Counter Culture

There is plenty here for those of us who like television to do more than simply fill an hour. The Bomb on the Boat revisits the IRA assassination of Lord Mountbatten; The Schoolgirl Terrorist looks behind the headlines of a disturbing and complicated modern case; while The Big Drought of 1975 takes us back to a Britain of standpipes and water shortages. Given present concerns about climate and resources, that last one may prove rather more contemporary than its title suggests.

The arts are particularly well served. We have Hitchcock, the Coen brothers, Gilbert & George, Spanish painting, Billy Elliot the Musical and a Proms concert heading boldly into the musical universe of science fiction. David Olusoga also arrives in Edinburgh — my hometown — for A House Through Time, uncovering the lives that have passed through a remarkable building dating from 1765.

Film brings some old favourites and less obvious choices. Hitchcock’s Rebecca remains magnificent, Brighton Rock gives us a chilling young Richard Attenborough, while I’m All Right Jack turns its satirical guns on British industrial relations. More recent highlights include Fallen Leaves, Moon, Inside Llewyn Davis and On Falling.

Here are my selections for the week.

Saturday 8 August

7.35pm – BBC Two – Space Soundtracks at the Proms
The Proms boldly goes where plenty of orchestras have gone before — but with music this good, who is complaining? A celebration of the soundtracks that have helped make science fiction so memorable, including John Williams’ instantly recognisable music for Star Wars and Hans Zimmer’s extraordinary score for Interstellar. Sometimes it is the music that really gives us the vastness, mystery and sheer wonder of space.

10.00pm – Channel 4 – Elvis, the Colonel and the Mob
A look at the extraordinary and often troubling relationship between Elvis Presley and his formidable manager, Colonel Tom Parker. The programme examines Parker’s influence over the King’s career and the darker world surrounding one of the most famous partnerships in popular music history.

11.10pm – BBC Four – Parallel Mothers (2021)
Pedro Almodóvar’s drama starring Penélope Cruz explores motherhood, identity and memory while connecting its intimate story to the lingering wounds of Spain’s past. Personal and political become inseparable.

11.15pm – Film4 – Midnight Run (1988)
Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin make a wonderfully mismatched pairing in this road-movie comedy thriller. A bounty hunter’s supposedly straightforward job of bringing an accountant across America becomes considerably more complicated. Terrific chemistry between the leads.

12.50am – BBC Two – Fallen Leaves (2023)
Aki Kaurismäki’s beautifully understated Finnish romantic comedy-drama about two lonely people whose tentative connection is repeatedly frustrated by circumstance. Melancholy, deadpan and quietly humane.

Sunday 9 August

8.30am – E4 – Ron’s Gone Wrong (2021)
An animated comedy about a socially awkward schoolboy and his malfunctioning robot companion. Beneath the knockabout humour sits a timely story about friendship, technology and the pressures of social media.

8.00pm – Channel 4 – Richard E. Grant’s Very Modern Odyssey (2 of 4)
Richard E. Grant continues his journey in search of the real-life locations associated with Homer’s Odyssey. This week he arrives in Sicily, traditionally identified as the home of the Cyclops. Grant makes an engaging travelling companion, bringing his customary enthusiasm and curiosity to a mixture of ancient myth and the modern Mediterranean.

8.00pm – ITV1 – Van der Valk
I’m enjoying this latest incarnation of the classic detective series, with Marc Warren making the Amsterdam detective very much his own. This week Van der Valk investigates the disappearance of someone presumed dead — only for the missing person to become the prime suspect in a murder.

9.00pm – 5 Action – The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Clint Eastwood directs and stars in this revisionist Western about a Missouri farmer driven towards vengeance by the violence of the American Civil War. Gritty, morally complicated and one of Eastwood’s strongest early directorial efforts.

10.00pm – BBC Two – Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
The Coen brothers enter the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s, with Oscar Isaac superb as a talented but self-defeating musician struggling to find his place. Funny, bleak and beautifully atmospheric.

10.00pm – BBC Four – Lady Antonia Fraser Remembers The Birthday Party
Lady Antonia Fraser reflects on The Birthday Party, the celebrated play by her late husband Harold Pinter. A particularly personal introduction to one of the defining works of post-war British theatre.

