Skyscrapers and short-stack buttermilk pancakes lathered in maple syrup and whipped cream. The Super Bowl, the World Series and Watergate. And Happy Days. Seen from provincial Britain in the 1970s, the US’s allure lay in its shameless hyperbole: everything it did was bigger and better than it was in, say, Middlesbrough. Even its scandals. And it was not shy about telling us this fact.
Come to America and live life as it is supposed to be lived — with guileless extravagance, frosting and sprinkles. That view has receded a little over the past 50 years, as more of us have visited the US and seen the blood seeping through the bandage. But the basic premise is still true — especially when it comes to television.
Turn on a British drama series and you know pretty much what to expect: pensive expressions, broken relationships, a modicum of violence, an intimation of sex. British TV dramas are a bit like American ones, except subject to strict rationing.
The Americans wouldn’t put up with it. And so in Yellowjackets (ITVX) you get a horrible plane crash, cannibalism, masturbation, teenage lesbians, a crucifixion, drugs, alcohol, spite, semi-naked young women and a girl brushing her teeth copiously after a sex act. Oh, and men dressed as giant beavers (the animal, the animal) building traps for women and hoisting them by their ankles to hang from a tree.
And all that, my friends, in the first 11 minutes of the first episode of the first series. Hell, what’s not to like? It may be gratuitous, meretricious and largely witless, but it is star-studded — Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis and Ella Purnell (resembling Cybill Shepherd in The Last Picture Show) and many more besides, plus action, action, action.
The series, which was broadcast on Paramount+ in 2024 and has been snapped up by ITV, shows the travails of a New Jersey girls’ school soccer team, who take a flight to Seattle for some tournament. But the plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness and they are lost for a somewhat questionable 19 months.
We also flash forward 25 years to see how the survivors are doing now and, predictably enough, the clever girls are desperately unhappy and the women who were druggy badduns are doing just fine, more or less. So it really is like one of those doughnuts with frosting and sprinkles and whipped cream which you eat guiltily and then throw up later and feel ashamed of yourself.
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I doubt that the producers of Yellowjackets consider that they are making a grand philosophical statement, but the producers of The Curfew (5) certainly do. The premise is interesting, until you think about it for more than eight seconds. All males are under curfew in the UK between 7pm and 7am and wear ankle tags, to ensure that women can go out in the evening without the risk of being attacked.
Bobby Brazier, Sarah Parish, Alexandra Burke and Mandip Gill in The Curfew
VERTIGO FILMS
There is indeed a great deal of male violence against women in our society, but most of it occurs in the home, and I would bet a fair amount of it happens during daylight hours. So this Atwood-lite worldbuilding crumbles rather too easily. As a consequence of the curfew, though, women occupy all the senior roles in the police — just as they do these days in every British crime drama.
And so we have Sarah Parish as a detective inspector channelling Gene Hunt from Life on Mars — as if, with an absence of males around, someone has to inject a bit of macho toxicity. Anyway, a woman is found bludgeoned to death and — yikes! — the crime was committed during curfew, so it couldn’t have been a bloke. Or could it? I don’t care, to tell you the truth. The premise is so dimwitted that one imagines the plotting and denouement will be likewise.
It’s a pretty good time to re-evaluate the second most successful postwar British prime minister, and The Tony Blair Story (Channel 4) does so with some brilliance and an exceptionally good cast, including Blair himself and, more importantly, his wife, Cherie, who is wonderfully puckish.
“Cherie is wonderfully puckish in The Tony Blair Story”
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Mandelson and Campbell deliver their two-penn’orth on Blair’s charm, determination and so on, and the first episode concerns the deal, or lack thereof, between Blair and Brown as to who should stand for leader on the death of John Smith. The truth is that the decent, much cleverer, more principled but uncharismatic Brown never stood a chance.
Our view of Blair has shifted dramatically since those times, of course, the consequence of two appalling policies: the illegal invasion of Iraq and opening the door to untrammelled immigration. But there were many successes during his first term and one rather wishes there was a Labour politician today who could come close to Blair’s ease with the public and the press, and his conviction in his own rectitude, even if it was misplaced.
The comment of the show came from Jeremy Corbyn, who said of Blair: “I think he is a man in denial.” Hard to disagree. Blair will for ever be associated primarily with the Iraq debacle, which he still insists was the right course of action.
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If you doubt the safety of nuclear power, then watch the documentary Fukushima: Days That Shocked the World (Channel 4) and have your fears quickly rinsed away. This is a two-parter, the first half of which concentrates on the earthquake that struck northern Japan in 2011 and the terrifying tsunami that was the immediate consequence. The two natural disasters claimed at least 20,000 lives.
And yet after the most powerful earthquake in Japanese history and a monstrous tidal wave striking the Fukushima reactor directly, the number of deaths from radiation was… zero. There was no nuclear nightmare, although seven years later one death from lung cancer was later attributed to radiation from the site. Anyway, there were moving interviews with Japanese workers and British expats and as everybody in Japan seems to have a dashcam, extraordinary footage of the tsunami’s destructive powers.
I see we have won some medals in the Winter Olympics 2026 (BBC1), largely by persuading some committee or other to allow in the sport of chav skiing, or “snowboarding” as it is also known. Great! The commentaries seemed breathless and not necessarily expert, but what would I know? I tend to watch with the sound off because I am unaccountably embarrassed by the word “luge”.
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