Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat (Channel 4) | channel4.com
Reframed: Marilyn Monroe (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Dreaming Whilst Black (BBC Three) | iPlayer
Special Ops: Lioness (Paramount+) | paramountplus.com
How often is it that television genuinely surprises you – when it takes a moment (or three) for your brain to calibrate what is unfolding before your very eyes?
Well (abandon all hope of avoiding spoilers here), this rare thing happens in Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat on Channel 4. I’m expecting a documentary on lab-grown meat and, at first, that’s how it goes. In Inside the Factory presenting mode, the turbo-enthused Wallace goes to the “Good Harvest” production plant to watch a technician demonstrate how cells transform into giant meat-blocks of “affordable protein”.
It takes a while, but eventually a very dim bulb (10w at most) starts flickering in my brain as I register that Wallace is talking about “engineered human meat”, and that the Good Harvest packaging says: “Made by humans from humans.” Wot? By the time Wallace and Michel Roux Jr are doing a “taste test”, rhapsodising about a particularly succulent “mystery meat”, I’ve finally twigged that I’m watching a sociopolitical mockumentary, a straight-faced, grimly cannibalistic satire on the cost of living crisis.
Concocted by Matt Edmonds (The Comedy Bus), Jonathan Levene (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) and director Tom Kingsley (Ghosts; Stath Lets Flats), The British Meat Miracle is inspired by Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay, A Modest Proposal, and once you catch on, the messaging is obvious. The relentlessly upbeat on-brand Wallace (“You can’t beat British grub!”) encounters impoverished people earning money by “donating” prime cuts of their bodies at “extraction plants”. A Good Harvest executive smilingly describes the process as “pain-subjective”. The “premium” meat turns out to be from children who are allowed to play beforehand so their flesh isn’t “stressed”. (Ouch. Little wonder that Ofcom received hundreds of complaints.)
It’s not perfect: a gag about “beer-fed Geordies” feels jarringly classist; the satire sometimes feels about as subtle as a clown plank in the face. At half an hour, it feels like an extended skit Chris Morris would’ve cut to a tight 10 minutes on The Day Today. Still, when was the last time TV threw out a genuine (unflagged) curveball? This was an audacious gatecrashing of the television schedules, and it should happen more often.
Who else was dismayed by Blonde, the 2022 film by Andrew Dominik that took Joyce Carol Oates’s darkly intricate book and delivered a submissive “broken doll” version of the young Marilyn Monroe, an uber-sexualised misogynistic fantasy?
Now, on BBC Two, there’s the UK premiere of the four-part docuseries Reframed: Marilyn Monroe, first shown in the US as a CNN Original. Narrated by Jessica Chastain, it’s a majority-female analysis of Monroe’s talent, intelligence and complexity that feels like a firm feminist riposte to the likes of Blonde; a probing re-examination of Monroe’s life, from her troubled beginnings, through the blitzkrieg of stardom, to her tragic death at 36. Throughout, the Hollywood star is reassessed by academics, peers and fellow actors including Ellen Burstyn and Mira Sorvino.
The effect is of a sorority of talking heads determined to take all the “totem of femme fatale victimhood” cliches and smash them like piñatas. In this telling, Monroe is positioned as a canny, ambitious self-publicist who took on the studios. A trailblazer whose sexual expression and #MeToo-esque whistleblowing were before their time. A celluloid supernova eclipsing her husbands (including baseball player Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller). A once-in-a-generation talent – and wasn’t she just? As evidenced here, clips from films such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes still shimmer and sparkle with her life force.
At times, Reframed is overzealous with the cheerleading revisionism. Towards the end, even Monroe singing Happy Birthday at Madison Square Garden to President John F Kennedy is presented as a shrewd power move – when it always seemed the point at which her jittery, overmedicated fragility entered a full-on collision course with tragedy. Will those posthumous Marilyn Inc cash registers ever cease ringing? Maybe not, but at least, here, you get the sense of women going out to bat for her.
New six-part dramedy Dreaming Whilst Black (BBC Three) is created by and stars Adjani Salmon as Kwabena, a film-maker stuck in a life-sapping recruitment job. Originally a web series that morphed into a Bafta-winning pilot, it works as a fable of modern black Britishness and also a tender prayer to the frustrations of the modern creative. While Kwabena deals with daily deluges of casually racist microaggressions (“You’re very articulate”), he also struggles to get his Windrush love story made.
This is confident work laced with wry humour, with well-drawn female characters (in particular, Dani Moseley as Kwabena’s fledgling producer friend) and the ability to whip comedy into sudden sharp emotion and drama. A pitch-perfect cast includes Rachel Adedeji, Babirye Bukilwa, Demmy Ladipo, Isy Suttie and Peter Serafinowicz, with a cheeky fleeting cameo from Jessica Hynes. If Dreaming Whilst Black ends on a tense note, it’s also an unfinished one, suggesting another series. Yes, please.
Special Ops: Lioness is the new eight-part Paramount+ creation from Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone; Tulsa King) and Jill Wagner. Zoe Saldana (Avatar) stars as Joe, a military operative overseeing “special activities” for the war on terror. She enlists recruit Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira), who (implausibly) joins up after escaping from a violent ex, (miraculously) aces her tests, and is then sent undercover to befriend the partner of a terrorist target, which she (again, improbably) achieves with the ease of a ditsy Carly Rae Jepsen video.
At first I think: is this an angrier, dustier GI Jane? Or just another war drama that feels like a Middle East-set video game? However, I find myself sucked in. While Nicole Kidman blankly floats through as a CIA bigwig (I’m not kidding: her scenes feel like weird screensavers), Oliveira vibrates with barely contained desperation, Saldana imbues Joe with itchy, world-weary energy, and the gritty, grungy visuals feel like a 1990s mood swing. I’m not entirely sold (too much gung-ho military corn), but there’s enough to suggest that Special Ops: Lioness might get interesting.
Star ratings (out of five)
Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat ★★★★
Reframed: Marilyn Monroe ★★★
Dreaming Whilst Black ★★★★
Special Ops: Lioness ★★★
What else I’m watching
David Harewood on Blackface
(BBC Two)
The Homeland actor presents this potent documentary on the shocking history of blackface minstrelsy (in the UK, The Black and White Minstrel Show was watched by millions) and how it affected generations of black families.
Good Omens
(Amazon Prime Video)
The second series of the Neil Gaiman adaptation of his and Terry Pratchett’s novel about a demon (David Tennant) and angel (Michael Sheen) fending off Armageddon. Fantasy studded with byzantine humour.
The Power of Parker
(BBC One)
A warm new sitcom set in the northern 1990s about a businessman, his wife and his mistress. It’s further elevated by a superb cast (Siân Gibson, Conleth Hill, Rosie Cavaliero) and ever-spiralling silliness.
