HONESTLY, who didn’t love Wendy Craig, the gamine actor who captured the nation’s hearts? Yes, we could all see Craig as an obvious Peter Pan, but wasn’t it wonderful to discover she could fly up to the ratings heavens in adultery-lite sitcom Butterflies?
All The Laughs and More (Channel 5, Sunday, 9pm) is an overdue retrospective on Craig, an actor who stormed British sitcom – in a quiet, nice twin-setted sort of way while doing all the heavy lifting in 1970s series such as Not in Front of The Children and the likes of And Mother Makes Five.
Yet, while Craig convinced in a clutch of roles playing vulnerable women, she was made from tougher stuff. Born in County Durham in 1934, Anne Gwendolyn Craig first set her sights on an acting career at the age of three, after seeing a pantomime in Newcastle.
She powered her way through drama school in the early 1950s and a career in fragile women followed, landing roles in British films such as The Servant and The Nanny, alongside legends such as Dirk Bogarde, Bette Davis and Oliver Reed.
But situation comedy gave Craig the chance to prove she could also create laughs. And by 1978 when she landed Butterflies, playing Ria Parkinson, the nation fell in love with the woman desperate to find love in her life.
And casting directors didn’t forget the older Wendy Craig. In 2017, she was cast in the dark role of a mother who had allowed her husband to abuse their children.
It’s always interesting to see actors cast against type and this is certainly the case with the much heralded The English (BBC2, Thursday at 9pm). Emily Blunt has been convincing in a range of roles, from The Devil Wears Prada to Girl on A Train and as the world’s favourite fictional nanny, Mary Poppins.
Now, she is setting out to convince as a television star, although there’s a sense the risk is lightened given that The English is written and directed by award-winning Hugo Blick (The Shadow Line and Black Earth Rising).
It’s set in 1890 in mid-America. Blunt plays fish-out-of-water aristocratic Englishwoman Lady Cornelia Locke, all best dress and bonnet, who we learn has arrived in Wyoming to set her sights on revenge. Before we know it, Lady Cornelia’s petticoat is hiding a six-gun and she sets off to hunt down the man she believes to be responsible for the death of her son.
She can’t survive in the mid-west alone, however. And TV drama needs a gender balance. Step forward a man who can guide her – in both senses of the word – a Pawnee scout named Eli (Chaske Spencer).
The terrific cast includes Ciaran Hinds and Toby Jones, and this series offers television to plan a night in around. Don’t expect your standard “giddy-up there” Gary Cooper-like western. This is genre revisionism at its best. This English rose, we learn, is beset with blood-letting thorns.
Petula Clark has long been regarded as an English rose with “a voice as sweet as chapel bells”, which wasn’t true because it’s far more emotive than that. Now, the career of the fabulous 90-year-old is being celebrated in Petula Clark at the BBC (BBC4, 9pm, Friday), rewinding on the child star of 1942 who went on to create hits such as Downtown and Don’t Sleep in The Subway, as well as developing a film and theatre career.
Longevity has to be recognised also in Two Doors Down (Wednesday, BBC2, 10pm). Many TV sitcoms lose their edge by series three. Writers’ ideas run dry as a bankrupt pub. But who would have thought TDD would run to Series Six? The plot is essentially the same each week: put-upon couple Beth and Eric are eaten out of house and home by their rhino-skinned, merciless neighbours.
Yet, writers Simon Carlyle and Gregor Sharp continually tweak the format and layer the ident mark of each character to bring a wonderful edge. And nuance is captured perfectly by direction tighter than Cathy’s leggings. This series could, hopefully, break sitcom records.
Let’s hope that’s not the situation with I’m A Celebrity . . . (ITV, Sunday, 9pm).With any luck viewers will abandon this show in their droves given the decision to recruit a serving MP in the form of former Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
Forget ideas of tuning in to see him eat kangaroo reproductive organs or wriggly things. The real creepy crawlies are the ITV controllers who sanctioned the appearance of a self-aggrandising man escaping from Covid retribution in the form of a parliamentary enquiry – thereby throwing insult at those who suffered tragic loss during the pandemic.
Let’s hope for a cacophony of jungle-sized complaints against the producers. Indeed, as for the show itself, it’s time to cancel it.
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