the music I constantly listen to, to this day. Every day.
The Young Offenders, which seems to have passed under many radars while the likes of Derry Girls soared and delighted, might finally make it big time. It deserves to. It’s cheeky, irreverent, Cork-based, scandalous, sweary and sweaty: also, extremely funny. Slapstick moments, at which my heart does plunge. Yet many more moments of sharp lines at which it soars.
