The Times 20180114 Culture.pdf

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January 14, 2018
POP
THE HOT GIG DOWN A
FREEZING COAL MINE
THEATRE
TOBY JONES’S GUIDE
TO PLAYING PINTER
TELEVISION
CAMILLA LONG, OUR NEW CRITIC,
ON CELEBRITY BIG BROTHER
HEADLINE
HEAD IN
IN HERE
TO
SUBLINE WORDS
HERE
SUBLINE WORDS
COME IN THIS SPACE
TO COME IN THIS
HERE WORDS TO COME
WHAT’S
SPACE HERECOME
IN HERE
WORDS TO
IN HERE
UP, DOC?
DOCTOR FOSTER TOOK
SURANNE JONES TO
NEW HEIGHTS: NEXT,
A TRAGIC MOTHER
CONTENTS
14.01.2018
ARTS
4
6
Cover story
Is Suranne Jones anything
like vengeful wife Doctor
Gemma Foster? Not a bit,
says Louis Wise
BOOKS
8
Theatre
Pinter’s pauses are not what
they seem, writes Toby Jones,
star of a new Birthday Party
in the West End
29
SKY UK
Lead review
The postliterate president:
Andrew Sullivan on Michael
Wolff’s devastating exposé
of the Trump White House
SHAWN THEW/GETTY IMAGES
Television
Camilla Long takes over the
remote as our new critic. She
watches Celebrity Big Brother
— and thanks the Lord she
didn’t agree to go on it too
‘For this moment
in American
decadence,
Trump is the
perfect president’
Books, page 29
32
The Sunday Times
Bestsellers
DIGITAL EXTRAS
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our
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weekly digest of literary news,
reviews and opinion, there’s
the
Books Bulletin.
Both can
be found at thesundaytimes.
co.uk/bulletins
10
12
New faces
We round up this year’s hot
prospects on stage and screen
Film
It’s awards season, and the
roles are getting meatier: Tom
Shone salutes Gary Oldman
and Frances McDormand
Tom Holland says
the new drama
series Britannia is
history — but not
as we know it
Television, page 14
18
30
36
Critical list
Our pick of the arts this week
History
Nefertiti was a woman to fear,
according to this new study
22
On record
The latest essential releases
17
TV & RADIO
Memoir
‘Anxious, guilt-ridden,
fragile and inconsolable’:
the pianist James Rhodes
looks within
Interview
Melvyn Bragg looks back
at 40 years of presenting
The South Bank Show
41
39
Instagram
Follow us for the best visuals
from the world of the arts —
@sundaytimesculture
Cover
Photograph of
Suranne Jones by David Brook.
Montage by Mike Cathro
TV & Radio
The best guide to the week’s
programmes
Fiction
Journey to the stony heart
of Australia in Peter Carey’s
engaging new novel
TELEVISION
Women on the verge of
The Big Brother house is no place for
feminist gimmicks, says the new Sunday
Times television critic,
Camilla Long
Just before Christmas, I received an
email. Would I be interested in taking
part in
Celebrity Big Brother
’s “year
of the woman”? The show would
“honour” 100 years of women getting
the vote. There would be an
opportunity to “share my story” amid
“strong, empowered women”. It
would be a women-only household
— for a few days at least, before male
contestants arrived — and there
would be serious discussions. Each
woman would have “a career, views
or experience relevant to the theme”.
Setting aside my wholehearted
disbelief that Big Brother, a hollow
pagan sex festival powered by
stupidity and dirty underwear, could
ever “honour” anything, I couldn’t
help but wonder if a feminist version
wasn’t a terrible mistake: yet another
doomed attempt by Channel 5 to tap
into the vast drunk audience of other
lady-faves such as The Handmaid’s
Tale and Doctor Foster. (Another show
I was sad to turn down included
dressing up as a man — complete, I’m
assuming, with prosthetic penis.)
But it’s one thing Germaine Greer
waddling around screaming at pillow
slips (she left after five days in 2005),
and another finding eight more of her.
Cast too many Waitrose matrons and
all you’ve got is an interminable
episode of Woman’s Hour.
