the times | Thursday October 15 2020 1GT 11
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Assignment:
Reza’s Story
BBC World Service, 9.06amFour years ago the Afghan
TV journalist Said Reza
Adib received a death threat
while working on a story
about the sexual abuse of
children by powerful men
in Afghanistan. Adib, above,
fled to neighbouring Iran,
the start of a dangerous
odyssey for him, his wife
and two small sons. The
family ducked gunfire on
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overcrowded makeshift
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and survived refugee camps
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thetimes.co.uk/bulletinsUrban Myths
Sky Arts
{{{{(Henry VIII: Rise of a Tyrant
Channel 5
{{{((U
rban Myths work better
when they focus on
comedians (cf last week’s
offering on Les Dawson)
because when things get
flimsy, which tends to be often, you
have their body of one-liners to fall
back on. And Joan Rivers was a
human gag-machine, as Sue Perkins’s
fizzy, nimble script showed from
the first seconds.
Rivers, complaining about climbing
umpteen flights of rickety stairs to a
ramshackle theatre in 1958 New York,said that her vagina was about to
prolapse and become a “trip hazard”.
From then on it was a brilliant
Katherine Ryan as Rivers who was the
engine of this Urban Myths, stealing
every scene and the actor you were
always watching. The action, such as
there was, centred on the rehearsals
for a play, Driftwood, starring Rivers
and a 16-year-old unknown called
Barbra Streisand in which the two
women were asked to kiss.
Urban Myths take liberties with
the facts, but it is true that Rivers
had a strained relationship with
her parents. Perkins had them so
scandalised by the on-stage lady kiss
that they walked out of the theatre,
her father having held a handbag over
his wife’s eyes to prevent her seeing it,
which was quite funny. “What do you
do when the people who are supposed
to love you think you are a piece of
shit?” Rivers asked.
If the drama had a flaw it was that
Streisand was so slight a character, so
unremarkable apart from her singing
voice (which she didn’t seem to realise
was good), that she was quite boring.
Rivers made jokes about her nose
(“human sundial”; “the shade coming
off your hooter”), although Jessica
Barden, who played Streisand, did
not have that big a conk despite the
prosthetics (and I speak as an expert).
Yet Ryan was a powerhouse. “It’s so
cold you could hang a wet ballgownoff my nipples,” she said. I’ll be
plagiarising that line this winter.
It’s hard to imagine that there could
possibly be anything new to say about
Henry VIII, but Rise of a Tyrant had
access to the Vatican library where a
16th-century Italian diplomat had
written an appraisal of Cardinal
Wolsey. The narration said that the
Vatican had “never given permission
for it to be filmed before”, although it
wasn’t clear why on earth not.
It told how Wolsey could strum the
lute, sing and tell jokes, but that he
manipulated Henry by flattery and
stealth, treating him almost like a
child. This was interesting, but the
documentary spent so little time on it
that it hardly seemed worth the
Easyjet fare to Rome.
It used dramatic reconstructions and
actors to depict the young and middle-
aged Henry, telling us that he had
been a mummy’s boy who exhibited
pathological behaviour, which will
come as a surprise to absolutely no
one. He also appeared to suffer from
OCD and paranoia and had difficulty
looking people in the eye.
The grimmest detail was his
treatment of the Duke of Buckingham.
He hired an incompetent executioner
to chop off the duke’s head so it took
three blows to sever his neck. Nice.
The thing about Henry VIII is that he
might have been an absolute bastard,
Jessica Barden as Streisand and Katherine Ryan as Rivers but he’s never boring.A funny, fizzing kiss-and-tell tale of two divas
CRAIG SUGDEN/SKYCarol
Midgley
TV review