Into the Storm (BBC Two)
The Family (Channel 4)
Comedy Showcase (Channel 4)
Although latterly usurped by Churchill the Insurance Dog, for nearly six
decades Winston Churchill was this country’s No 1 Churchill. And little
wonder — he is, as they say in Hollywood, a “triple threat”: he’s got a big
story arc (won a world war), some cracking catchphrases (“It is not even the
beginning of the end”, etc) and he’s really easy to do impressions of, too.
In many ways, he’s the Bruce-Willis-in-Die Hard (“Yippie-ki-yay
on the beaches, motherf***er!”) of politics.
And when you factor in that, on top of all this, Churchill spent most of the
Second World War two sheets to the wind on Nebuchadnezzar after
Nebuchadnezzar of Pol Roger, then you can see why this is the third biopic,
so far, on the man. He’s got star power. The first Churchill film was in
1974 — The Gathering Storm, starring Richard Burton. The 2002
HBO/BBC remake, which had Albert Finney squaring up as Winnie, covered the
years 1919-40, essentially serving as a kind of World War II: The Prequel.
When it bagged an Emmy, it inevitably triggered this sequel, Into the Storm,
which goes on to knock off 1940-45 in 90 minutes flat. Presumably, if this,
too, wins an Emmy, next year we can expect World War Two III: The Search for
Curly’s Gold.
This time, we’ve got Brendan Gleeson (Golden Globe-nominee for In
Bruges) as Winston, with lovely, classy old Janet McTeer squaring up
opposite him as Clemmie. We get the 101 on this Churchill within five
minutes — he wakes up in 10 Downing Street, puts on his unfortunately
monogrammed slippers (“WC”), and then has a testy exchange with a
schedule-wielding apparatchik in a hallway: “I need at least one hour’s
uninterrupted sleep, and a bath, or I can’t function,” Churchill barks,
cancelling all meetings chalked in between 3pm and 5pm.
The Third Reich, it is made clear, can annex the Rhineland all it likes, but
it is not going to annex Winnie from the Land of Nod.
The problem that Into the Storm has (as, to be fair, in a much more
visceral way, did 1.7 billion people between 1939 and 1945) is that the
Second World War, we kind of ... know it. Like, really, really well. To the
ruination of all possible dramatic revelation. For instance, when all
350,000 soldiers of the British Army are trapped in France by the advancing
Nazis, advisers tell Churchill that he can probably get 50,000 evacuated,
tops. It’s looking bad. Spirit-wise, one could just ... give in. Unless one
had a ... special kind of spirit.
“The Admiralty should assemble as many small vessels as they possibly can!”
Churchill orders, freestyling radical tactics on the hoof. “Tug boats,
yachts, fishing crafts, barges, pleasure boats — everything must be called
into service.” In the slight pause that follows, the words, “It’s going to
be Dunkirk!” hang in the air, unbidden.
Similarly, when Churchill modishly talks about the innovation of “unrestricted
air attacks, sapping morale”, the mind automatically adds “just like the
Blitz!”
This problem of over-familiarity reaches its awkward apogee in Churchill
himself. He just had a lot of ... hits. He’s got a lot of iconic
catchphrases to rattle through in 90 minutes — and it often proved hard to
cold-launch them in the middle of a script that was already having to deal
with an entire world at war, and Churchill’s faltering marriage.
One of Churchill’s smash-hit No 1 hits was cued in after he visited young
pilots at an airfield. Driving home deep in thought, he carelessly riffed,
“Never has so much been owed to so many by so few” — and then did a
borderline Fonz-face at his secretary. “I might use that later!” he said.
“Make a note of it!”
We then cut to President Roosevelt, some weeks later, in the White House. It
turns out that Churchill did use that phrase, after all, in a big, famous
speech — and now Roosevelt is reading it in The Washington Post!
“Never have so many owed so much to so few,” Roosevelt sighed, waving the
paper at a nodding general. “Not bad, eh? Not bad.”
He might just as well have added, “You know what — I’m thinking of entering
World War II in a bit. That Churchill is well impressive”, for all the
subtlety on display.
By the time of “We shall fight on the beaches”, Into The Storm
had sadly turned into a great big Jive Bunny/Churchill catchphrase megamix
in your head. As Churchill barked, “We shall fight in the fields and in the
streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender!” you could
hear the ghostly voice of Churchill the Insurance Dog going, “Yes yes yes
yes yes yes yes!” towards the conclusion.
