Life on Our Planet (Netflix)
Mamma Mia! I Have a Dream (ITV1) | itv.com
The Burning Girls (Paramount Plus)
What is it about Sunday night that too often forces television drama to be glossy, muted and oversweetened? As though broadcasters have huddled together in a secret meeting and decided that, even now, in 2023, Sunday evening viewers can’t cope with anything more visceral than the Strictly Come Dancing results.
Lenny Henry’s new ITV1 six-part Windrush drama Three Little Birds (from the Bob Marley song) is a case in point. Henry created and mainly wrote it (Russell T Davies is a co-executive producer). It’s a clearly deeply felt passion project honouring Henry’s family heritage. Tree young Jamaican women set sail for England in 1957, where, in London and Henry’s own West Midlands, they encounter racial abuse (“Wogs out”), exploitation, brutality and sexual harassment. All this is depicted in the two episodes I’ve seen. Yet, still, it all feels curiously inhibited, as if the anger has been diluted to make it more palatable.
It feels like a wasted opportunity, especially since the likes of 2020’s Small Axe and 2009’s Small Island set a high bar for drama with Windrush themes. Still, Three Little Birds isn’t without merit. As much as the main characters verge on timestamped stereotypes, they’re performed with panache. Mother-of-two Leah (Rochelle Neil) is running from a brutal husband. Her sister, Chantrelle (Saffron Coomber), dreams of movie stardom but must navigate a soul-sucking nanny job. Hosanna (Yazmin Belo), the daughter of a preacher (played by Henry in flashback), is the intended bride for Leah and Chantrelle’s brother, Aston (Javone Prince). The backchat and humour between the core characters is seamlessly played; you truly feel their bond.
As befits the Windrush theme, the main narrative is how, for each of the “birds”, expectations about the mother country turn to ashes. For all the noisy racism, the drama is most powerful in its quieter moments, as when one of the women is icily instructed to use different crockery to white people (“I’m mentoring you, understood?”). This scene hums with such grotesque, genteel viciousness, Three Little Birds shudders into life. I hope there’s more of this to come and less of the syrupy restraint.
Netflix’s new eight-part, four billion year-spanning, eco-themed natural history series Life on Our Planet comes with a Hollywood pedigree. With visual effects by Industrial Light & Magic (founded by George Lucas), it’s executive-produced by Steven Spielberg and narrated by Morgan Freeman. It also has a bold premise: to trace the vast history of our planet – in land, sea and air – complete with mass extinction events, and to recreate extinct wildlife with CGI.
It’s daunting to think of the time, money and effort it took. So why is it so lumbering and ordinary? Once all the dinosaurs, woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers start showing up, it starts looking like Jurassic Park meets Ice Age meets The Lion King for a bloodthirsty kids’ matinee.
There are some great moments: the asteroid that kills off the dinosaurs is rendered as a sizzling Armageddon. Nor did I realise that birds are descended from dinosaurs. But too much in Life on Our Planet is repetitive and laboured, with clear attempts to pep things up: from grisly hunting scenes (cue bloodstained CGI mushes) to the Disneyesque mating whimsy of dinosaurs nuzzling (I suppose we should be grateful they’re not sucking on strands of spaghetti together). Throughout, Freeman silkily drones away, to the point that it starts seeming like The Shawshank Redemption for nature nerds.
I hang on because I’m intrigued to see how the series does humans. Answer: badly. They just pitch up wearing animal skins. I’ve seen more stark realism and scientific inquiry in The Flintstones. It doesn’t help that David Attenborough’s Planet Earth III has started on BBC One. As per, it’s beautiful: flamingos, sharks, turtles et al coming together in an eco-themed symphony. This is the issue for series such as Life on Our Planet: not only is Attenborough the Beatles and the Rolling Stones of natural history broadcasting; over the years, he’s spoiled viewers rotten.
Who has missed those reality contests in which musical theatre hopefuls jazz-hand each other into oblivion for plum West End parts? Some of us have fond memories of the Andrew Lloyd Webber-led noughties BBC searches for the likes of Dorothy (Over the Rainbow), Nancy (I’d Do Anything) and Joseph (Any Dream Will Do).
Now we have the eight-episode Mamma Mia! I Have a Dream (ITV1), which takes 14 finalists to Corfu to compete for the parts Sophie and Sky in the hit stage musical version of Mamma Mia! Judges include musical theatre doyennes Samantha Barks (who competed to be Nancy) and Amber Riley (Dreamgirls), pop star Jessie Ware and comedian Alan Carr (presumably included to cut through the stage school cheese). It’s hosted by Zoë Ball, who gamely models Meryl Streep’s Mamma Mia! dungarees as the contestants tumble around the streets group-performing the title song. That’s just the opening sequence. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
There are issues. Before the first ad break, I’m already sick of the constant enthusing about the loveliness of the Greek landscape. They’re racing through Abba songs (are they just going to do them all again?). Until the final, it’s prerecorded and the judges decide who goes, but they’re overly nice (“Marvellous!” this; “Wonderful!” that). The open-air night performances are so windy that voices are blown away. But who am I kidding? I’m already invested. If you can tolerate the schmaltz, capital-E entertainment just arrived for those chilly winter evenings.
Over to Paramount Plus for some seasonal, Halloween-compatible fare with six-part UK chiller The Burning Girls, adapted from the bestselling CJ Tudor novel by Hans Rosenfeldt and Camilla Ahlgren. The always great Samantha Morton plays a vicar (nursing her own secrets) who moves with her daughter (Ruby Stokes) to a sleepy village parish where, 30 years previously, two teenagers disappeared. In a 16th-century Protestant purge, two young girls were burned to death in the village.
I’m halfway through and it’s full-on goth bingo. Fiery apparitions. Exorcism kits. Burned bibles. Pagan twig dolls. One of the sinister villagers, played by Jane Lapotaire, keeps intoning: “If you see the burning girls, something bad will befall you.” It’s all a bit discount Wicker Man, but a lot of fun regardless.
Star ratings (out of five)
Three Little Birds ★★★
Life on Our Planet ★★
Mamma Mia! I Have a Dream ★★★
The Burning Girls ★★★
What else I’m watching
The Hidden Children of Ruinerwold Farm
(BBC Four)
Four-part docuseries looking into the 2019 case of a young man from the Dutch village of Ruinerwold who revealed that he and his siblings had been held captive for years by their father. Including allegations of physical and sexual abuse, this is intense.
What We Do in the Shadows
(Disney+)
Fifth series return of the Staten Island neighbourhood vampire comedy. Starring Natasia Demetriou, Matt Berry and Harvey Guillén, it’s as funny, inventive and mildly deranged as ever.
Ukraine’s Stolen Children
(ITV1)
Shahida Tulaganova’s unsettling documentary about Ukrainian children taken to Russia, some ostensibly to “holiday camps”, at the start of the conflict. While some children have been returned, many others are still missing.