10.10pm – BBC Four – The Birthday Party
Pinter’s unsettling drama follows immediately afterwards. What begins in the apparently mundane surroundings of a seaside boarding house gradually becomes something altogether more threatening. Ambiguity, menace and dark humour — all the ingredients that eventually made “Pinteresque” a word in its own right.

11.40pm – BBC Two – Lady Macbeth (2016)
Florence Pugh gives a formidable early performance in William Oldroyd’s dark period drama. Its title may suggest Shakespeare, but this is something altogether different: a tale of repression, desire and increasingly ruthless rebellion.

Monday 10 August

4.20pm – Talking Pictures TV – I’m All Right Jack (1959)
Peter Sellers is unforgettable as trade union shop steward Fred Kite in the Boulting brothers’ ferocious industrial-relations satire. Management, unions, the establishment and the press all come under fire — nobody escapes entirely unscathed.

8.00pm – BBC Four – The Art of Spain: The Dark Heart
A journey into the Golden Age of Spanish painting and the extraordinary art that emerged from a country shaped by intense religious faith, imperial ambition and political power. The darker currents running through the work of Spain’s great painters make this rather more than a conventional gallery tour.

9.45pm – Sky Arts – Billy Elliot the Musical
The multi-award-winning stage musical, captured at London’s Victoria Palace Theatre. Elton John’s music and Lee Hall’s story take us back to the 1984–85 miners’ strike, where young Billy’s discovery of ballet brings him into conflict with his family and the expectations of his working-class community. Big, emotional and unapologetically theatrical, but with the politics and social upheaval of the period never very far from the surface.

Tuesday 11 August

There are no films tempting enough to make my selection today, but two television programmes are worth a look.

2.15pm – Sky Arts – V&A Presents Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser
A journey through the V&A’s exhibition exploring the extraordinary cultural afterlife of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. From the original Victorian story and John Tenniel’s illustrations to fashion, film, theatre, art and popular culture, Alice has been reinvented repeatedly while somehow remaining instantly recognisable.

10.30pm – Channel 5 – The Bomb on the Boat: The Murder of Lord Mountbatten
A look back at the assassination of Lord Louis Mountbatten in August 1979. The 79-year-old great-uncle of King Charles III was killed when the IRA detonated a bomb aboard his fishing boat off the coast of County Sligo. Three others — two members of Mountbatten’s family and a 15-year-old local crewman — also died.

The documentary revisits the attack and its circumstances during one of the bloodiest periods of the Troubles, as well as the enormous attention the murder attracted in Britain, Ireland and internationally.

Wednesday 12 August

7.15pm – PBS America – Athens: Birth of Democracy
Democracy did not arrive in Athens fully formed. This documentary traces the decidedly rocky road towards its development, through popular uprisings, crushed revolts and the overthrow of tyrants. Archaeologists explore the physical marks these struggles left on the Greek capital, connecting the city we can see today with political ideas that continue to shape our world.

8.35pm – Talking Pictures TV – Brighton Rock (1948)
Richard Attenborough gives one of his most chilling performances as Pinkie Brown in the classic adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel. A wonderfully bleak slice of British noir, with Brighton’s seaside attractions providing an unsettling backdrop to violence and corruption.

9.00pm – Channel 4 – The Spy Next Door: The Anna Chapman Story
Russian-born Anna Chapman appeared to be an ordinary British businesswoman until 2010, when the FBI exposed her as part of a network of Russian sleeper agents operating in the United States. Her arrest — and subsequent return to Russia in a dramatic spy swap — turned Chapman into an unlikely celebrity. A stranger-than-fiction espionage story that feels as though it ought to have been invented by a novelist.

11.10pm – BBC One – Red Eye (2005)
Wes Craven takes terror into the confined surroundings of an overnight flight, with Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy facing off in a lean thriller that wastes little time getting down to business.

12.00am – Sky Arts – The Pilgrimage of Gilbert & George
A chance to enter the distinctive world of Gilbert & George, the artistic partnership that has spent decades deliberately blurring the boundaries between art and everyday life. A characteristically unconventional journey with two figures who have remained provocative, entertaining and difficult to categorise.

12.05am – BBC Two – Kindling (2023)
A group of young men reunite in their home town when one of them reveals that his cancer has returned. Connor O’Hara’s intimate British drama explores friendship, mortality and the difficulty young men can have talking openly about both.

