The Hardacres: New series trailer
It’s amazing how quickly you could turn your life around in 1890s Yorkshire. I give you The Hardacres (C5, Mon), a hard-toiling family of six with barely two shillings to rub together.
In 60 minutes of TV though, they managed to start a herring stall from nothing, make it a roaring success, invest in a South African gold mine with no knowledge of the stock market before landing a whopping windfall of £240,000. Talk about levelling up! That’s worth £38m today.
Someone should tell money expert Martin Lewis – he’ll be recommending we all open a herring stall. And The Hardacres weren’t even offering chips with it, just wrapping it in brown paper.
As a period drama, it’s heart was in the right place but the rest of it was rather fishy. I'm sure French & Saunders, sitting there in semi-retirement, must have felt the urge to get off their respective sofas and do a biting parody of this quite cliched family saga. Maybe they were playing it for laughs, who knows? If so, it's a five-star hit – I guffawed throughout!
Of course, rags-to-riches stories are 10 a penny. I couldn't stop thinking about At Home The Braithwaites, who didn't even sell a single herring on their way to a big lottery win – ironically also £38m -- before squabbling away.
But back to those docks where the mist-maker machine was working overtime, as was that dodgy looking winch, which the camera trained upon twice. It was so telegraphed, all of Yorkshire must have shouted, “Watch out for that winch!!”
No family working down the docks in 1890 looked as well fed, and nicely groomed as this lot. They were also just too pretty. Work was hard labour, and it showed down the generations. I believe there’s an author called Charles Dickens who wrote about it. The house also looked like it was furnished by Ikea. More Softacres than Hardacres.
Funniest of all, however, were the local gangsters, “the Wilson boys” who robbed them of their first day’s takings. They looked no more threatening than the Weasley Twins.
The Softacres finally moved up to the local big house where a light parody of Downton Abbey will ensue over coming weeks.
Showtrial (BBC1, Mon) was an earnest drama created by Ben Richards, which made the viewer cleverly decide between two divisive groups -- the police and climate activists. Wow! Of course you could simply turn it off.
The two central performances however were intriguing. Adeel Akhtar played stressed lawyer Sam Malik who visits a therapist to get him through the day. Plus his meds. He tells her, “The goldfinches have disappeared from my garden”. He feels responsible for this. Come to think of it, I haven't seen a swift for days.
Sam was urged not to do the case by everybody he knew, but he had an acute sense of justice. What's happened to good old-fashioned cynicism?
Well, that's been left to the police officer who's charged with running down a climate activist Marcus on his bicycle and leaving him for dead. Michael Socha played PC Justin Mitchell like a magician with a card up his sleeve. I believe a complex conspiracy is afoot here, Sam. Check for local infrastructure projects? That should make great drama. Worth watching for the two leads.
There’s something very likeable about Charlie Cooper. Not only because he helped create and write the highly entertaining This Country with his sister Daisy, but also because he has a sense of mischief.
This trait was deployed splendidly in Charlie Cooper Myth Country (BBC2, Sun), which purported to be a documentary about folklore which we were advised, “is very much alive” in the country. Was it a documentary or was it something else? I thought the original Office was a documentary for almost two episodes!
Charlie went in search of the East Anglian “black shuck”, a large dog which stalked the pretty meadows. He didn’t see it – but it was all very amusing.
Finally, twinkly Professor Brian Cox has a new show called Solar System (BBC2, Mon). I could almost hear famous movie composer Hans Zimmer warming up the keyboard in the background as we got underway.
Punctuated by dramatic orchestral surges, we journeyed the planets with Cox, and to moons, far, far away that only Darth Vader has probably seen.
Mars, he said, had volcanoes 800k high. We won’t bother colonising that one then.
Another small moon was partly made from ice. Strike that off the list, too.
Cox also found local volcanic equivalents on earth. Things can only get hotter, you might say. That was until he told us about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us the opposite. Something like that. He then began to barbecue a large and a small rock to prove this.
One for Tom Kerridge’s next book.
STEPHENSON'S ROCKET
ITV2 clearly can’t think of anything better than refloating barnacle-ridden Big Brother (ITV2, Mon) for our viewing pleasure.
While presenters Will Best and AJ Odudu squeeze all the entertainment they can from this shouty nonsense in a Teletubbies-style house, it remains a dead format – and frankly nothing like “the original social experiment”.
Back then, there was virtually no format at all, and contestants had to find a way of getting on, or not. By offering £100,000 prize money, every extrovert in the nation is now vying for a place on this show when that’s the last thing they need.
