Succession | Sky Atlantic
Deep Water (ITV) | ITV Hub
Kathy Burke’s All Woman (Channel 4) | All 4
The Chefs’ Brigade (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Remarkable Places to Eat (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Succession burst back on to our screens with a vengeance: chiefly, of course, Logan Roy’s. The billionaire media mogul, the part Dundee’s own Brian Cox was perhaps born to play, is, if not exactly relishing the comeuppance of his squirrelly, treasonous son Kendall – who had something of a Chappaquiddick moment at the close of the first series – not shedding hot salt tears at the turn of events either.
Big Daddy Roy now has Kendall whimperingly where he wants him, and Jeremy Strong’s squirms are a painful joy to watch. I can’t praise this HBO drama enough for the overarching quality of all the acting, nor the sheer sense of style as pointlessly privileged progeny snap for scraps at Logan Roy’s table. This series, with the patriarch revivified and vowing to be the last global media brand standing, has the hallmarks of triumph. Part of the delight, aside from the papercut-sharp barbs that come from the pen of Jesse Armstrong every 40 seconds or so, is watching the increasingly easy camaraderie between Roman and Shiv, the (only, it sometimes seems) brains in the batch. Bring it on.
Deep Water is a highly promising new drama from ITV that seems certain to set folk talking. Mainly talking about the shamblefest of mistakes made in the opener by Anna Friel who, tiddly at a friend’s dinner party, embarks on an ill-advised bathroom knee-trembler. She doesn’t just forget to close the door, so the kid of the house can see in; she manages to forget her own thong. Later on, she will forget something far, far worse.
The three women at the heart of this Windermere-set six-parter, adapted from the novels of Paula Daly, are drawn with heart and finesse, and acted with equal style. Throughout, it balances a cloying air of community domesticity with something approaching an air of menace – menace of sexual threats, of bankruptcy, of misplaced children – and already I’m wholly intrigued to see quite where it goes with it all. A winner for ITV drama. A loser, perhaps, for the Lake District education system: what with all the special “days” that the schools apparently now have to celebrate – book day, vegan day, superhero day, bloody “cake day” – it’s a surprise they can remember to teach anything, if less of a surprise that these three school-gate mothers are going gently mad.
Kathy Burke was caught between several canyons of compromise in her All Woman, the first of a promising triptych: hating the pressures on young women today to beautify themselves to insane degrees yet being, fundamentally, always too bloody nice to inform them that so many pressures are falsely imagined social constructs. I doubt whether anyone other than she could have pulled it off but, somehow, with her mix of sweary derision and personal kindness, she managed. Almost.
The derision was best saved for the likes of bollocks-talking plastic surgeons, smug in their patriarchy, or on-trend richos such as the sainted Gwynnie Paltrow. No one on earth, I’ll wager, can pronounce the phrase “Steam your fanny? Fack off” with quite such intense, laughing scorn as Ms Burke.
She was on shakier ground with Love Island “star” Megan Barton-Hanson, who got pelters on social media for having dared transform her body, yet after reams of plastic surgery still has to spend two hours prepping for a C-list red-carpet photo; or 20-year-old Laura, saving for a boob job. The operation is a bit scary, she admitted, “but I think it’s going to make me happy”.
What, Burke wondered gently, if it didn’t? Laura looked as if someone had just sat a cormorant in her lap. “I really, like, can’t imagine what I’d do.” Burke was, arguably correctly, mild in her facial confrontations with Megan and Laura, not wanting to blame, but there was no shrinking from her later conviction that “it’s not enough to look attractive any more, you have to look stunning”. The causes behind this conviction, though, were sadly unexplored, as were Kathy’s musings on whether women, as well as men, weren’t equally (if not more) societally culpable. But the very presence of the unashamedly homely Burke – and that of the wonderful grime artist Nadia Rose, whom I seem to remember closing a thrilling Stax Prom a couple of years ago – gave hope that sanity might, eventually, get a look-in.
Jason Atherton’s slab-faced irascibility on The Chefs’ Brigade makes him the ideal leader of a crew of impossibly young wannabes competing against long-established teams in Europe’s finest restaurants: when he gives a compliment, you know he really means it. Even so, even he was struggling in Andalucía to prevent his charges from getting too cosily complacent. When he asked who had their new best friends sitting next to them, more than half the hands went up. Wrong response. Atherton had to have a quiet rant about them seeming more “friends on a food trip” than contestants on a potentially life-altering slice of seriously high-end cooking.
I’m quite aware that young people like niceness, and few of us want to hurtle back to a time of utter deference, but what is becoming increasingly evident in this series is that it’s the ones who can take criticism – or even a simple order – who will be left standing when the last dish is washed. Platitudes, especially Hallmark-card coddling, won’t cut it. When over-sensitive, over-angry Frankie said: “I’m not disappointed in myself,” after having loused up on the caramel, he was instantly comforted by a colleague, who petted the nothing phrase “and that’s the most important thing”. Again, way wrong answer. The most important thing would have been to not disappoint Jason, the judges or the hordes of fine diners who had been kept waiting for 40 minutes in Cádiz’s El Faro. Frankie now knows this: he was booted off, along with overconfident blogger Kareem. Good to see, on the other hand, once-mouthy Stephen stepping up to absolutely save the day.
This is a fascinating series, if naturally a bit BBC-heavy on the “personal journey” stuff. You get to see lovely vistas and salivate over some heavenly looking foodstuffs, with more than enough jeopardy to raise it well above travelogue. This is in stark contrast to the recent Remarkable Places to Eat, a promising-enough premise in which Fred Sirieix and the similarly amiable Tom Kerridge, Michel Roux Jr and others purportedly opened their little black books to vouchsafe the alleged secrets of a city. Unfortunately – no, infuriatingly – at least three amounted to a shameless advertorial for the chosen restaurant: Paris’s La Tour d’Argent, say, or San Sebastián’s Mugaritz.
The Edinburgh one, in particular, was essentially an hour-long paean of praise to Tom Kitchin’s Leith business, a drooling hagiography, a PR’s dream. I know Scottish chefs who were appalled at the blatancy, even though Tom is, by common consent, an all-round Good Thing. Thank your souls for the existence of restaurant critics, rather than the understandably close-knit cheffy community just being allowed to lead cameras around their mates’ gaffs.
