It's hard to feel charitable towards Richard Curtis's malaria drama. There was more bite in Simon Cowell's dog's dinner
Mary and Martha (BBC1) | iPlayer
Lightfields (ITV1) | ITVPlayer
Food Glorious Food (ITV1) | ITVPlayer
Heading Out (BBC2) | iPlayer
Drama in aid of a worthy cause is not always more a pleasure than a duty, and Richard Curtis's feature-length Mary and Martha – an early curtain-raiser for Red Nose Day – was no exception. If its aim was to draw attention to the thousands of African children who die needlessly each year from malaria, all I can say is, it felt like it. I hope that doesn't sound too uncharitable. But I would have been as happy with a decent documentary as with this glossy weepie about two mums – one American, one English – having the bad luck to have a beloved son bitten to death by a mosquito in Mozambique and then the good luck to bump into each other some months afterwards.
You could see the thinking here. How better to teleport ourselves into the shoes of wretched black bereaved parents than to imagine our own precious offspring succumb to the same cruel fate. But, also… what a stirring finale it would make to have our dogged heroines – perhaps one rich and sculpted (Hilary Swank) and the other lumpy and down to earth (Brenda Blethyn) – reduce a crowded Senate committee hearing to tears with their feisty political unsophistication and sunny pictures of deceased schoolchildren.
With our own boys doomed to be thrown on to the tramlines of plot early on, it must have seemed a good idea not to waste too much creative energy on character and setting. While Martha's student son Ben – flying off to Africa as a volunteer teacher – was given the sort of "endearing" permanent grin, carefree timekeeping habits and effortless popularity that invited an early death, Mary whisked little George off for an extended bonding safari, leaving behind her materialistic lifestyle, shallow, pampered friends and badly drawn husband who didn't understand her. George was soon enjoying the proximity of giraffes and being schooled in local wisdom ("Becoming a man is a lifelong journey…"), while Ben, in another part of the forest, was busy being intuitive with children and falling in love. After half an hour, you wouldn't have been surprised to find Richard Curtis stepping out of the bushes with a sign saying: "Disaster approaching".
It seemed no time before personal tragedy and scenes of routine grieving gave way to reflections on the bigger picture and intimations of people power. Here was Blethyn as wide-eyed Martha, now knitting mosquito nets at the poor African school and seeing the world in Benetton colours, though even she (the very embodiment of Curtis's idea of honest-to-goodness English working folk) found it hard to shine with such lines to deliver as: "You could've knocked me down with a feather". Things were creakier still back in the US with James Woods (playing Mary's emotionally detached father and generic tough nut) making an entrance first as the villain of the piece, and then – as if waking in confusion from a personality transplant – a misty-eyed penitent, reeling off global malaria statistics like a Unicef spokesman. I would have given him £10 just to stop it right there.
Do you believe in ghosts? Neither do I, not even after watching the first episode of Lightfields, ITV's new five-part supernatural series, which like Marchlands (its spiritual forerunner, so to speak, from 2011) is a haunted-house story involving three sets of occupants over different time periods. It was surprisingly not bad, even when Clare and her mum arrived in 1975 to find a crow in the bedroom. Later, they had the willies put up them, so to speak, with laughter out of nowhere and doors opening on their own. Oh and the lights went off. Admittedly it wasn't The Omen but imagine what the pair of them will say when they find out a farmer's teenage daughter went up in flames here during the war following a furious squabble with her so-called friend Eve (Dakota Blue Richards, whose name I mention for the simple enjoyment of typing it) over a handsome American airman.
We didn't discover too much about the third family, except that, by 2012, they had turned the place into a struggling B&B. I can't guess what further mild horrors are to come, but I wouldn't rule out negative equity.
Just as the nation was beginning to worry about where its next plate of slop was coming from, Food Glorious Food arrived. And what a dog's dinner it was, with its traces of X-Factor DNA (Simon Cowell had a hand in this), old bits of Kirstie Allsopp, Antiques Road Show and The Great British Bake Off and other copycat formats desperately looking for a magic collision between "characterful" experts and members of the public chosen for their desire above life itself to appear on television. Ah, here were the strings of bunting and white marquee, the spry rhythms of light oompah, the milling onlookers and calculated assortment of judges – Loyd Grossman (eccentric), Tom Parker Bowles (posh), Anne from the WI (stern), north-eastern cupcake princess Stacie, hired for her beehive hair and willingness to say "knickers" and "bum" (novelty).
The quest to find "Britain's most glorious recipe" was pronounced under way by host Carol Vorderman, and with barely a moment to ask how a woman with such a flair for maths could be happy to stand around all day laughing into a microphone, the judging had begun. A plate of salmon and veg was considered to be not quite interesting enough to earn a rosette and the chance to win £20,000 and join Marks & Spencer's range of ready meals. Sausages in milk, while certainly interesting, failed on the grounds of being on the wrong side of vile. So who would get the nod – the "steaming faggots" we heard about in the prologue? The jelly made by a group of young disabled people? To cut an ill-thought-out programme short, this first round was won by a woman earlier seen treading cabbage (yes, with her feet) as preparation for a Serbian dish of pheasant cooked over an open fire with paprika and chestnuts. Mmm. You could almost smell it. And if anyone wondered which British region Serbia belonged to, they weren't saying.
I've been more than happy to laugh at Sue Perkins on Radio 4 and in those historical foodie shows as Giles Coren's hard-pressed Elizabethan spouse, but not so much during Heading Out, in which she plays a 40-year-old veterinary surgeon who hasn't got round to telling her parents she's gay. She had plenty of comic talent on call – Mark Heap, Joanna Scanlan, Harriet Walter – but her dog stole the show just by padding into her birthday party with a dead cat. Here's hoping it wasn't a sign.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/mar/02/mary-martha-tv-review-phil-hogan
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