Art Matters (Sky Arts/Now)
Surviving the Post Office (BBC One) | iPlayer
The Decameron (Netflix)
Time Bandits (Apple TV+)
Righteous, molten anger burst from screens like an erupting volcano last week, a fair amount spraying from Melvyn Bragg in his stand against swingeing arts funding cuts in Art Matters (Sky Arts/Now).
Billed as “the biggest fightback of his life”, it features interviews with mainly working-class luminaries, including Tracey Emin, Lenny Henry, Antony Gormley and Maxine Peake. The fact that this documentary has been made at all feels like a feat in itself. We don’t see much of this kind of thing (arts-themed docupolemic?) on the box any more. And who better to present it than Lord Bragg, the octogenarian big daddy of Radio 4’s In Our Time and LWT’s fabled arts strand The South Bank Show. If you’ve never seen Bragg’s 1985 interview with Francis Bacon, I urge you to do so: they lurch around London talking about the artist’s work, increasingly blotto, practically sliding off chairs. Can you imagine this happening now? They’d be strapped to the fourth plinth and horsewhipped.
This time, Bragg (disappointingly sober and well-behaved, but you can’t have everything) marches around, dapperly seething (“Culture today is on the ropes”) or rabble-rousing in the House of Lords, calling, Braveheart-style, for “an Industrial Revolution of the arts”. Quite right too. Art and music have been decimated in the school curriculum, while Britain’s renowned and, Bragg points out, lucrative creative industries are routinely downgraded.
Class squats at the centre of the crisis like a clump of dark, choking weeds. Bragg recalls the relative cultural richness of his northern working-class youth, and how books “saved” him after an adolescent breakdown. Armando Iannucci defends the BBC and notes how the arts kept Britain going during lockdown (“Culture got us through. We were pigging out on culture”). Emin shows Bragg around the Margate art school she founded. After her bout with aggressive cancer, it’s good to see her looking chilled, with that lightning bolt of mischief returned to the mix.
At times, Art Matters potters and prattles too much. It could do with being beefed up with stats showing the elitist narrowing of culture. Still, it’s a vigorous use of Bragg’s authority, and striking how, even now, his interviewees look thrilled and honoured to speak with him. Hardly surprising, really. What David Attenborough is to nature, isn’t Bragg to the arts in Britain?
Over to BBC One for more fury in Surviving the Post Office, a documentary about the decades-long scandal that saw hordes of British subpostmasters wrongly accused of theft. The appalling affair was of course turned into Mr Bates vs the Post Office, ITV’s drama phenomenon broadcast in January this year.
This doc is presented by Will Mellor, who played subpostmaster Lee Castleton in Mr Bates. Mellor interviews the real Castleton, who ended up in court facing a £321,000 bill, and four other post office operators around the country who weren’t featured in the drama. Again, the stomach-lurching tales of reputations shredded and lives destroyed; rocks thrown through windows; homes lost. A brother and sister witnessed their mother face allegations while dying with lymphoma.
It’s brisk (half an hour) but packs a lot in, including the fact that subpostmasters still use the faulty Horizon payment system, which is still producing shortfalls – though now post office operators aren’t scapegoated. While the inquiry drags on, documentaries such as this are a reminder of why people are seeking compensation, and why apologies from the Post Office and Fujitsu, the defective software’s developer, ring hollower than an empty church steeple. One Cornish woman who was accused of stealing more than £20,000 continues to be a subpostmaster: “I enjoy my customers,” she smiles tightly. “I don’t enjoy the job any more.”
The Decameron, a collection of 14th-century Italian short stories by Giovanni Boccaccio said to have influenced Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, has now inspired an eight-part Netflix comedy drama, created by Kathleen Jordan. It’s set in 1348, as the Black Death (“pestilence!”) rips through Florence, and spoiled, obnoxious nobles and their longsuffering staff seek sanctuary in a sumptuous rural villa, where societal mores break down in a wine-soaked swirl of debauchery and manipulation.
At first I found it hard going. What with all the laced doublets and olde worlde repartee, it felt like being trapped at one of those cosplay banquets where tourists drink pretend mead and keep trilling “Forsooth” at each other.
Five episodes in, I’ve really warmed to it. The nobles are deliciously foul: highlights include Girls’ Zosia Mamet as a sniping noblewoman panicking at being an “old maid”. The servants, including Sex Education’s Tanya Reynolds, are a wiser, warmer but no less miscreant crowd. Watch out for Derry Girls’ Saoirse-Monica Jackson, whose dark bobbed wig brings to mind a medieval Björk, and Tony Hale of Arrested Development/Veep fame as the wily servant running the villa.
While it may be too theatrical for some tastes, The Decameron gets wittier and darker as it goes along, with death (corpses in carts, suppurating neck boils) never far away. Think a middle ages comedy of manners laden with pandemic metaphor and spicy contemporary nods to The White Lotus.
I was looking forward to Apple TV+’s 10-part remake of Terry Gilliam’s 1981 fantasy film Time Bandits from Jemaine Clement, Iain Morris and Taika Waititi (Clement and Waititi are behind the magnificent What We Do in the Shadows). Their Time Bandits, though, turns out to be pitched younger than I expected, with none of the scabrous naughtiness of Gilliam’s film, or the Monty Python member’s signature visual mind-melt. It’s still sweetly funny, with Kal-El Tuck as the history nerd catapulting through time (dinosaurs, Vikings et al) in crusader pyjamas. The bandits are no longer people of restricted stature (there are other roles for them in the series), and they’re led by Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe from Friends).
The resting comic temperature is Our Flag Means Death (which Waititi also starred in) meets Horrible Histories. If you’re after family viewing suffused with warmth and brazen silliness, you won’t be disappointed.
Star ratings (out of five)
Art Matters ★★★★
Surviving the Post Office ★★★
The Decameron ★★★★`
Time Bandits ★★★
What else I’m watching
Linford
(BBC One)
To coincide with the start of the Paris Olympics, this at times gruelling profile of British Olympic gold medallist Linford Christie covers drug tests, racism and relentless media coverage of his “lunchbox”.
McDonald & Dodds
(ITV1)
A journalist is found dead in the fourth-series return of the watchable Bath-set lo-fi whodunnit. Tala Gouveia (McDonald) and Jason Watkins (Dodds) star.
Tabloids on Trial
(ITV1)
A penetrating interview with Prince Harry about his media battles, royal rifts and his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. Hugh Grant, Charlotte Church and Paul Gascoigne are also interviewed.
