Chas & Dave: Last Orders, BBC Four

CHAS & DAVE: LAST ORDERS, BBC FOUR The cockney styled duo get bigged-up big time

The Cockney duo get bigged-up big time

Chas & Dave’s run of hits up the mid Eighties made them an alternative to the gloss of Wham!, Duran Duran and Culture Club. They had three chart albums in 1983. But was there more to their “rockney” music than a first take suggests? Were they more than a cockney slanted, pie ‘n’ mash Wurzels? This programme, prompted by their 2009 retirement, made a valiant – heroic – attempt to elevate them to the level of the greats. Peter Doherty declared them “just like The Clash, The Smiths, Keats”. Obviously, he was thinking of “Snooker Loopy”.

Holy Motors

HOLY MOTORS The whole world really is a stage in Leos Carax’s comedic curio

The whole world really is a stage in Leos Carax’s comedic curio

Stop me if you know this one. What do you get if you combine Gallic absurdity with a pristine, pouting Eva Mendes and Kylie as a suicidal chanteuse? The answer, it turns out, is gloriously unpredictable entertainment – by turns satirical, melancholy and effervescently eccentric. Following on from David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, which chose to set its verbose and violent social critique in a white stretch limo, Holy Motors uses a similar vehicle both to transport and transform its protagonist.

Lilyhammer, BBC Four

LILYHAMMER, BBC FOUR Culture clash fun when Steven Van Zandt's New York Mafia-man holes up in frozen Norway

Culture clash fun when Steven Van Zandt's New York Mafia-man holes up in frozen Norway

Despite Lilyhammer’s sub-zero, snow white Norwegian setting, it is initially difficult to divorce Frank Tagliano from The Sopranos’  Silvio Dante. They’re both played by Steven Van Zandt and both are Mafia men. The suit they wear is the same. Yet Lilyhammer is not The Sopranos in Norway and, by plonking this stereotype into the most unlikely of locations, Van Zandt reveals a flair for nuance formerly obscured by the shadows of others.

F For Fake

F FOR FAKE Orson Welles’ mock-doc on fakes and forgers is terrifically witty and terribly wise

Orson Welles’ mock-doc on fakes and forgers is terrifically witty and terribly wise

For all that’s been said about Orson Welles – usually focusing on his towering genius and sizable ego - he was above all a great contrarian. In interviews he was often genial and self-effacing and of course a scintillating raconteur. During his later years he could be avuncular, entertainingly unpredictable and very funny, like a mischievous lecturer. His The Lady From Shanghai (1947) is so loaded with eccentricity it’s positively cock-eyed and Welles was of course an outcast in Hollywood, that is until he cast himself out.

Jackpot

Threadbare Jo Nesbø-plotted where’s-the-money farrago

It’s a standard dilemma in film. What to do with the body? In this case, the answer can be seen coming but when it does, it isn’t one that could have occurred outside the world created for the otherwise all too generic Jackpot.

DVD: Le Havre

Reality and the hyper-real combine in Aki Kaurismäki’s tribute to tolerance, redemption and goodness

You’d have to have a heart of coal not to be moved by Aki Kaurismäki’s celebration of tolerance, redemption and the goodness that people can do. Le Havre isn’t quite It a Wonderful Life, but it’s not far short. The sensitivity with which the Finnish – now resident in France – director brings together unlikely elements makes him more than a humanist and takes him further into the political than any of his previous films.

Crazy For You, Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park

A larky evening of Gershwin amidst London's lockdown

"Drop that long face," we're urged during the end of the giddy Regent's Park revival of Crazy For You, and if ever there were a time for such sentiments, it came during the lockdown that London remained under during the all too aptly cloud-filled evening that saw the Open Air Theatre not quite full. Nor was it lost on many spectators that the glorious George and Ira Gershwin score was giddily filling a night air punctuated at regular intervals by the distant (or maybe not) sound of sirens.

Psychoville, BBC Two

TV's creepiest series gets a fine send-off

Psychoville, whose first series was made on such a low budget that one episode was filmed in one room in one take (having the additional benefit of being an homage to Rope), used all the extra cash thrown at it to horrifying effect in its second series finale. A Jacobean plot, with a revivified cryogenically stored Nazi's head and a cremation while alive, was animated with the best technology licence fee payers' cash can give, and instead of being chucked up the wall, it gave TV's creepiest series a fine send-off.