The Family returns — the original fly-on-the-wall documentary series
from 1974, newly revived, and now on its third family: the Grewals, from
Windsor.
Never the most arduous of viewing terrains, even in its worst moments, this
new series opened on an effortlessly easy access point: the 57-year-old
patriarch Arvinder on his exercise bike — bellowing up the stairs, to his
sleeping wife, to bring him a cup of tea.
“Cup of tea!” he kept shouting, as his legs whizzed round and
round. “Cup of tea!”
His voiceover explained, “She’s a very good wife — she does whatever I say”,
over footage of him repeatedly shouting, “Cup of tea! Cup of tea!
Cup of tea!”, like Father Jack from Father Ted on an
unexpected sober streak.
There’s nothing quite like a gigantic whack of the patriarchy to engage the
viewer from minute one, and The Family had plenty more pique-inducing
moments where that came from — most notably right at the end, when Arvinder
sniped, “What have you done today?” at his wife, only for her to reply, with
quiet factuality, “Everything”, then fall asleep on the sofa.
Morally, these fly-on-the-wall docs are an amazing paradox. The viewer
experiences all the joy of filthy, no-holds-barred prurience — but while
also knowing that the subjects wanted us to watch them, all along. It’s
obviously wrong — but yet somehow, thanks to an unlikely technicality, also
OK. Amazing. You’re left feeling much how Ian Krankie must have, the first
time he had that first, really in-depth, slightly drunken conversation with
Jeanette. But while the initial hit was of simple, MSG-like pleasure
nosiness, this series of The Family has some seriously meaty bits of
narrative tucked away in its sexy sauce. Arvinder and Sarbjit’s eldest son,
Sunny, lives with them, along with his wife, Shay — a woman of borderline Dynasty-level
glamour, who has been disowned by her family for marrying the lower-caste
Sunny.
Arvinder recalled how the entire Grewal family went over to Shay’s, and tried
to reconcile her with her mother. Alas, her mother wasn’t having any of it.
“I said, ‘I came to give your daughter back to you — but you didn’t take her.
So now she’s mine’,” Arvinder said, in one of those rare moments when the
patriarchy really comes through for the ladies. “I will never leave her.
She’s with us now.”
Shay started crying at the memory.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” Sarbjit clucked, hauling herself off the sofa and
heading towards the kitchen. “Let’s have something to eat.”
Finally, Channel 4’s Comedy Showcase returns — essentially The
X Factor for sit-coms. Every week there’s a new pilot, with the most
popular being commissioned for a whole series — before, presumably, having a
nervous breakdown and being admitted to the Priory.
First up for the phone vote was Campus — the new project from the Green
Wing team: essentially Green Wing but set in a red-brick
university, not a hospital. The show is already so well-formed that finding
it having to audition for a series seems bizarre — like Patti Smith turning
up to an X Factor audition in Cardiff, and doing Piss Factory
to a gob-smacked Simon Cowell.
The writer/director/producer Victoria Pile has two trademark techniques:
creating worlds where a horrible, dark surreality keeps oozing through the
cracks; and characters who take childlike gestures to extremes — walking
past a shelf and pushing all the books off with a triumphal air, stealing
lipstick from a handbag and putting it on during a conversation, shouting “Shut!”
at a door that’s already shutting.
Although, like Green Wing, Campus works as an ensemble of
freaks, perhaps the most intriguing mutant is Vice Chancellor Jonty de Wolfe
(Andy Nyman). Initially, he looks like the weakest character — a small,
bumptious David Brent clone who keeps attempting Jamaican patois to make a
point. But by the end of the show he has turned into a more sinister version
of the shopkeeper in Mr Benn — wandering around the library in a
floor-length taffeta ballgown, urging depressed students to commit suicide
and, on one occasion, simply disappearing in the middle of a monologue, as
if it were a Las Vegas floor-show, leaving his English lecturer Matthew Beer
(Joseph Millson) holding a madly clattering clockwork monkey, and his jaw.
The 2007 Comedy Showcase resulted in series commissions for The
Kevin Bishop Show, Plus One and Free Agents, from which The
Kevin Bishop Show has made it to a second series — making it very much
the Leona Lewis of the enterprise. But Campus is far superior stuff
to Kevin Bishop. It makes Kevin Bishop look like ... David Sneddon. Campus
— it’s a yes from me. I’m putting you through to Boot Camp.
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