It is rare to see a documentary presenting its subject as a stone cold liar in the first scene. There will usually be some initial tip-toeing around the topic, making a case for and against, before reaching a conclusion. No such niceties were necessary with Roger Stone, the subject of A Storm Foretold (BBC4, Tuesday).
As the political fixer lights a comically large cigar (paging Dr Freud), the Danish filmmaker Christoffer Guldbrandsen asks when Stone had his first smoke.
Seven years old, he replies. “I was running a Republican state convention and somebody handed me one.”
Guldbrandsen doesn’t pick him up on the ridiculous claim. Who runs a convention at 7? The director prefers to let Stone yammer on and damn himself with lavish self-praise.
“Saving Western civilisation is hard work,” says Stone with a showbiz sigh. What a ham.
Stone is a human hot air balloon, a ridiculous character who has ridden the coattails of Republican leaders from Nixon to Trump. His strongest claim to fame/infamy today is that he lied to a congressional committee allegedly to protect Trump, and had his jail sentence commuted by the then president.
For 90 minutes we watch Stone being a blowhard, which would be dull after a while save for one thing: the period Guldbrandsen’s film covers is the run-up to the invasion of the Capitol by Trump supporters on 6 January, 2021 - an event still searingly relevant today as America prepares to go to the polls again.
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What Guldbrandsen’s enthralling film charts is how, in such times, idiots like Stone can be dangerous. Besides charting Stone’s part in the Trump story, A Storm Foretold is a film within a film about the relationship between a documentary maker and his subject.
At first the old campaigner delights in the camera finding him interesting once more, but it is not long before he becomes crotchety and resentful. At one point he dumps Guldbransen for another filmmaker.
Most people would struggle to be with Stone for a week, never mind the two years that Guldbransen puts in. Even after he has a heart attack at the gym - CCTV footage of which he shows - he goes back when Stone calls.
“It’s complicated,” he says of his relationship with Stone. Ultimately, as we see in a devastating (for Stone) final scene, Guldbrandsen gets his man - and how.
Cooking with the Stars (ITV1, Tuesday), being a cooking competition for celebrities who can’t cook, promised much in the way of harmless, non-Olympic entertainment. The guest lineup was a mix of what you might call classic dishes (Vorderman, Biggins, Linford Christie) alongside more nouvelle celebrity cuisine (Katherine Ryan, Pasha from Strictly, and the latest social media sensation). Fun to be had there, right?
Not a lot, alas. It started well, with Emma Willis and Tom Allen taking a sarky approach to celebrity reminiscent of Les Dawson on Blankety Blank. It didn’t last, leaving Katherine Ryan to pick up the slack with a few choice one-liners. They should have had her hosting.
Even the chefs/judges were on their best, not Gordon Ramsay behaviour, trying to find the positive in whatever hot mess was presented to them. Celebrity MasterChef has nothing to worry about.
Miriam Margolyes: A New Australian Adventure (BBC2, Friday) found the actor off on her travels again. A heart operation had left her feeling uncharacteristically vulnerable, she said, and she wanted to put this “new” Miriam to the test. There was something, too, about exploring the idea of belonging. Whatever, she was off on her holidays once more.
The new Miriam turned out to be a lot like the old Miriam, sweary, crude and fond of a sweeping comment “I don’t like miners,” she announces to a miner at the baggage carousel in Perth airport. As for getting to know the country better, she has been visiting the place for more than 40 years and has a home there. How new to Australia was this new Miriam, really?
But she made an effort to see the upside in things and have a go, finding that she quite liked whatever she had recently poo-poohed, be it sailing or swimming in the hotel pool.
It wasn’t all tourist-friendly fare, as when she visited an old mission school that had housed some of the “stolen generations” of First Nation children. One of the guides had been taken from his family at the age of three. After a while you knew no-one was coming to the rescue, he said. While Margoyles felt pure, hot fury at his treatment, another survivor told her anger only went so far and the only way forward was reconciliation.
Her finest moments are the quieter ones, as when she has Friday night dinner with a rabbi from Manchester. Then it’s back to scaring the horses business as usual via an interview with a sex worker. There is no middle way with Margolyes, and thank goodness for it.
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