Whites Only: Ade’s Extremist Adventure Channel 4 | channel4.com
3 Body Problem Netflix
Palm Royale Apple TV+
Jordan North: The Truth About Vaping (BBC Three) | iPlayer
Where to start with the Channel 4 documentary Whites Only: Ade’s Extremist Adventure? It’s one of the tensest you are likely to see all year. British Paralympian Ade Adepitan is the first black person to stay (for a week) in the South African whites-only Afrikaner town of Orania. In a global climate of attacks on multiculturalism, Adepitan asks if “racial separatism can ever be justified”.
Established in 1991 after apartheid, funded by political parties and groups around the world, Orania (population: about 3,000) has the long-term goal of becoming a “fully fledged Afrikaner nation state” the size of England. It just looks like an ordinary, neatly fenced rural town, albeit with guns, but it’s Adepitan’s interactions with residents that count. It doesn’t seem long before the Oranians’ rehearsed-feeling civility slides into blank-eyed evasion and attempted gaslighting.
They talk about riots and power cuts elsewhere in South Africa (anything but race). How anyone can apply to live in Orania (so long as they speak fluent Afrikaans, follow Afrikaner traditions and the rest). Taken to see statues of apartheid founders, Adepitan is told, straight-faced, that apartheid’s (only) mistake was to outsource manual labour to black people.
For me, the most shocking scene occurs at Orania’s school. A grim play is performed with Adepitan explaining the plot for viewers: “Two man-eating monsters… they look like monkeys. They’re uncivilised and stupid… outwitted by their clever, fair-skinned neighbours.” It feels akin to a trolling of Adepitan himself. Mainly sharing his thoughts to camera in private, the increasingly strained presenter finally gets irritated with an Oranian man who weaves Black Lives Matter into a muddled discussion about democracy not adequately serving small groups.
For Orania, Whites Only… is a failed PR exercise, a bizarre, bungled bid for global legitimacy. Unfortunately, the documentary itself feels confused and unconfident, even with Adepitan’s tougher final interview with the town’s former mayor, who dismisses multiculturalism as “social engineering”. Oddly, the main problem is Adepitan’s biggest strength: his buoyant positivity. Why try to understand something as odious and obvious as “racial separatism”? Why tie yourself into appeasing knots?
In fairness, the presenter is in an impossible situation. He has to avoid getting kicked out of Orania (even his brief BLM tussle leads to cancelled interviews). Moreover, unlike Louis Theroux, who did a memorable Weird Weekend about Boer separatists, Adepitan isn’t just an outsider, he’s also black. How dispiriting and frightening this experience must have been, how confronting? I end up wondering who could have pulled off this documentary (David Harewood? David Olusoga?), but I’m mainly left with Adepitan’s stress pouring from the screen, and the stress of watching it.
Over to Netflix, for the long-awaited eight-part futuristic thriller 3 Body Problem, the first new project from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and DB Weiss (along with Alexander Woo). You have to hand it to them: it’s no GoT rehash. Based on Chinese author Liu Cixin’s cult sci-fi opus, there’s zero dragon action and zilch medieval cosplaying (unless you count some hot Tudor doublets in historically themed virtual reality sequences).
Instead, you get modern-day eco-vandalism, flashbacks to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, quantum physics and a lot of earnest, cerebral woo-woo about preparing for an alien invasion in (erm) 400 years’ time (so much for dramatic urgency). Some GoT personnel are around: Jonathan Pryce is a cult leader on a ship; Liam Cunningham plays an enigmatic security head; John Bradley’s character is part of a group of genius young physicists.
3 Body Problem suffers from a concept-heavy, near-indigestible opening episode (you may need a couple of tea breaks to get through it). After that, it can be mind-blowing, with the young physicists plonking on chrome helmets to venture into virtual reality (under vast lethal suns, human bodies dehydrate, to be rolled up like yoga mats. Wow!). Notable performances include Jess Hong as one of the young physicists and Benedict Wong as a dishevelled investigator who appears to have the same stylist as Jackson Lamb from Slow Horses.
Could it be a hit? Six episodes in, sometimes 3 Body Problem seems immense, other times a tad too similar to other Netflix time/dimension-bending fare (1899, Bodies, et al). If it tanks, it would be interesting to know how many viewers are shed halfway watching the unwieldy opener.
A dramedy about a gatecrasher infiltrating a hyper-bitchy female elite at a Palm Beach country club in 1969? Based on Juliet McDaniel’s book Mr & Mrs American Pie, Abe Sylvia’s 10-part Palm Royale sounded right up my shrub-lined boulevard.
Kristen Wiig plays Maxine, a plucky former Chattanooga pageant queen who’s desperate to befriend the moneyed, obnoxious Palm Royale club Queen Bees, headed by Evelyn (Allison Janney) and Dinah (Leslie Bibb). Ricky Martin plays a suspicious bartender; comedian Carol Burnett is Maxine’s husband’s wealthy aunt (first spied in a coma); and Laura Dern drips around as an ultra-worthy, consciousness-raising hippy.
Palm Royale is perfectly watchable if you don’t demand too much of it. There’s a storming cast and the styling is pure TV candyfloss, featuring everything from cat- eye glasses to brocade muumuus. However, Maxine is mighty underpowered for a lead character, while period context is mainly provided by President Nixon occasionally appearing on television.
Most disastrously, Palm Royale isn’t sharp or funny enough, despite (or maybe because of) a demented attempt to be Desperate Housewives, Mad Men, Big Little Lies, and The White Lotus all at once. These days, to satirise any wealthy elite, you’ve got to go in fangs-first, bloodily feasting on every last bit of hypocrisy and venality. Palm Royale prefers to splash around in a bubble bath of aimless subplots.
Are vapes bad for you? What nasties are in them? As the UK government moves to ban disposable vapes (in part to discourage use among children), the BBC Three documentary Jordan North: The Truth About Vaping tries to get to the heart (and lungs) of the matter.
Radio DJ and TV presenter North – a vaper – encounters scientists, toxicologists and officials seizing counterfeit vapes. He looks at genuine vapes (annual sales: more than £1.3bn), and also the booming market in illegal ones, which can contain formaldehyde, lead and toxic levels of nicotine. Some young people who are addicted to vapes have never smoked cigarettes.
North seems genuinely interested in the subject, his eyes anxiously widening as he puffs away during an oxygen test (indeed, his lungs turn out to be a little older than he is). This 30-minute documentary zips along at a hectic pace, but it works well as a short, sharp cautionary tale.
Star ratings (out of five)
Whites Only: Ade’s Extremist Adventure Channel 4 ★★★
3 Body Problem ★★★
Palm Royale ★★★
Jordan North: The Truth About Vaping ★★★
What else I’m watching
The Gone
(BBC Four)
A twisty, absorbing New Zealand-set thriller. When a couple go missing from town, an Irish detective teams up with a Māori detective to investigate.
Hunted
(Channel 4)
The seventh series of the show in which teams of two try to evade capture by an elite squad. Always entertaining (lots of ranting and sweating in waterproof jackets), there’s a prize pot of £100,000 for those who elude the hunters.
The Dropout
(BBC One)
A chance to see the gripping hit drama (previously shown on Disney+). Amanda Seyfried is stylishly duplicitous as blood-testing fraudster Elizabeth Holmes.
