The Bear (Disney+)
The Sixth Commandment (BBC One) | iPlayer
Rosie Jones: Am I a R*tard? (Channel 4) | channel4.com
University Challenge (BBC Two) | iPlayer
What is it about Disney+’s The Bear that makes it so riveting? The first series of Christopher Storer’s Chicago restaurant comedy drama exploded like a chip-pan fire no wet tea towel could put out. The Emmy nominations showered down like pepper-mill grindings.
Yet, watching the second series, sometimes you wonder if the characters are just a bunch of workaholics who should probably be stopped. A culinary cult, a Waco of spatulas and griddles, led by head chef, Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), himself a human bit-pot of unresolved mental health issues. The food porn lies in plain sight: this time, sous chef Sydney (the ever-luminous Ayo Edebiri) makes an omelette that looks so delicious you can almost smell it. But it’s the work porn, or vocation porn, you have to watch out for. In The Bear, every person, every emotion, every trajectory, is sublimated to the needs of the kitchen. Is this healthy? Such are our emotionally starved times, The Bear somehow manages to make it feel like an honour to watch people care far too much.
While the first series was about saving Carmy’s dead brother’s sandwich shop, the second 10-parter gives the crew three (cash-poor, soul-annihilating) months to turn it into a high-end establishment. It’s all finely done: there are nods to post-pandemic industry freefall; characters are given richer backstories; guest appearances abound (Jamie Lee Curtis delivers such an open wound of an Italian-American matriarch, it’s like Carmela Soprano with extra toppings). Carmy even gets a love interest (Molly Gordon), his emotional defences crumbling like fresh pecorino.
At first, though, it’s slow. I love gentle giant pastry-savant Marcus (Lionel Boyce); not so much his dreary trip to Copenhagen learning how to perfect quenelles (with Will Poulter). However, just as I’m fidgeting, wondering why there isn’t more of series one rock star Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s combustible Richie, The Bear rises on its hind legs and becomes a killer, roaring into slathering, brilliant life. In particular, an extended mid-series flashback episode (no spoilers here) is an exhilarating tour de force.
From there, the series ignites: a scorching, shooting blue flame of humour, intensity, camaraderie, disaster, passion. If it sometimes seems like a television prescription for workaholism, the professional kitchen presented as a proxy for the human soul, The Bear gets away with it.
Days after watching it, I’m still winded by the four-part BBC One true crime drama The Sixth Commandment – the choking sadness of the story, the sheer weight of the cruelty. Writer Sarah Phelps (A Very British Scandal) has written Agatha Christie dramas, and this new work has one of the key Christie motifs of sheltered innocents consumed by dark forces, though, sadly, this time for real.
Timothy Spall plays Peter Farquhar, the semi-retired English master, formerly of Stowe school, whose chaste religiosity, repressed homosexuality and naivety made him the perfect mark for younger malignant love-bomber Ben Field (Éanna Hardwicke). Field tricks Farquhar into a “betrothal”, gets him to change his will, then drugs him, slanders him, before taking his life. Next, Field gaslights and dopes Farquhar’s elderly religious Maids Moreton neighbour Ann Moore-Martin (Anne Reid).
The entire cast is brilliant, but Spall is astounding as the gifted scholar with the unworldly blind spot, thrilled by what he believes to be a late-life miracle of the heart. Hardwicke is also outstanding as the “delightful young man” masking greed and narcissism with a bright smile and a crucifix. Although the two later episodes dealing with the police investigation and court case aren’t as compelling, this is a powerful drama that’s as much about the padded scallop headboards and vulnerabilities of old age as it is about murder. There’s true crime as it too often is (base, grubby, sensationalist, focused on the perpetrator), then there are dramas like this, which give victims their humanity and dignity.
Can a vile term be used for good? Rosie Jones, the comic with cerebral palsy, hopes so. Her Channel 4 documentary, Rosie Jones: Am I a R*tard?, arrives dogged by controversy. While you understand why the provocative title made some contributors pull out, it’s clear that Jones couldn’t be more serious about tackling ableism (prejudice against disabled people) head-on.
Her documentary isn’t a jokey attempt to normalise the “r” word or sanitise ableist hate speech. If Jones isn’t exposing rape and death threats and denigrations of her and others in real life and online (“She should be in a cage”; “Ugly overweight lesbian spastic”), she’s challenging troll-enabling social media outlets. At one point she wittily leaves a giant baked Am I a R*tard? cookie at Twitter UK.
Unfortunately, when Jones finally gets a troll to (anonymously) talk to her, his motivations (“We’re just people that are a little bit broken inside”) aren’t particularly revelatory. Exploring why people do it is valid, but as this spirited documentary makes clear, how to stop them, and how to make social media outlets take responsibility, is even more pressing.
Amol Rajan is everywhere: one-time newspaper editor, latest Radio 4 Today host, documentary presenter and star TV interviewer earning approximately £339,000 according to the BBC’s pay list… You get the feeling he’d appear in EastEnders if they let him.
Now Rajan hosts the newly refurbished University Challenge, only the third presenter after Bamber Gascoigne and Jeremy Paxman, and his first episode (Trinity College, Cambridge v the University of Manchester)… goes nicely.
Admittedly, Rajan looks strangely small in the seat, like a Lego-man Scotty from Star Trek. He reads questions from a screen instead of cards, which means (tut, tut) wayward hands. While his diction is clear, he sometimes asks questions so fast it verges on Channel 4 Racing.
Still, he doesn’t make the mistake of copying his predecessors, and he’s natural and nice (“Wow”; “You got there in the end”) with contestants (as I knew he would be, after watching his great documentaries on youth and class). It doesn’t hurt that the opener is exciting, ending in a tie-break. Fingers on buzzers those who thought he did pretty well.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Bear ★★★★
The Sixth Commandment ★★★★
Rosie Jones: Am I a R*tard? ★★★
University Challenge ★★★★
What else I’m watching
Earth
(BBC Two)
Chris Packham’s new series, a “biography” of our planet, goes back 252m years to depict mass extinction events. It’s all here, including apocalyptic CGI graphics, stark warnings and trowels digging into cliff walls for the truth.
Fifteen-Love
(Amazon Prime Video)
A tennis coach/sexual misconduct thriller starring Aidan Turner and Ella Lily Hyland. It’s a missed (oversoapy) opportunity, but watchable in a glossy-meets-slimy, Liar-esque way.
The Secrets of Hillsong
(Disney+)
An absorbing if scattershot four-part docuseries about the Hillsong megachurch phenomenon of groovy, denim-clad “rock star” preachers eventually involving allegations of abuse, wrongdoing and financial mismanagement.
