Soldiers come from all over the UK to the Army School of Bagpipe Music and Highland Drumming at Redford Barracks in Edinburgh. There’s one subject missing from the sign, presumably to avoid scaring the chanters out of students - Highland dancing.
As an instructor says in Battle of the Bagpipes (Sky Arts, Wednesday), the dancing comes as “a bit of a shock” for some. Any Scot of a certain age knows the feeling. One minute dancing means a side to side shuffle in the local disco, the next some PE teacher is shouting “Pas-de-ba” in your lughole and expecting you to dance around two sticks meant to be swords.
There should really have been a trigger warning before Battle of the Bagpipes. Plus, depending on your affection for the instrument, advice to keep the remote control handy to turn the sound up and down as desired.
Three one-hour episodes devoted to the bagpipes. You didn’t know piping was so interesting? Well you do now. The cameras follow civilian and military bands as they prepare for the busy month of August, when various events lead up to the World Pipe Band Championships in Glasgow, described by narrator Bill Paterson as “the fiercest competition in the piping world”.
To have Paterson narrating is the documentary equivalent of a royal warrant: production quality is guaranteed, and so it proves, with Glasgow looking fabulous in the summer sunshine. There is a determined attempt to inject jeopardy into proceedings, which mostly works, as in the auditions to play for King Charles, but occasionally feels forced.
Everyone has a story about the pipes, the best of which came from tutor Sergeant Roland Ray of the Queen's Own Gurkha Logistic Regiment. He served in Afghanistan in 2009 and recalls a piper playing outside the gates “saying goodbye to us and giving us good luck”. Years on the sound of the pipes still tugs at his heart - as no one ever said about a drum machine.
For all the many people fed up with sport on the main channels, Auntie Beeb has had an idea - why not give you more sport? Paddy and Molly: Show No Mersey (BBC3, Monday) is a reality series set in the world of mixed martial arts fighting.
The titular two are best mates and passionate Scousers, especially the latter. “This isn’t Made in Chelsea mate,” says Paddy to the director. “We don’t want to look like divvies.”
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The cameras film the pair as they get set for major life events, whether it’s the birth of twins or a comeback bout after a serious injury. There is nothing here you will not have seen in countless boxing documentaries, but Paddy and Molly are a likeable pair. In typical BBC3-style the editing is fast and furious, music blasts throughout and after 10 minutes I stopped counting the F-bombs dropped.
Martin Lewis or Tim Harford as your financial guru of choice? The latter gave us Skint: the Truth About Britain’s Economy (Channel 4, Monday). The Financial Times writer and More or Less presenter laid out what has gone wrong with the world’s sixth-largest economy, and how to put it right via growth.
Harford has a winning way of making complex ideas understandable, even if he did, rather depressingly, keep hammering home what might have been. For instance: “If Britain’s house building had kept pace with the average west European country between 1955 and 2015 we would have an additional 4.3 million homes today.” But it didn’t and we don’t.
Solutions were offered - build more houses, make it easier for businesses to invest, and so on - but did the UK have the political leaders willing to implement them? A fascinating, provocative film packed with ideas, so why wait till the last few days of the campaign to show it?
There are now so many property shows they are spilling into each other’s territory. Ryan Serhant, once of Million Dollar Listing New York, turned up in The Parisien Agency recently, helping one of the Kretz brothers sell a property in New York. Serhant now has his own series, Owning Manhattan (Netflix).
The silver fox estate agent has the contract to sell the penthouse at Central Park Tower, the tallest residential building in the world. The price is a mere $250 million. For that price, you get 11 bathrooms (only 11?).
Selling homes is not deemed interesting enough any more on its own, so Owning Manhattan has gone full reality TV and turned staff into characters competing for commissions like contestants in a game show. And because there must be drama, every molehill of disagreement between agents is turned into a mountain of he said/she said/oh no you didn’t rowing.
Serhant appears to have an almost Trumpian belief in himself, with everything the greatest in the best of all possible worlds, but at heart he is the same nervy soul who failed in his ambition to be an actor all those years ago. Or did he?
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