‘Outrageous' review: You'd learn more about ghastly Mitford sisters from Wikipedia than this superficial drama
If the miniseries Outrageous (U&Drama, Thursday, June 19, 9pm), about the exploits of the Mitford sisters, had been made 20 years ago, it would probably have looked fresh, innovative, daring and, well, outrageous.
The brisk pace. The colourful, screen-filling graphics introducing the characters. The freeze frames. The wry, knowing voiceover. All of these things, in a series set mostly in the 1930s might have marked it out as bracingly original: the fact-based historical drama playfully reimagined using very modern methods.
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Irish Times
4 days ago
- Irish Times
Have you heard the one about the scrapped Edinburgh joke award?
The award for 'best joke' at the Edinburgh fringe is dead and permission to laugh at its funeral is granted. No arrests will be made, no fines issued. The annual list of allegedly the funniest gags to be heard across hundreds of shows staged at the month-long festival has been sent to the comedy scrapheap, with the organiser/culprit, UKTV-owned channel U&Dave, releasing a straight-man statement citing an 'opportunity to reflect' on how it supports grassroots comedy talent. To be fair, U&Dave – known as Dave before UKTV slapped a 'U&' on its channels to make them sound like a family of deodorants – does do its bit to spotlight comedy talent, which used to be something bigger broadcasters took more of an interest in before their nerves failed. What UKTV didn't say was that its pun-heavy rundown of handpicked one-liners had the risible effect of reducing hours of intelligent, precision-timed, carefully honed comedy sets into a creaking, groaning slab of rage bait. READ MORE Take, for example, last year's winning effort by English comedian Mark Simmons: 'I was going to sail around the globe in the world's smallest ship but I bottled it.' Most wordplay is reverse-engineered, but it's not great when the steel beams of a joke are so fully exposed, is it? Still, the British public voted this the best joke of the fringe from a selection offered to them by a panel of critics and comedians doubling as U&Dave collaborators. Voters might have been less wrong if they had instead plumped for Arthur Smith's third-placed absurdity, 'I sailed through my driving test. That's why I failed it.' But I'm falling into the trap now. I'm engaging. It never mattered what came out top. As long as it struggled to bear the weight of the 'funniest joke' accolade, it did its job as cheap filler content that reliably provoked stiff breakfast-host laughter or, more usually, a sceptical sigh. As it goes, I have a high appreciation of the shameless pun, though almost-puns are tough to swallow. This week I learned that former Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey has a policy on these. When the singer turned environmental campaigner was spotted struggling with his earpiece on BBC Breakfast, a viewer, referencing lyrics to solo hit A Good Heart, commented that 'a good earpiece [these days] is hard to find'. Sharkey cheerily outlined his normal penance for 'the bad-pun lobby', proposing a £20 donation to his chosen charity. [ From the archive: 37 mostly appalling jokes to make you groan – and maybe even grin Opens in new window ] This was all in good spirit, and didn't muddy Sharkey's advocacy on UK water reform. The problem with the Joke of the Fringe wheeze, by contrast, is that it wound up misrepresenting the essence of the festival. It wasn't U&Dave's fault, but the list's reproducible nature meant it attracted more attention than the genuinely prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Award and, in the process, reaffirmed the views of people predisposed to believe that stand-up comedy is a bit rubbish, a touch childish; the product of a Vitamin D-deprived cohort yet to get a real job. Never mind that at festivals such as the fringe, you will discover some of the cleverest, most magnetic people delivering 50-minute masterclasses in stitch-inducing storytelling, their styles ranging from the surreal to the polemical, their words as judiciously selected as poets'. Other gag lists will now fill the void. But this media fodder, rather than promoting the craft of joke writing, risks contributing to the minimisation of stand-up and reinforcing the dismissal of comedy as something other than art. It all becomes part of the same attitude that saw comedians here in the Republic barred from applying for the Government's Basic Income for the Arts pilot scheme. They're not artists, you see. Well, the State says so. Humour is subjective, as proved last week by reactions to the Coldplay kiss-cam couple. Some people thought the pile-on a clear nadir for surveillance society and media tabloidisation, with unfunny pitchfork-culture vibes thrown in. Others found it hilarious, for some reason. I didn't laugh, obviously, but reading a recent edition of satirical magazine Private Eye, I was struck by the acuteness of a cartoon capturing Westminster's hypocrisies and moral failure on Israel and Gaza. This was in light of the UK government's move to proscribe the organisation Palestine Action . 'Unacceptable' Palestine action, it read, was to spray military planes with paint, while 'acceptable' Palestine action was to shoot Palestinians queuing for food. A retired teacher called Jon Farley was also taken with it, so much so that he stuck a blown-up printout of it on a placard and brought it to a silent demo in Leeds. Alas, this got him arrested , as police officers didn't recognise it as political satire. Maybe they were more pun fans. Or maybe some truths, pinpointed by satirists, are just too dark to countenance. Either way, arresting people for 'carrying a joke', as editor Ian Hislop put it, suggests a U&Dave-style 'opportunity to reflect' is urgently required.
