Masters of the Air Apple TV+
Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain ( Channel 4) | channel4.com
Expats Amazon Prime Video
David & Jay’s Touring Toolshed (BBC Two) | iPlayer
The thing I find with zillion-dollar TV epics is that, as you watch, you’re wondering where all the dosh went. Take Apple TV+’s Masters of the Air, the long-delayed nine-part second world war drama starring Austin Butler, Callum Turner and Anthony Boyle. The third series in a loose Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks-produced trilogy after Band of Brothers and The Pacific, it’s based on Donald L Miller’s book about real-life US airmen, the 100th Bomb Group, who flew out of Thorpe Abbotts in Norfolk.
It’s reported to be the most expensive war series ever made (as much as $300m), and a fair wedge must have gone on the vast, illustrious but sometimes barely used cast (the likes of Stephen Campbell Moore flash by like extras). Putting aside the painstaking recreations and CGI (planes, airfields, bombed-out cities) and brazen, Top Gun-esque, merch-friendly window dressing (anyone fancy a bomber jacket?), does this fulfil the brief as a heroic, devastating story well told?
Yes and no. The aerial combat scenes are stunning: planes in formation; planes nosediving; bombs dropping like pellets; the deadly missions (they flew in daylight, with shattering numbers of casualties).
However, particularly in the early stages, it’s a blur of mission after mission, which might reflect reality for the “Bloody Hundredth” (so called because so many were killed) but doesn’t do much for characterisation. Butler (as Major Gale Cleven) is just plain miscast, giving an embarrassing pop-video performance: posing, drawling, chewing on matchsticks. Boyle (Lt Harry Crosby) is lumbered with a saccharine, dated Wonder Years-style voiceover. Turner, however (portraying impetuous Major John Egan), is strong. This is a star-making turn for him.
Moving through the episodes, there are prisoners of war, Nazi concentration camps (briefly) and punting at Oxford University. There’s also nepo casting, including Spielberg’s son Sawyer (are we not supposed to notice?). Saltburn’s Barry Keoghan gets lost in the mix, while the new Doctor Who, Ncuti Gatwa, barely features (black airmen only start appearing in the penultimate episode, though the point is made that real-life second world war black airmen weren’t permitted to fly on missions until long after their white counterparts). Brits are routinely portrayed as snide and snooty. As for women, forget it. Fair enough, it’s called Masters of the Air, but it comes to something when Bel Powley’s intriguing military officer is fobbed off with about 30 seconds of backstory.
Overall, the result feels mixed: syrupy, jingoistic, with MIA characterisation and a sense of sexed-up war, rather than human cost. (It’s not a patch on Edward Berger’s visceral 2022 remake of the film All Quiet on the Western Front, which cost Netflix a mere £20m.) Still, Masters… could be worth a look for the aerial combat scenes alone: sky ballets of death that place you with the men, inside the blood-spattered cockpits, breathing in their valour and terror.
On Channel 4, there’s another kind of conflict, with Tom Barrow’s engrossing three-part docuseries Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain. With the first instalment dealing with how the strike divided the tight-knit mining town of Shirebrook in Derbyshire (striking miners versus working miners), there’s the sense of a real-life Sherwood (James Graham’s 2022 crime drama set in a Nottinghamshire mining district still riven by strike-era enmities).
In this series, there are oral histories from those involved, including miners, their families, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) officials, police, reporters and lawyers. Then there’s stark 1980s footage: NUM leader Arthur Scargill locking horns with then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, but also frenzied picket lines, with working miners and their families taunted as “scabs”.
The second episode focuses on police brutality, including the battle of Orgreave in South Yorkshire (still denied a public inquiry), where trumped-up riot charges with huge potential sentences eventually resulted in legal victory for the miners. The third features political and legal machinations and shadowy manipulators (a Thatcher adviser called David Hart gives me proto-Dominic Cummings chills).
This style of no-frills documentary-making works well with the charged material, giving an even-handed account of the corrosion of pit closures and the intimidation of strike-breakers. I would have liked more about actual mining and its impact on physical health. It’s left to Yorkshire miner Arthur Critchlow to unsentimentally describe it: “Hard, filthy, full of dust… If you go to the toilet, you dig a hole and you bury it.” If that’s not keeping social history real, what is?
Lulu Wang’s Expats (Amazon Prime Video) is a six-part arthouse quasi-thriller set in Hong Kong, based on Janice YK Lee’s 2016 novel. It features a doomed triptych of entwined female characters: Nicole Kidman is a wealthy wife buckling when her small son goes missing; Ji-young Yoo plays a troubled Korean-American; Sarayu Blue is an Indian-born businesswoman whose marriage is crumbling.
Expats works as a complex 21st-century parable touching on grief, guilt, sex, lies, money, childlessness and disappointment. The longer (90-minute) fifth episode is beautifully shot, vibrantly juxtaposing the rain-swept 2014 umbrella protests with a segue into the lives of staff (“helpers”) and their relationships with their ultimately selfish employers.
Yoo delivers a character, part vulnerable, part scratchy and cynical, who marks her out as one to watch. However, as clever and poised as Expats is, it leans too hard into arty longueurs, making it interesting but hard going. Nor, apart from the fifth episode, is there that much of a feel of Hong Kong. This elite could be anywhere, but maybe that’s the point.
David & Jay’s Touring Toolshed (BBC Two) is a spin-off from The Repair Shop, showing on weeknights over three weeks. TRS’s Jay Blades and actor David Jason (a former electrician, don’t you know) drive around Britain (towing an actual toolshed) to airshows, steam festivals et al, offering expert help to like-minded tinkerers busy repairing, creating and upcycling.
In the episodes I’ve seen, there’s everything from automaton heads to art made from old planes via refurbished holiday coaches. Blades and Jason, both sporting flat caps, banter, bicker and grumble like ersatz father and son. This kind of sweet, ordinary madness needs a name (tink-core?), but really it’s British eccentricity at its unshowiest and finest. TV balm for the soul.
Star ratings (out of five)
Masters of the Air ★★★
Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain ★★★★
Expats ★★★
David & Jay’s Touring Toolshed ★★★
What else I’m watching
The Traitors
(BBC One)
The final episodes! At the time of writing, I don’t know the winner, but what a cracking second series it’s been. The drama, the pathos, the format tweaks, the leaks about the subpar breakfasts (dry croissants, apparently). Roll on, series three.
Sexy Beast
(Paramount Plus)
Eight-part prequel to the cult British gangster film, starring James McArdle and Emun Elliott (in the Ray Winstone/Ben Kingsley roles). It’s overstylised a la Guy Ritchie and violent, but also snappy, witty and exciting.
Wilderness with Simon Reeve
(BBC Two)
A new series in which explorer Reeve ventures forth into the remotest of wildernesses. First stop: a dense rainforest in the Congo.