Obviously
I
don’t mind that, but
imagine being a diehard fan
discovering it’s day four and absolutely
no one has wet themselves yet. Brrr,
it’s definitely weird switching it on for
the first time since Sally Bercow’s
knickers imploded in 2011, though. I’d
forgotten the borstal bed linen and
unrelenting Astroturf. I’d blocked out
the theme tune — chlamydia made
music. There’s a promising moment at
the start when we are told to brace
ourselves for “sexual themes”. If only.
I don’t even understand who
the people are any more. There’s
an impenetrable selection
of reality-TV lifers like the bilious
pottery frog Ann Widdecombe
(Strictly, Celebrity Fit Club,
Celebrity Antiques Road
Trip) and, later, when the
men rush in, someone
called Jonny from Love
Island, a nut-brown
professional love rat who
looks like Nigel Farage grafted
onto the lifeless body of Made in
Chelsea’s Spencer.
The contestants are now so
smoothly attuned to life under
constant watch that having 80 cameras
trained up every crevice no longer
seems intimidating. In fact, it’s a nice
holiday from all the revenge porn,
extreme sexting and suicide videos
outside the house. Most of the
contestants emptily game the whole
thing, strategically picking fights and
cracking jokes designed to elicit
maximum sympathy. But the truth is
that the more streamlined everything
gets — the less showy, the less
spontaneously, cretinously appalling
— the less interesting it becomes. And
it wasn’t very interesting to start with.
It’s quickly obvious that feminism is
a fatal error: it’s far too tasteful, too
middle-class and clever. Under the
harsh glare of the cameras, even the
most reasonable and intelligent
women — on this edition, there are
plenty, including Corrie’s Amanda
Barrie and Khloé Kardashian’s
whip-smart best friend Malika Haqq
— come across as earnest and dull.
It’s what happened to Hillary Clinton
last year. The smarter and cooler she
tried to appear, the more the 24-hour
news cycle crushed her.
For days, the women are wary,
sticking to tit chat and “proseccs”.
They seem aware that they are
participating in little more than
another feminism-themed gimmick,
television’s answer to the pussy hat.
Obviously it isn’t a feminist triumph,
unless you count desperately waiting
for the “rape joke comedian” Dapper
Laughs to enter the house.
In the end, it takes someone who
hasn’t even always been a woman to
smash through the niceties in a
desperate bid to up the ratings. India
Willoughby, a transgender newsreader
with a ratty whip of blonde hair,
becomes the unexpected star of the
show. India is old-school Big Brother:
vain, vicious and deliciously
internecine, a professional victim
who attacks any housemate
she feels does not accept she
is “A WOMAN”. Barely has
the show begun before
she lays into Ann for
“misgendering” her —
there’s a juicy half-second in
which Ann clearly considers
WHY I LOVE TV
To the sofa, then — goodbye film,
hello television. I’ve officially left
my wife for the mistress. It’s true
that television is film’s sexy, saucier
side bit: when the editor asked me
if I’d consider moving, I don’t think
he quite realised the strength or
breadth of my affection. “I can
write you 15,000 words on Cake
Boss TONIGHT.”
I’m thrilled to be the new Sunday
Times television critic. It feels like
diving into a digital Limpopo:
endless possibilities, with some
interestingly mucky bits. Nothing
matches television’s insanity, its
intensity, its wit, its self-deprecation,
its tireless obsession with bettering
itself. The sheer volume of
overmatter, lost ideas, culled
scripts, abandoned pilots, shelved
miniseries, ruthlessly tried-and-
tested formulas, marks it out as the
most creative and vital medium
of our age. No other art form can
afford this wastage. No other art
form spends this much time
tailoring itself to the tastes and
desires of so many people. It’s pure
anthropology; it’s transformed our
sex lives, revolutionised our politics.
It’s even changed childbirth.
“I wish I’d had box sets when I
gave birth,” a friend of mine said
quietly, just after I had my daughter
last summer.
I don’t know what she’ll be
watching, of course — but it’ll be
nice to have a say in it.
4
14 January 2018
THE
CRITICS
JAMES COWEN
swiping at India’s shaved trachea. But
she doesn’t. Not yet.
One of the more mysterious
contestants is Maggie Oliver, a police
detective who helped uncover the
Rochdale grooming ring. Celeb Big
Brother seems a weird place for her
indomitably frosted tips, until you
realise that everything is fodder for
glossification now, even child abuse.
The misunderstood female public
servant — the whistleblower — is
swiftly becoming a new sort of
sublebrity, the new tart with a heart.
