There’s an interesting back story to The Trip. Before Rob Brydon was “discovered” by Steve Coogan’s Baby Cow production company in 2000, he was a workaday comic and Coogan was then at the height of his Alan Partridge-induced success.
Stephen K Amos, who was born in London to immigrant Nigerian parents, always used to joke that he would get a television series only when Lenny Henry died, because commissioning editors were working on a “one out, one in” basis where black comics were concerned. He was joking, of course, and after several years as a successful stand-up and panel-show guest, he debuted on BBC Two with his own show last night.
“I was a very good soprano.” Of all the sentences you’d not expect to hear tumbling from the mouth of Keith Richards, that one is up there with "Tap water for me, please, and I do hope this vegan restaurant is non-smoking." He has the addled larynx of a Fag Ash Lil who, when not mopping and dusting, perches on a barstool glugging gin and puffing on Bensons. But once upon a time little Richards did once sing for the Queen. Got a free bus ride up to the London and all, he recalled with a wide-eyed cackle. When his voice broke and he was relieved of his cassock, he was most put out.
Nowadays it’s not so easy to find a doc you can trust. Since talent shows started supplying back stories as part of an all-in-one narrative package, it’s as if everyone has learnt how to behave when there’s a camera crew around. Meanwhile, in the cutting room film-makers can be quite as manipulative as colleagues who nakedly trade in fiction. But there are some things you can’t fake. A young male troupe of cheerleaders from rough working-class south Leeds? That’s one of them.
On the set of Downton Abbey I recently put some questions to Maggie Smith. She was reflecting on the end of her incarceration in Hogwarts. “Alan Rickman and I ran out of reaction shots,” she said, in exactly that mock-baffled tone you’d expect of her. “We couldn’t think what sort of faces we would pull. I remember him saying he’d got up to about 360-something and there weren’t any left.” On the glorious evidence of The Song of Lunch, Rickman was keeping some back.
As any successful entrepreneur will tell you, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” - so the sixth series of both these shows returned with just a few cosmetic changes. The muted opening is in tune with the times, Sir Alan Sugar is now the more ennobled Lord Sugar, the wonderful Margaret Mountford (who has gone back to her papyrology PhD) has been replaced in aide-de-camp duties by businesswoman and West Ham Football Cub executive Karren Brady, and Adrian Chiles (recently departed to ITV) by comic Dara Ó Briain. But in style, format and, most importantly, bombastic cliché by the 16 hopefuls jostling to become Sugar’s new sidekick, these two programmes remain the same. And what an utter joy both still are.
Many of us enjoy a slap-up fish supper. Far too many, unfortunately. Now that the Earth’s population is approaching seven billion, the drain on the denizens of the world’s oceans is becoming insupportable, many aquatic species are hurtling towards extinction, and at this rate the international commercial fishing industry will collapse by 2050.
"You do understand you'll have no editorial control? None. The BBC and Channel 4 are very clear about that. Control will rest solely with the broadcaster. There's absolutely no wiggle room." The speaker was Alan Hayling, editorial director of Renegade Pictures. We were sitting in Soho House and he was one of over 40 television producers who approached me last autumn with a view to making a documentary about my group's efforts to set up a Free School in west London.
Those of us who occasionally still wake abruptly at 3am, a cool, clammy film of sweat creeping across our brow, as we recollect the full horror of Lenny Henry’s Chef! (God, that cruelly mocking exclamation mark), could be forgiven for approaching this new kitchen-com with a degree of trepidation. Thankfully Whites, starring Alan Davies, turned out to be a far more appetising proposition, and not just because there’s nary a sniff of the dread Mr Henry to be found lurking behind the pots and pain.
The double act between screenwriter Peter Morgan and his favoured leading man Michael Sheen has given us some of the most teasingly enjoyable dramas of recent years, but how much genuine insight they've given us into Tony Blair or New Labour remains a moot point.