Section:GDN 12 PaGe:18 Edition Date:190906 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 5/9/2019 16:15 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian
18 Friday 6 September 2019
Benidorm’s creator, Derren Litten, turns
his attention to another legendary
seaside destination, one where life
revolves around karaoke night in
the local pub. After a few wobbles,
hairdresser Karen (ex-Corrie and future
Strictly star Catherine Tyldesley) and
arcade manager Mike (Jason Manford)
are trying to make a go of it. T he writing
is both warm and wicked, while Claire
Sweeney brings some powerful energy
as the local man-eater.
Graeme VirtueBBC Proms 2019:
Shanghai Symphony
Orchestra
7.30pm, BBC Four
A well-constructed
evening of music sees
the Shanghai Symphony
Orchestra make their
Proms debut under
Long Yu. They perform
Qigang Chen’s The Five
Elements, Rachmaninov’s
Symphonic Dances and
a rendition of Mozart’s
Piano Concerto No 23 in A.
Mike BradleyMortimer &
Whitehouse:
Gone Fishing
8pm, BBC Two
To bring a cackling close
to another collection of
angling adventures, the
comedians head to the
Yorkshire Dales on a quest
to lure “the lady of the
stream” – the increasingly
scarce grayling – from the
shallows of the River Ure.
Topics include “angling
Subbuteo”, plus we meet a
surprise guest. MBThe Berlin Wall: Escape
to Freedom
9pm, PBS America
“Imagine your city
becomes a prison
overnight – a prison
sealed off by a deadly
mega-wall,” begins the
macho commentaryto this melodramatic
US documentary. But
bear with it and you
are likely to glean some
good cold war history
behind a barrage of
cliches and a cock-rock
soundtrack. MBThe Rob Rinder Verdict
10pm, Channel 4
Judge Rinder has well
and truly broken free
from the confi nes of
the courtroom for his
topical comedy show. But
he’s still the country’s
leading legislative
body when it comes to
acerbic one-liners and
comic common sense.
As Rinder administers
his own brand of justice,
the laughs are likely
to keep on coming.
Hannah VerdierFront Row Late
11.05pm, BBC Two
As the literary non-
event of the year – the
emergence of David
Cameron’s autobiography- looms, Mary Beard
brings her cultural
review back for a panel
discussion about what
makes a good memoir.
Thoughts on this come
from Germaine Greer and
Boy With the Topknot
author Sathnam Sanghera.
Jack Seale
Vulpine ...
Russell Crowe as
Roger AilesScarborough
9.30pm, BBC One
And
another
thingI have had to
turn all news
off this week.
How those who
don’t manage
to survive the
strain I do not
know, but hats
off to you.Review The Loudest Voice,
Sky Atlantic
tires of him almost as quickly as his beleaguered crew
does; the great diff erence being that we have the option
to walk away without consequence and enjoy the rest of
our lives without him.
More challenging, at least dramatically speaking,
is the fact that Fox News is now old news. We are so
steeped in its results and ramifi cations that it is hard
even to see Ailes as the visionary he undoubtedly
was. The political strategist in him knew early on
that his success would again lie in “turning out the
base” – in this case, the half of the country that didn’t
recognise itself in the liberal media or messages
and were ripe for the picking by someone who gave
them a non-mealy-mouthed alternative. Thus the
news channel engineered to create precisely that ,
with the chutzpah of sporting the motto “Fair and
balanced” obscuring the deliberate uncoupling from
any journalistic or professional standards that might
have made it so.
The problems of The Loudest Voice’s own making
are simply that, from the prosthetics used to turn
Crowe into the fat, balding Ailes and Sienna Miller
into a facsimile of his wife, Beth, to the script, it’s
not good enough. Not in a landscape dominated by
excoriating documentaries on similar subjects and
by stylish and sophisticated limited series such as
Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story anthology that
manage to reconstruct real-life events compellingly
while using them to scrutinise American history
and illuminate current aff airs in new, important
and broadly appealing ways. The Loudest Voice
is a straightforward retelling of an essentially
straightforward story, and it won’t do. This goes
double for the prosthetics. Crowe’s bald head is barely
one step up from a beige swimming cap with wire wool
stuck around the edges.
There is so much gone to waste here. It could have
been an unsettlingly detailed look at how the big
players widened – then smashed – the Overton window ,
making any and all ideas, however hateful, not just
tolerable in public but eventually unchallengeable
by any civilised means. It could have been a forensic
dismantling of the fake news phenomenon and
its co-option by increasingly malevolent forces,
or an interrogation of the neglect of people in
American heartlands that left them so desperate for
representation and a saviour. It could have been any
number of things, but it has settled for being a study
of one man and the showcase for Crowe’s bid for an
Emmy – which he may deserve, if only for trying to do
so much with so little.
It has – at least in the few episodes made available
late in the day in the UK ( in the interests of fairness and
balance, I should note that I have heard rumours of
improvement in the latter half of the series) – about as
much light and shade as the thunderously arrogant and
relentlessly ambitious Ailes did himself.★★☆☆☆
TV and radio
A
nother day, another programme about
a mighty man hoist on the petard of
his own misogyny as the #MeToo era
dawns. This time it’s a dramatised
account rather than a documentary- The Loudest Voice is a seven-part
miniseries starring Russell Crowe as Roger Ailes, the
former Republican strategist who was hired by Rupert
Murdoch in 1995 and a year later gave television Fox
News, the truth-mauling ratings monster that would end
up eating the world.
We fi rst meet Ailes as he is fi red from CNN as a
result of the sexual harassment allegations piling up
against him. It will come as no surprise to learn that
his behaviour does not markedly change once he
has his own news network to run. As he gathers his
team about him, men are recruited on the basis of
their killer instincts and ethical detachment, women
on the basis of whether they look good in skirts and
don’t kick up a fuss when he makes his predatory
moves on them.
The problems that The Loudest Voice faces are
many – some inherent to the subject, some of its own
making. Among the former (leaving aside the additional
diffi culties presented by a UK audience nowhere
near as steeped in Fox lore as the production’s native
one) is the fact that Ailes remains throughout such
a deeply unpleasant, one-dimensional character (as
megalomaniacs tend to be). Without much in the way of
a developmental – let alone redemptive – arc, the viewer
One-dimensional
portrait of the
Fox in the
henhouse
Lucy Mangan
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