Paris Olympics 2024 (BBC/Eurosport/Discovery Plus)
Atomic People (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Saucy! Secrets of the British Sex Comedy (Channel 4) | channel4.com
House of the Dragon (Sky Atlantic)
Time to be frank: the Paris Olympics have sent us doolally, haven’t they? Or maybe that’s just moi. I’ve got those five rings burned on the back of my retina, like enchanted hoopla.
There’s so much to see. One day I was glued to the sofa watching the skateboarding, relishing 14-year-old female wunderkind Coco Yoshizawa’s win for Japan. Staged in a futuristic concrete jungle, La Concorde urban park, it’s like Squid Game meets school sports day. And the gymnastics! Without meaning to be reductive, I’ve got serious bling envy for the women’s leotards. It’s as if they’ve been rolled in diamond dust.
Over at La Défense Arena, there’s dark talk of a “slow pool” (too shallow or something) affecting swim times. The pools certainly host a fair amount of Team GB drama: Adam Peaty’s tears after he failed to defend his 100m breaststroke gold. Tom Daley and Noah Williams winning silver in the 10m synchro diving, flying off the platform together like muscular photocopies of one another. The victorious Chinese synchro team, Lian Junjie and Yang Hao, celebrated by jumping on to the medals podium in perfect unison.
Elsewhere, the incomparable Simone Biles swooped through uneven bars and charged over vaults to help the US win the team gymnastics gold (among the spectators, Tom Cruise and Ariana Grande gawped in awe). Back with Team GB, Tom Pidcock puffed, panted and barged his way to a hard-won gold in the cross-country mountain bike event after suffering that most British-seeming of setbacks – a badly timed puncture. We’d barely recovered from that when GB struck again, and indeed again, not least with Alex Yee wining the men’s triathlon, and the women’s skulls four rowing to gold medal glory in a photo finish.
It all felt a long way from the Paris Olympics’s farcical, rain-drenched opening ceremony, which will surely go down as the Heaven’s Gate of sporting spectaculars (at one point it looked as if Serena Williams was going to be tipped into the Seine). Due to the financing and rights palaver, at times the BBC is noticeably lagging behind in the coverage stakes (Eurosport and its Discovery+ app have wall-to-wall broadcasts of everything). The BBC can also come across a tad partisan, clucking over Team GB like an actual doting Auntie, even when they’re so out of the running, they’re practically still on the Eurostar.
Still, generally, Olympics telly is impressive – so close to the action, you’re getting high on Deep Heat fumes. It cut deep watching an emotional Andy Murray after he and doubles partner, Dan Evans, were defeated by Team USA’s Tommy Paul and Taylor Fritz. (Chin up, Andy, the Paris Olympics quarter final ain’t so shabby for the final match of your career). All these days in, I’m still waiting impatiently for the new breaking (breakdancing) event – give me people twizzling on their heads like it’s 1989! – but what sparks and larks. Who needs Marvel superpowers when human beings are this extraordinary?
From some of the best humanity has to offer to the unconscionable worst. Megumi Inman and Benedict Sanderson’s unsparing, feature-length documentary Atomic People (BBC Two) marks the forthcoming 79th anniversary of the bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US military to end the second world war.
Hundreds of thousands died, either instantly in the initial blasts, or later of radiation poisoning or cancers. Here, the appalling events are related by the survivors – hibakusha – who were mainly children when the bombs dropped. They vividly describe the explosions (“It felt like the sun had fallen”) and their aftermath. The charred babies (“black as coal”), the stains on the street where people had been. One saw her friend’s skin falling off (“I said: ‘Your face is dripping like candle wax’”).
The US government tried to cover up the aftermath (deaths, sickness, deformed foetuses). The hibakusha were shunned in their country as damaged goods, eventually joining forces as activists for medical care, compensation and to campaign for nuclear disarmament. With an average age of 85, they feel an ever-greater urgency to bear witness to “what happened under the mushroom cloud that day”.
Looking around (the likes of Vladimir Putin posturing with nuclear weapons as though they were water pistols), I can see why. While Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer sought to capture the crushing horror of causing mass death, Atomic People gives voice to those at the sharp end.
I’ll say this for the two-part Channel 4 docuseries Saucy! Secrets of the British Sex Comedy: it tries valiantly to be a serious sociological affair. For the blissfully unaware, British sex comedies were films (mainly made in the 1970s) that were ruder, more vulgar than the Carry On franchise, but still firmly in the quintessential “Oo-er, missus”/saucy seaside postcard camp of innuendo-fuelled British sexuality.
Pulling together stars, directors et al (including Robin Askwith from the mega-successful Confessions of a Window Cleaner and sundry sequels), Saucy! examines the lot: repressed 20th-century British mores (the infamous “dirty mac brigade”); to casualties (including actor Barry Evans, who had to hide his sexuality); old-style British film censors; and female actors rolling their eyes at the pre-#MeToo horror of the casting couch.
All this is interesting. Then the screen fills with clips from the actual films, and it’s game over for the serious societal appraisal. It’s just too much of a smörgåsbord of bare boobs, grunts (“Cor!”) and pale male bottoms undulating rather tragically.
Looking ahead to the second instalment, some dissenting voices are featured. One is Oliver Tobias (Joan Collins’s co-star in The Stud), who sits being sniffy in a cardigan so garish, chunky and cosy, it sets me off giggling uncontrollably. Saucy! is worth a look, but it’s difficult to take seriously.
An appeal to Sky Atlantic: attend to House of the Dragon (spoilers ahead)! I really enjoyed the first quartet of episodes in this second series, which blended subtlety and sulphurous tension, climaxing in savage, tragic dragon aerial combat.
Since then, there’s been an energy dip, and now we’ve reached the penultimate episode. Power-hungry Daemon (Matt Smith), by far the most compelling character, has been wasted in a satellite storyline where he mainly has tedious visions and dreams. Otto (Rhys Ifans) has gone awol. Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) is constantly auditioning “small folk” to become dragon riders. All it needs is a row of buttons and it could be Dragonstone’s Got Talent.
I’m still confident there’ll be a blowtorch of a finale, but HOTD needs to pick up the pace. The first series prowled and menaced like an actual dragon; the second increasingly feels as if it’s asleep in a giant dog basket.
Star ratings (out of five)
Paris Olympics 2024 ★★★★
Atomic People ★★★★
Saucy! Secrets of the British Sex Comedy ★★★
House of the Dragon ★★★
What else I’m watching
Cowboy Cartel
(Apple TV+)
Intense docuseries about a rookie FBI agent who cracked the case of one of Mexico’s most ruthless drug cartels-cum-money-laundering operations. Jaws will drop.
Love Island Final
(ITV2)
Big spoiler klaxon! Love Island isn’t what it was, but this latest series turned out to be watchable. It features reality star Joey Essex (The Only Way Is Essex). Also (that spoiler I mentioned), the first black couple to win.
Totally Completely Fine
(ITVX)
Dark, witty Australian comedy drama starring Thomasin McKenzie. Going to stay at her grandfather’s clifftop house, her character encounters people who want to use it as a suicide leap spot.
