Gutsy Apple TV+
Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg BBC One | iPlayer
Stuck BBC Two | iPlayer
The Capture BBC One | iPlayer
Arena: James Joyce’s Ulysses BBC Four | iPlayer
One of the TV moments of last week: former US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton with Gutsy co-host, daughter Chelsea, sitting with Megan Thee Stallion and discussing her and Cardi B’s mega-hit WAP. It’s not a line-by-line dissection of the rap hymn to inspired filth – nothing that delicious – but it’s still quite something, Hillary nodding away as Chelsea ruminates: “She’s proving what’s possible for women artists when you’re not afraid.” Oh absolutely. Get a bucket and a mop out for that.
Sticking with the female-lauding theme of the Clintons’ 2019 bestselling tome The Book of Gutsy Women, their new eight-part Apple TV+ series also features Kim Kardashian, who studied law to advocate for criminal justice reform, and Amy Schumer savaging medical attitudes to endometriosis: “‘I’m sorry, we haven’t been able to study it because it only happens to women.’” The Clintons aren’t daft. This most patrician of mother-daughter double acts know they need fistfuls of stardust to illuminate the wide-ranging, worthwhile issues and venerable women around the globe they also want to talk to: refugees, workers’ rights trailblazers, climate change activists, survivors of child marriage and more.
Does the show sometimes feel like a hyper-worthy Ted Talk without end? Interesting and valuable though it is, the answer has to be yes. Part of me wishes the Clintons had embraced their inner trolls and reached out to Ivanka and Melania. While there’s no denying a certain stiffness in Hillary’s presenting style (she still laughs like she taught herself “amusement” from an internet course), Chelsea seems less controlled: she doesn’t hold back in her contempt for the comedians who mocked her as a child.
Still, a sense of the real Hillary sometimes punches through. When she talks about how she wishes she’d been pithier fighting Donald Trump for the presidency (“Oh, to turn the clock back!”), or why she stayed with Bill, post-philandering (“He’s fundamentally a good person”), beneath the pragmatism you sense scar tissue crackling.
The maiden edition of BBC One’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg (in the former Andrew Marr Show slot) provided another TV moment of the week. Surrounded by bizarre, giant wiggly doodles of everything from Big Ben to the Angel of the North, Kuenssberg looked all set for a tight first show, which included a warm, enlightening interview with Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska: “Are you afraid?” “Yes, we all are.”
She’d also snagged interviews with Rishi Sunak and the eerily robotic Liz Truss, neither of whom could be drawn on the energy crisis. Seated on the guest panel with shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry and former Tory deputy chief of staff Cleo Watson, there was whooping “support” for Truss from the comedian Joe Lycett. To paraphrase: “Haters will say that (after) 12 years of the Tories, these were the dregs… that Liz Truss is the backwash… I wouldn’t say that because I’m incredibly rightwing.”
Mischievous? Yes, but also a witty take on the “leftwing comic bias” trope. As a one-off, such disruption is fresh and funny. (That evening, a film of Stewart Lee’s hilarious standup show Snowflake aired on BBC Two, so it was like early woke-Christmas for some of us.) Kuenssberg can’t complain: it got people talking about her show.
Stuck had been due to start on Thursday. Now presumably bumped to next week, this five-part comedy, created by comedian Dylan Moran (Black Books), stars him and Morgana Robinson (Toast of London) as couple Dan and Carla, who are “stuck” in a rut.
Each episode, just 15 minutes long, serves as a microscope slide examining the “symptoms” of long-term coupledom: bed-bound ennui, low-wattage bickering, digs about him being older: “I just realised, I’m holding something that was alive in the 1970s when there were dragons everywhere.”
While Carla is exhausted by a needy boss (Juliet Cowan), Dan is given the bumpiest journey: made redundant; gloomily concerned about everything from Carla’s fidelity to his “moobs”: “I have to go and find clothes for the larger-cupped man.” Sometimes, Stuck turns surreal: there’s some kind of sexual game in a snooty delicatessen. On other occasions the arguing becomes nastier, more interesting. Despite the brevity, Stuck meanders, and the jokes, while smart and spiky, feel rationed, but there’s much to enjoy in its wayward, woozy approach.
I enjoyed the first outing, in 2019, of Ben Chanan’s tech-espionage thriller The Capture (BBC One), in which a soldier was accused of murder, only for Holliday Grainger’s detective to discover deepfake, post-truth “corrections” in a shadowy government operation run by Ron Perlman and Lia Williams.
This time (spoiler alert), Paapa Essiedu’s semi-slippery government minister is caught up in an even deeper fake nightmare, finding his utterances manipulated (China? Russia? Others?) at every turn, with a magnificent, creepy cliffhanger at the end of the latest (fourth) episode. At times this requires Herculean suspensions of disbelief: these malevolent tech whizzes don’t bug cars? Still, the second series of The Capture is shaping up to be that rarest of television creatures: better than the first.
I remember trying to read Ulysses when I was young and wondering if there might be a Ladybird version. At 90 minutes, Adam Low’s Arena: James Joyce’s Ulysses (BBC Two) is a generous explainer for the labyrinthine 1922 masterpiece, here saluted by novelist Howard Jacobson: “Ulysses invents the modern novel, and by inventing the modern novel, it also invents the modern reader.”
Joyce’s own life was complex, and with Ulysses – the story of one day in the life of Leopold Bloom – he ploughed a delinquent, sexually explicit, determinedly impenetrable modernist furrow. Among the admirers discussing Joyce are Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín and Eimear McBride. Jacobson reveals that he received a copy of Ulysses as a school prize: ”It took many years before I got around to reading anything but the rude bits.” Relatable.
There’s a jolt when a pre-attack Salman Rushdie appears. He notes Joyce’s love for Dublin (“In his heart he was always in Dublin”), and chuckles over the Irishman’s audacity. In a documentary marking the centenary of a book that is all about risk-taking and creative freedom, it was good to see him there.
Star ratings (out of five)
Gutsy ★★★
Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg ★★★★
Stuck ★★★
The Capture ★★★★
Arena: James Joyce’s Ulysses ★★★★
What else I’m watching
How to With John Wilson
BBC Two
In this new series of half-hour oddball documentaries (Small talk? Scaffolding?), from American comedian John Wilson tells a story in voiceover, using vox pops on the street in New York. Highly original and strangely moreish.
Brassic
Sky Max
The Lancashire-based dramedy, written by Joe Gilgun, returns for a fourth series. Directed by Danny Brocklehurst and loosely based on Gilgun’s past, it continues to be a whip-smart comedy about working-class life with deep emotional undercurrents.
Ladhood
BBC Three
Originally starting out on Radio 4, Liam Williams’s droll inventive show returns for a third and final TV series. He looks back at the trials and tribulations of his adolescence – his adult self often stepping right into the midst of the action to make wry asides.
• This article was amended on 11 September 2022. Amy Schumer discusses endometriosis, rather than endometritis.