Irish Times
5 days ago
- Irish Times
Dying review: Dark family saga shows living, like dying, is a messy business
Dying Director : Matthias Glasner Cert : 16 Genre : Drama Starring : Lars Eidinger, Corinna Harfouch, Lilith Stangenberg, Ronald Zehrfeld, Robert Gwisdek, Anna Bederke, Hans-Uwe Bauer, Saskia Rosendahl Running Time : 3 hrs 3 mins Matthias Glasner's Dying (or Sterben in the original German) is a film composed like its central musical motif: sprawling, discordant, haunted by mortality and strangely reminiscent of other works. Spanning three hours and five loosely tethered chapters, this dark family saga plays like a collage of recent festival favourites; early, unvarnished scenes of elder care nod towards Vortex and Amour ; a hectic middle section concerning a conductor recalls Todd Field's similarly themed Tár ; a late narrative swerve into assisted suicide intersects with Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door . Somehow, the disparate pieces and maximalist clutter find a rhythm. Glasner's sweeping intergenerational study lays bare the fractures within a German family. Lissy (Corinna Harfouch), an incontinent matriarch dying of cancer; her husband Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer), vanishing into dementia; their son Tom (Lars Eidinger), an enigmatic conductor rehearsing a choral piece titled – get it? – Dying; and Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg), their estranged, self-loathing daughter, who works as a dental assistant in the belief that it's a job everybody hates. She sings beautifully, but only when drunk. Her desperate affair with a married colleague marks her out from a clan composed of emotionally distant adults. Tom's marked detachment is signalled by his bizarre domestic arrangements and the dispassionate abandonment of his depressed composer friend. His blank self-concern veers toward blackest comedy: imagine an episode of Peep Show directed by Michael Haneke. READ MORE There's plenty to admire in the performances – Harfouch, Eidinger, and Stangenberg all deliver searing, bravura turns. The film's obsession with finality makes room for bodily fluids of all varieties. Even the film's hook-up scene – Ellen pulling a lover's tooth before kissing his mouth – is bloody. Living, like dying, is a messy business. The script's wandering and overlapping arcs can feel uneven and tricksy, yet there's something utterly compelling in how Glasner stages decay not just as a biological inevitability, but a doomy familial legacy.
Irish Times
6 days ago
- Irish Times
Review: Mix Tape is bit of a mixed bag while Bookish combines cosiness, craft and class
This week saw the conclusion of Mix Tape ( BBC 2), a drama that follows its protagonists Dan and Alison across two timelines. One covers the beginnings of their teen romance, amid the grim glamour of late-1980s Sheffield . The other timeline, many years later, finds them living entirely separate lives in near middle-age. Teenage Dan and Alison are fresh-faced sweethearts, schoolmates who bond over music and angst, exchanging devastatingly cool mix tapes featuring a roll call of new wave bangers. Older Dan and Alison have grown into writers – he is a music journalist, she is a novelist - separated by 10,000 miles, but united by a sense of ennui and a sudden urge to reminisce about their time together. Will they reunite and attempt to rekindle that old flame? Well, yes, but the show is predicated on us pretending we don't know this from the outset, so let's keep that mystery alive. While watching the show's first two episodes , broadcast last week, I took the latter timeline to be 'the present', but that left me in a bit of a muddle. The decor, clothing and phones seemed broadly contemporary, but the burden of maths forced me to reckon with the fact that this 'nowadays' section must be set about 10 years ago, or else our heroes are looking extremely sprightly for 55-year-olds. I tried to confirm this by freeze-framing a shot of Facebook used in the show, which does suggest it takes place in 2015/16. (If this is true, then I guess my first clue should have been that every adult in this programme is still using Facebook). READ MORE This is, after all, a friend-request romance, that genre of drama in which events are set into motion by social media notifications. In this case, it is when Older Dan, still living in Sheffield, is alerted to Alison's massive new book deal. We learn he has not heard of her for many years, because she lives in a different TV show that's set in Australia. There, she drinks balcony wines with her handsome doctor husband in their showroom apartment, where they fret over the behaviour of their daughter, whose teenage rebelliousness chimes somewhat with Alison's own. In the years since she stopped exchanging mix tapes with Dan, she has also become fully Australian, a detail that may seem a little convenient given the actor in question is Australian herself. Speaking as someone who moved to Dublin for college and thereafter developed a traitorous dollop of