Last year’s drama Three Girls
presented Maxine Peake as Rochdale’s
defiant but beautiful social worker
Sara Rowbotham. (Lesley Sharp played
a vacuous letdown
apply their forensic skills to Nikki’s
suspiciously expensive wardrobe, her
professional-standard make-up, her
stupid trustafarian sensibilities? What’s
she doing living in a £9m house?
And why do the crimes always have
to trace back to her? It’s almost as if
the scriptwriters are trying to appease
the thunderous insecurities of their
leading lady by feeding her the corpse
of a close friend, usually female, each
episode — or maybe they’re just
horrifyingly unoriginal. Last series, we
left her having just escaped Mexican
gangsters who kidnapped and killed
one of her friends. This time, a friend
from a rival pathology lab has gone
missing, possibly murdered. Nikki is
now averaging a friend an episode, the
monster. I had high hopes for Julian
Rhind-Tutt as a rock-star pathologist
caught up in the murder. But even he
seemed to wither under the format.
Among comedians, Michael Palin is
an anomaly: he seems unbendingly,
relentlessly, mindlessly happy. He
clearly believes being successful in
one’s public life is only possible if one
is boring and predictable in one’s
private life, as per Flaubert. But really,
it’s astonishing: he has been married
since he was 23; he started writing
Monty Python because he was worried
about his mortgage. “I would describe
him as a gentleman,” David Jason
warbles. One very good reason never
to make a documentary about his life.
I’m immediately suspicious of
Michael Palin: A Life on Screen
. Its
thinness, its hastily assembled mien,
the lazy selection of Python footage,
the general lack of material. It has the
stale whiff of a documentary that’s
been hurried out as a curtain-raiser
to another big project, like the direly
smug Alan Partridge tribute Steve
Coogan foisted on us over Christmas.
Its saving grace, unexpectedly,
turns out to be the turgid presence of
defensive bridge troll John Cleese, who
does not unfold his arms once. He
tries hard to big Palin up by claiming
he is “vicious, ambitious — a
sociopath”, but the only hint we get of
the “real” Palin is his recollection of a
slightly stiff childhood, including the
revelation that he based his character
in A Fish Called Wanda on his father,
who had a stutter.
c 
Celebrity Big Brother
C5, daily
Kiri
C4, Wed
Silent Witness
BBC1, Mon, Tue
Michael Palin: A Life on Screen
BBC2, Thu
14 January 2018
5
Oliver.) Now Sarah Lancashire plays
Miriam, a beleaguered social worker
responsible for a young black girl, Kiri.
Kiri
feels like a rerun of Happy
Valley, in which Lancashire appeared
as a beleaguered police officer. But
it’s also rather good. Lancashire’s
transition from busty barmaid slash
aromatherapist on Corrie to
grande
dame
of drama has been one of the
most fascinating events on the
small screen: she is the Matthew
McConaughey of British TV. As Miriam,
she’s the sort of floppy-jumpered,
dog-loving heroine who skips happily
through liberal dreams. I feel I know
everything about her: she’s good at
her job, but not too good; she’s a bit
fat and drinks too much; and her
supervisor says she doesn’t always get
things right. Cheeringly, she also
despises Kiri’s foster parents, a cold
middle-class white couple who live on
a leafy Ocado-porn street.
It’s a bold angle, rooting for the
social worker who screws it all up, but
it’s sharply written (by Jack Thorne,
of National Treasure fame) and, one
episode in, I couldn’t tell you where
it’s going. Miriam is a welcome repeat
of Happy Valley’s Sgt Cawood, her
flaws a nice change from the usual
haggard career woman drinking
herself into an early grave.
Down the other end of the scale,
there’s Dr Nikki Alexander (Emilia Fox)
in
Silent Witness
. It’s back now for
an interminable 4,572nd series. Well,
dash my eyes out with a rusty
hammer. Why is this show still here? It
is a crime drama that feels exactly like
its subject matter: a long-forgotten,
maggoty corpse, relentlessly dug up
and dissected on a cold slab.
It’s difficult to overstate how much
I hate Nikki: it’s what keeps me coming
back week after week. I don’t even
think she’s a pathologist, I think she’s
a luxury-goods PR from Putney who
has bluffed her way into a commercial
morgue, where all the other people
are too thick to question the
interloper among them. If they’re so
great at their jobs, why don’t they

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