Thursday 13 August

1.30pm – Talking Pictures TV – Rebecca (1940)
Alfred Hitchcock’s Oscar-winning adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s novel, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Manderley, Mrs Danvers and the unseen presence of Rebecca combine in one of cinema’s great Gothic psychological dramas.

7.10pm – Film4 – Moon (2009)
Sam Rockwell carries Duncan Jones’s intelligent, economical science-fiction film as an astronaut approaching the end of a solitary three-year stint mining helium-3 on the Moon. The less you know beforehand, the better.

9.00pm – BBC Two – A House Through Time
David Olusoga comes to Edinburgh, my hometown, to investigate a curious house dating from 1765, a building straddling old and new which has survived political upheaval, industrial change and war. As ever with this excellent series, Olusoga puts flesh on the historical bones by tracing some of the many people who have called the building home. History viewed not through kings and governments, but through a front door.

9.00pm – BBC Four – The Coen Brothers Story
A documentary portrait of Joel and Ethan Coen, the hugely influential filmmakers behind such distinctive films as Fargo, The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men and Inside Llewyn Davis. A useful introduction to their idiosyncratic cinematic world.

10.00pm – Channel 4 – The Schoolgirl Terrorist
In 2020, Rhiannon Rudd became the youngest girl in the UK to be charged with terrorism offences. At first glance, the case appeared to be the story of a vulnerable youngster drawn into far-right extremism. Behind that headline, however, was the considerably more complicated story of a teenager confronting the full weight of the criminal justice system.

Drawing on testimony, family archive and previously unseen material, the documentary re-examines how Rhiannon entered that world and the events that ultimately brought her into contact with the authorities. Potentially difficult viewing, but an important examination of vulnerability, radicalisation and how the justice system responds when the person at its centre is still a child.

10.50pm – Sky Arts – I Am Alfred Hitchcock
A documentary portrait of Alfred Hitchcock, the British director who transformed suspense into something approaching an art form. It explores both the films and the complicated man behind them, whose influence can still be detected throughout modern cinema.

Friday 14 August

9.00pm – Channel 5 – The Big Drought of 1975
Beginning in May 1975, Britain was gripped by an extraordinary and record-breaking period of erratic weather that would stretch across 16 long months, eventually culminating in the famous standpipe drought of 1976. For thousands of households, turning on a tap could no longer be taken for granted, with communities instead relying on communal outdoor water supplies.

Using archive footage and first-hand recollections, including contributions from John Kettley, Toyah Willcox and Don Letts, the documentary recalls what it was like to live through a crisis that has become part of the folk memory of 1970s Britain.

There is more here than nostalgia for parched lawns, water rationing and government appeals to conserve supplies. Given the climate pressures we face today, it is worth looking again at what happened half a century ago — how Britain coped, where it struggled and, perhaps most importantly, what lessons we might still learn from it.

11.05pm – BBC Two – On Falling (2024)
Laura Carreira’s impressive feature debut follows a Portuguese warehouse worker employed at a fulfilment centre in Scotland. A quietly observant film about precarious work, isolation and the human cost hidden behind the apparent efficiency of the modern economy.

Streaming

Netflix – Moria

All eight episodes available from Friday 14 August

Argentine actress and entertainment legend Moria Casán marks her 80th birthday by opening the doors on a fictionalised version of herself. A suitably unusual way to celebrate eight decades for a performer whose public persona has always been rather larger than life.

Netflix –Mourinho

All three episodes available from Tuesday 11 August

The story of the “Special One”, José Mourinho. Few football managers have been quite so successful at making themselves part of the spectacle. Across three episodes, the series turns its attention to the career and personality of one of football’s most successful, outspoken and instantly recognisable managers.

Apple TV – Women in Blue (Las Azules) , Season 2

Episodes released weekly from Wednesday 12 August

The Spanish-language thriller returns. Set in 1971 and inspired by true events, it follows the women who defied convention to become part of Mexico’s first female police force. Their struggle is not simply against crime but against the assumptions of a society with very definite ideas about what women should — and shouldn’t — be doing.

Netflix – My Brilliant Career

All six episodes available from Thursday 13 August

Philippa Northeast leads this period drama about a determined young writer. A new screen treatment of a story centred on a woman determined to forge a life and creative identity on her own terms — and unwilling to accept that the expectations placed upon her should determine the limits of her ambition.

By Pat Harrington

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