TV preview, Murder on the Blackpool Express (Gold, Saturday 9.30pm): TV's top tier of talent on a whodunnit-style trip
Plus: Motherland (BBC2, Tuesday 10pm), Love, Lies and Records (BBC1, Thursday 9pm), Detectorists (BBC4, Wednesday 10pm), Children in Need (BBC1, Friday 7.30pm), The Andrew Marr Show (BBC1, Sunday 9am), Remembrance Sunday: The Cenotaph (BBC1, Sunday 10.20pm), Peaky Blinders (BBC2, Wednesday 9pm), Howard's End (BBC1, Sunday 9pm), The Boy with the Top Knot (BBC2, Monday 9pm), The Secret Life of the Zoo (Channel 4, Tuesday 8pm), Blue Planet II (BBC1, Sunday 8pm)
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Your support makes all the difference.I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more impressive cast lined up for a TV comedy than the one Gold has assembled for its special one-off original commission Murder on the Blackpool Express. So I ought to namecheck them, oughtn’t I?
There’s Johnny Vegas, Sian Gibson (best known for Peter Kay’s Car Share), Nigel Havers, Una Stubbs, Griff Rhys Jones, Nina Wadia, Sheila Reid, Kevin Eldon, Mark Heap, Kimberley Nixon, Katy Cavanagh, Matthew Cottle, Susie Blake and Javone Prince. There you have them: some of the best comedic talent from the past half a century or so – and a lot for the scriptwriters and directors to live up to.
Where do you go with that lot? Well, Blackpool, obviously, on a “literary coach tour” with Vegas driving and Gibson as the guide, but also a journey of detective investigation to discover exactly which of the assembled odd bods did for pensioner Marjorie, murdered by means of a dodgy cob with coronation chicken filling. There’s one clue for you. Remember: Means, Motive, Opportunity. Enjoy.
It’s not the only comedy highlight of the week, though it is one from an unusual source, Gold usually contenting itself with reruns of Only Fools and Horses, As Time Goes By and Yes, Prime Minister. You should enjoy Motherland, for example, which features the brilliant Diane Morgan (though not here in her usual faux naive alter ego Philomena Cunk), Anna Maxwell Martin and Lucy Punch in a comedy of middle-class manners and mores – think of it as Mumsnet with a more pronounced sense of self-irony. Punch plays the character and anti-hero Amanda, an intensely annoying alpha mum who is a mash-up of Nigella Lawson, Joanna Lumley and Rachel Johnson (by which I mean the worst bits of all of them). Not the funniest thing on the telly, but pretty good satire, and worth catching.
I also like the look of Love, Lies and Records, again assembling some established and trusted quantities – in this case Ashley Jensen (Extras, Ugly Betty) and Rebecca Front (just about everything from The Day Today to the The Thick of It), with Kay Mellor doing the writing. That one’s about a local authority registrar, which has more potential than might at first appear.
Plus there’s another episode of the superb Detectorists (Mackenzie Crook, Toby Jones) and, no doubt, a welter of self-promoting, self-conscious and depressingly unfunny sketches coming up on Children In Need, or “Children in Greed” as we cynical, nasty subversive types used to call it at the BBC. Proof that some terrible crimes against entertainment are committed in the name of charity.
Apart from the reliably excellent Andrew Marr Show, Sunday mornings don’t usually turn up many must-watches, but of course this year the coverage of Remembrance Sunday will be marked for the first time by the absence of the Queen and Prince Philip from the wreath laying ceremonies, and they will instead watching from a balcony above the ceremony. Unchanged in almost a century the rituals of remberance – the marching, the hymns, the simple prayers and the Elgar anthems – have the same emotional power they possessed in 1919, on the first anniversary of the armistice that ended the Great War.
For drama, the BBC have it mostly to themselves for now. Peaky Blinders is back, single-handedly laying waste to the notion of a kinder, gentler sepia-tinged Britain that existed before the Second World War. Cillian Murphy, Paul Anderson and Helen McCrory star again. The corporation is also responsible, maybe less laudably, for a “raunchy” remake of their adaptation of EM Forster’s Howard’s End. Matthew Macfadyen and Hayley Atwell do their best with Henry Wilcox and Margaret Schlegel respectively. Bang up to date is a tale of a Sikh man facing prejudice from his own family in his romance with a white girl. The Boy with the Top Knot is a reminder, were it needed, that racist attitudes are not confined to any single class or community.
Last, I can suggest The Secret Life of the Zoo, which this week features two of my favourite creatures – a cockroach named Carl (that ought to be the title of a folk song) and a Black Rhino named Kitani (ditto). Much overshadowed by the blockbusting Blue Planet II, it also has its charms.
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