Leinster atop my Derry twang, I cannot possibly comment. A lot of this show reminded me of my own life at 18. Not merely because I made desperately try-hard mix CDs for girls I fancied, but because I did so on the mean streets of Ireland's capital, where all of the mix-tape era Sheffield scenes were filmed. I don't want to mire this article in tedious pedantry about a TV show's shooting locations, not least since much was made of it when the show debuted last week, but it is unavoidably comic to witness establishing shots of Yorkshire's urban exteriors cut directly to the pristine streets of Ranelagh or Rathmines. Things entered an even more discombobulating realm in this week's episodes when we discover that Young Alison subsequently moved to actual Dublin to work in a pub in Temple Bar. Having journeyed there to find her, Young Dan spots her in a tryst with another man and takes an emotional moment on the Ha'penny Bridge. At that point, action cuts abruptly to his older self back in Sheffield, a juxtaposition which may have carried more declarative oomph were it not very clearly filmed 20 minutes' walk from said bridge, at the Dean Hotel on Harcourt Street. [ The Narrow Road to the Deep North review: Unflinchingly savage war tale starring Ciarán Hinds is a gruelling watch Opens in new window ] All such quibbles aside, it's quite watchable in an emotional, tear-jerky way, even if its plodding pace didn't raise my heartbeat too often. The soundtrack is certainly great, but the show chooses to presume as fact, rather than demonstrate how or why, the music they fell in love with was earth-shatteringly, groundbreakingly important. The paper-thin characterisations of our heroes' respective partners also seem explicitly geared toward giving us, the audience, license to let said spouses be discarded like decrepit band merch. 'You never forget the boy who makes you your first mix tape,' Alison tells her daughter in a car ride, which is a neat summation of the show's themes of love and art transcending time and distance. It does, however, seem like resolutely useless advice to give a 16-year-old girl, since the curation of mix tapes should be as relatable to a teenager as talk of whale oil lamps or penny farthing maintenance. Perhaps kids were still doing this in 2015. It's all so long ago, I can't quite remember. Trekking further into olden times, we find period murder mystery Bookish (U&Alibi) – or, rather, I found it, but you may still need directions. That's because Mark Gatiss (co-creator of the BBC's Benedict Cumberbatch-minting blockbuster, Sherlock) has returned to crime with this caperish series for U&Alibi, a channel with such an impressively prolix history of rebrands, I'll offer a brief summary for the uninformed. Originally launched as UK Arena in 1997, it was then renamed UK Drama, then UKTV Drama, then Alibi and, as of last November, the gloriously inscrutable 'U&Alibi'. Since the fourth of those five brandings, the channel has focused solely on crime, mostly British-made listings-fillers culled from the yellowing pages of decades-old copies of the Radio Times. Bookish, created, co-written and starring Gatiss, is one of the few full originals they've produced, and its premise seems curiously familiar; in period London, eccentric bookseller Gabriel Book – it's that kind of show – supplements his day job by solving murders alongside his wife, Trottie. He bears a letter from Churchill that grants him license to step into crime scenes and intrude on interrogations, in the manner of some sort of London-based amateur genius sleuth who works with the constabulary – a scenario I'm sure has some form of literary precedent I can't quite put my finger on. The action takes place in 1946, rather than the Victorian era, although you may never quite banish the whiff of Baker Street from your nostrils while watching. [ What does the future hold for popular BBC show Masterchef? Opens in new window ] Gatiss is capable as ever in the lead, waspish and arch without quite tipping over into panto territory, and thankfully given more interiority to work with as the show goes on. The script is sharp and Bookish doles out its soft-scoop mysteries with a restraint that's admirable, if occasionally frustrating. Fans of Gatiss's work with League of Gentlemen or his Ghost Stories For Christmas may sometimes wish, as I did, for something a little nastier than the cosier-than-thou fare on offer here. This is, for the most part, glacially gentle programming, albeit suffused with just enough quirk, charm and subliminal darkness, to raise it above the duvet-lined trenches of, say, Death in Paradise, or – God forbid – the treacly, incident-averse morass of Heartbeat. For all its tropey trappings, Bookish is more cleverly written, and a good deal more handsomely mounted, than you might expect from a channel that sounds like a wifi password. U&Alibi may have just cracked the riddle of combining cosiness, craft and class. Turns out the answer was hiring Mark Gatiss, but you needn't be Sherlock Holmes to work that one out.
