Who could fail to like Judi Dench? It’s a basic test of character, along with finding puppies adorable and Nigel Farage loathsome.
Bring Dame J together with one of the nice blokes off The Repair Shop and it was a pretty safe bet no-one was going to lose their job for commissioning Dame Judi and Jay: the Odd Couple (Channel 4, Sunday).
The two met when she brought her late husband’s pocket watch to be repaired, and she starred in a Comic Relief sketch about the show with French & Saunders. Dame J said she and Jay had become “the best of friends” though they didn’t know that much about each other.
They could have just wandered into the nearest Starbucks and Googled each other, but that would not have filled an hour of telly. Instead, they took each other to the places that meant a lot to them. The first stop for her was the Old Vic, where she began her career at 22 playing Ophelia. For Blades it was a youth club in Hackney, without which, he reckoned, he would have been in prison or dead.
Dame Judi has to be one of the most interviewed women in the country, and it wasn’t that long ago that Blades made a documentary about learning to read at 51. So there were no Who Do You Think You Are-style surprises here, but that wasn’t the point of the film. Instead, it explored what makes a friendship (a shared sense of humour in their case), and what it means to have a good life.
“I’d like to go back and have the lot of it all over again,” said Dame J when she visited a former family home, one of several occasions when she was overcome with emotion.
At points the film veered close to being saccharine, but on the whole it stayed on the right side of the line. And it did, in the end, contain a few surprises, one involving a goldfish and Dame J’s mouth-to-mouth resuscitation skills.
Another week, another sitcom where they forgot to add the com part. That wasn’t my main beef with We Might Regret This (BBC2, Monday), though. Instead it seemed just too cool for school, much like the first series of Fleabag.
Get this set-up. Freya (Kyla Harris, who also writes) is a Canadian artist who is disabled and needs 24-hour care. She has just moved in with her older lover, who is hoping to divorce his wife (Sally Phillips) and marry Freya. Meanwhile, Freya’s spiky pal Jo has turned up out of the blue.
No location was mentioned as far as I recall, but the programme gave off a strong, It’s Grim Up North London vibe. They were a chilly lot, hard to get a handle on and not that easy to like.
The tell-it-like-it-is attitude to disability made a refreshing change. In one scene Freya had to have her catheter changed in a lane because there was no accessible loo in the offices she had just visited. Apart from that it was thin stuff that struggled to fill the half hour. Harris can do laughs - I liked the modelling scouts both called Olivia - and hopefully there will be more to come. I warmed to Fleabag in the end; maybe this will be the same.
Michael Mosley: Wonders of the Human Body (Channel 5, Thursday) was always going to be a tough watch. While the medic and presenter was of course his usual cheery, articulate, engaging self, his death still seems so recent. How soon is too soon in such instances? Who knows, but the scene where Mosley was having his heart tested, and expressing his hope of living longer than his dad, who died “just 74” from heart failure, was almost unbearably sad.
Mosley was such an obviously decent sort it was always a pleasure to spend time in his company, whether he was on the radio or television. In complete contrast we had the subject of The Kingdom: The World’s Most Powerful Prince (BBC2, Monday).
It is quite an achievement to make a two-hour portrait of someone and struggle to relay one redeeming feature, but in the case of Mohammed bin Salman it did not seem to be a stretch.
Narrated by Morvern Christie, the film promised “one of the most extraordinary stories of our times” and largely kept its side of the bargain. There was too much time spent at the beginning exploring the distant past and the ins and outs of Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy. With “MBS”, as he is known, more recent history, and the future, are what matters.
The first episode had a lot of good “gets” as talking heads, including exiles who had crossed the regime, as well as the more traditional ex-ambassadors and exiles. Plus it had a scoop about Yemen. It’s the next episode, covering the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, that will be the real test. Cue the grainy CCTV of a man entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul …
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