I enjoyed the first run of BBC1’s SAS Rogue Heroes despite the pantomime beards and Steven Knight’s script painting Blair “Paddy” Mayne as a bar-room psychopath. This second series irritates more. Running a disclaimer stating ‘This is not a history lesson’ doesn’t excuse Peaky Blinders creator Knight painting the wartime SAS as thieving gangsters. He has them robbing banks like Kelly’s Heroes and Mayne desecrating a Catholic church.
This cartoon version of Paddy portrays him more like some grudge-fuelled south Belfast UDA leader than the smart, fearless, educated officer he was. It’s a joke and a shameful one because the real Paddy Mayne was one of our greatest WWII heroes. He deserved the VC he was recommended for twice – that’s a Victoria Cross not a Volatile Caricature. Let’s hope this flawed series revives the campaign to award him the VC (and bar) Churchill, Monty and King George VI wanted him to have.
Social media at its most deranged may feel like staring into the gaping jaws of hell, but its forerunner was the Jerry Springer Show where no episode felt complete without a punch-up.
Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action (Netflix) tells how the former Mayor of Cincinnati was persuaded to front this gladiatorial freakshow.
Notorious episodes like I Married A Horse, I’m Pregnant By My Brother, and Honey, I’m A Call Girl propelled Springer to the top, beating Oprah in the daytime ratings. No depths were left unplunged; no barrels unscrapped. The show did for good taste what e-scooters do for pedestrian safety. One episode, featuring Ku Klux Klan members and the Jewish Defence League, ended in the TV equivalent of a barroom brawl.
Executive producer Richard Dominick was the brains behind it, with producers like Toby Yoshimura finding the guests – love-rats, oddballs, skanks, and occasionally straw-sucking simpletons whose stories could be smelted into trash TV gold.
The bookings were conned into thinking the TV show was on their side, but, as one producer boasts, “We’re not trying to help nobody.”
Defending his oeuvre at a Chicago city council meeting, Springer said, “It’s a TV show – we will all survive it.”
Unfortunately not everybody did. In 2002, guest Nancy Campbell-Panitz was murdered by her ex-husband the day he saw the episode they’d recorded with his new wife.
The ethics of the genre – find us the freaks, the unstable, the laughing stocks – informed British ‘reality TV’ too, and still does with predictably shocking results including unnecessary deaths and unbridled depravity.
At least BBC1’s The Traitors doesn’t stoop that low. What is it about this show that sends contestants potty? Collective madness sets in around that round table as the Faithful inflate innocent comments into incontrovertible “evidence”.
At one point they suggested Kasim, a doctor and all-round nice-guy, was killing them off. “You’re basically calling me Harold Shipman!” he finally snapped. And to think we let people like this sit on juries…
It took them three goes to get shot of actual traitor Armani, who was so loud, hammy and irritating she might as well have walked in with a placard proclaiming ‘Beware! I’m dodgy!’.
While the Faithful banished their own, the Traitors bumped off smart Yin Lu, and amiable Keith. I like traitor Linda, the 70-year-old retired opera singer who looks like a cross between Su Pollard and Denis Norden, but she won’t survive.
The biggest mystery is who is filming Freddie in the shower, objectifying him in such a distressing sexist way? Let’s hope it’s not our Claudia, so splendid in her gothic velvet finery and bespoke capes.
Sociopath Miles Lambert, James McCardle’s character in Playing Nicely, would make a top traitor. The ITV potboiler is like Long Lost Family with added melodrama and a wealthy control freak (Miles) thrown in. Two baby boys, Theo and David were somehow swapped at birth. Three years later, hospital bosses tell doting dad Pete Riley (James McNorton) and his restaurateur-chef wife Maddie (Niamh Algar) they’ve been raising the wrong cherub.
Then Miles, the other dad, was on their doorstep. Initially, he played nice, but, rather like Elon Musk, worrying aspects soon become apparent.
Miles is smug, scheming and manipulative; he tries to buy himself into their favours (while stalking them), and when his charm offensive fails, he has them served with a legal letter demanding custody of both boys – within minutes of their restaurant bust-up.
His near-mute artist wife Lucy (Downton’s Lady Sybil) is under his thumb, and won’t give Maddie time to bond with David. With two episodes to go, the dice are loaded in the Lamberts’ favour. The Rileys are skint, Maddie’s restaurant is struggling and Miles is planning to open a rival eaterie next door.
He also suspects she may be enjoying a chocolate fondle with her sous-chef Ollie.
Big dope Pete leaves cannabis gummies around for Theo to munch on. The subsequent (unnecessary) hospital visit inevitably comes to light. The only way to enjoy these shows is to suspend disbelief, strap in for the ride and soak up the Cornish scenery.
TV bigwigs say the days of mass audiences are gone yet the final Xmas Day Gavin & Stacey had a consolidated viewing figure of 19.3million (still climbing). It was warm, witty, real, and woke-free. Give us what we want, and viewers will come.
