When first announced, Derry Girls seemed a strange prospect. Derry during The Troubles wasn’t an obvious choice for a sitcom; neither was writer Lisa McGee, whose only previous comedy outing London Irish was slammed for negative stereotyping.
The new import is the latest procedural from Scandinavia, this time focusing on Stockholm’s biker gangs. The first episode aired Tuesday night, with the rest of the series available on All4 now.
“I’m black – I need to find out how black people live.” So reasoned Kiri, sitting in the back seat of the car driven by her social services case worker. She was on the way from her prospective adopters, a white middle-class couple who already had a teenage son, to pay a first unsupervised visit to her Nigerian-born grandparents. Kiri (Felicia Mukasa, pictured below) was mature beyond her years, open-minded and well-spoken, while her case worker Miriam (Sarah Lancashire) brimmed with mumsy good cheer and sensible advice.
There are, as I’m sure many of you are aware, four key stages of political change. Denial, anger, acceptance and, finally, documentary film-making.
You might expect a posthumous 90-minute documentary – and that’s before you insert the ad breaks – about one of the biggest stars in British pop music over the last 30 years to shed some light on how said artist became so huge, but also how his career slowed to a crawl and his life came to such a depressing end. Freedom gives you some of the former but absolutely none of the latter.
Cast your minds back, if you will, to 2011. Remember Jamie Oliver’s Celebrity Fight School?
By the outrage it prompted, you’d be forgiven for thinking that The Great British Bake Off’s move to Channel 4 was a national disaster. If only the public felt so indignant about the sale of the Post Office, or the creeping privatisation of a beleaguered NHS… but hey-ho, cakes it is, then.
Journalist Mark Austin is no stranger to conflict, having reported from war-torn landscapes including Rwanda, Iraq and even the ITN newsdesk. However, when the battle lines were drawn closer to home and involved an enemy he couldn’t see, the veteran journalist found himself in unfamiliar territory and without any kind of roadmap.
It’s a burning question of western civilisation: what persuades young people brought up among us to walk out on their lives and join the cult of murderous fanatics who call themselves Islamic State? If any dramatist could attempt a coherent answer it’s Peter Kosminsky, who for more than three decades has been telling minutely researched stories – in documentary, drama and a fusion of both – about the big moments of modern British social and political history.
Come awards time, it’s inevitable that Elisabeth Moss will be collecting a few for her portrayal of Offred, the endlessly-suffering lead character in The Handmaid’s Tale (her real name is June). But I reckon the real stars of the show are cinematographer Colin Watkinson plus the production design and art direction teams. What made Handmaid grip from the start was its photography and its balefully beautiful colour palette.