The Guardian - 31.07.2019

Section:GDN 12 PaGe:14 Edition Date:190731 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 30/7/2019 16:07 cYanmaGentaYellowbl

• The Guardian
  14 Wednesday 31 July 2019

Welcome to the Isle of Man’s only

prison, the cosiest corner of the British

Isles’ criminal justice system, with one

guard for every prisoner and some of

the lowest re off ending rates in Europe.

Custodial sentences in the crown

dependency have been handed out for

“hitting [one’s] elderly mother over the

head with a rolled-up Hello! magazine”

and “stealing four pork pies”, so this fi lm

is a fairly civilised aff air. The hang ’em

and fl og ’em brigade won’t be pleased,

but everyone else seems quite content.

Ellen E Jones

George Clarke’s Council

House Scandal

9pm, Channel 4

As the 100th anniversary

of council housing in the

UK approaches, George

Clarke presents an

interesting documentary

that follows his campaign

to launch a new wave

of council-house

construction. He meets

architects of the past and

evaluates the best and

worst examples on off er.

Mike Bradley

Der Pass

9pm, Sky Atlantic

You had better be good

if you are going to replace

Gomorrah – fortunately,

this eight-part Austrian/

German frontier crime

drama is exactly that.

A novel narrative

structure and a canny

fl ashback technique

enhance a dark tale that

starts on a border pass

with the discovery of a

frozen body posed as if

killed for a pagan ritual.

MB

Better Things

10pm, BBC Two

The textured sitcom

created by and starring

Pamela Adlon as a harried

single mother of three

continues its second

season. After a poetry

event fl irtation with

tender single dad Robin

(Henry Thomas, a long

way from E T ), Sam accepts

his off er of a wine-tasting

weekend, much to the

chagrin of her off spring.

Graeme Virtue

Million Pound

Handjobs

10pm, Channel 5

See past the

provocative title and

what you have here is a

worthwhile fi lm about

hand modelling, looking

at celebrity doubles,

supermodels you have

never heard of and the

secret of a good-looking

hand. Plus, we meet a

couple who regularly

walk away with £5 ,000

for a day’s work. MB

sMothered

10pm, TLC

Sharing a plastic

surgeon is the norm for

the mother-daughter

duos featured in this

provocative new show.

To say they are close

is an understatement:

their clothes and faces

are almost identical and

all hell breaks loose if a

daughter doesn’t answer

their phone. Of course,

secrets emerge – and

screaming matches

follow.  Hannah Verdier

Jason Atherton

(third left) with

his chefs and his

team of hopefuls

The Best Little Prison

in Britain? 8pm, ITV

And

another

thing

I made it all the

way to the fi nal

of Love Island.

By which I mean

not watching

any of it, thus

sparing you my

perspective.

You’re welcome.

Review The Chefs’ Brigade,

BBC Two

kits, so that Atherton could inspect their knives and

equipment. Daisy, 26, inexplicably turned up with

no kit. And I mean literally inexplicably – if there

was an explanation, we didn’t hear it. Did she miss

an email? Were her knives confi scated at the airport?

Had she sold them to pay for pastry lessons? “I know

it’s not extremely professional, but that’s just what’s

happened,” she said, in a drawl so posh it seemed to

bend space. Scene missing, or what?

This opening episode focused on a few of the

brigade, while others were barely named. After cooking

one meal together, two were demoted to the status

of black-aproned kitchen porters: Stephen, for being

so headstrong; and Shiv am, for being barely there.

Soon enough, Shiv am, diffi dent and homesick, was

sent packing.

I understand that diff erent characters are destined

to emerge over time, but very little of what we saw was

left to chance. This is the sort of programme in which

people keep sitting down for scheduled conversations

about their emotions, with Atherton in the role of

tough - guy therapist.

During training, he discovered Daisy out by the

cacti on the back terrace, feeling overwhelmed. “When

you feel that anxiety, is it like the walls are closing in?”

he asked, when he should have said: “What the hell

happened to your knives?” In the end, he chose to

be supportive.

“A brigade is also like a family,” he said. “We’re not

just some macho machine, where anything that gets in

the way we chew up and spit out.” Tell that to Shivam.

Shivam’s replacement, Livia, is destined to be

such a favourite that it is hard to imagine why she

was relegated to the reserves bench in the fi rst place.

One suspects her late entry into episode one was a bit

of narrative engineering.

Overall, there was a refreshing lack of kitchen

machismo on display. Early on, the tendency for the

boys to talk over and ignore the girls was exposed

and criticised. Atherton himself has a knack for being

exacting without being a bully. None of the shrieking

and swearing that has become part of the mythology

of professional cooking’s hierarchy was on display.

Strangely, for a show about food, The Chefs’ Brigade

contain ed minimal cooking, mostly limited to decorative

shots of hands saucing plates. A few techniques were

demonstrated by Atherton over the course of the

training, but it wasn’t fi lmed in a manner that was

meant to make you care about – or even understand –

what was taking place.

I accept that this is not a show about how to bone

a  guinea fowl. Clearly, this is going to be a series about

the psychological highs and lows involved in forging a

tight-knit crew under pressure – which is fi ne, unless

I already feel I have been manipulated on that score.

I just don’t understand why I couldn’t be trusted with

the story of what happened to Daisy’s knives.

★★★☆☆

TV and radio

J

ason Atherton has the intense air of a man

who rarely has to raise his voice before his

wishes are accommodated. He radiates

an iron calm, but you get the feeling you

wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. And that

he really, really wouldn’t like you.

With four Michelin stars and 18 restaurants, Atherton

relies on strong kitchen teams for the success of his

empire. In The Chefs’ Brigade , he attempts to build such

a team from scratch, out of cooks with only basic skills,

cherrypicked from the pubs, cafes and bistros of the

land. Once the brigade is assembled, he takes it on a tour

of Europe, training his charges to compete against the

fi nest restaurants on the continent. First stop: Puglia

in south-east Italy.

The central battle was a competition between the

brigade and a local chef – same venue, same menu,

diff erent nights. Atherton’s raw recruits ha d just four

days to practi se under the ever-present threat of instant

dismissal, with a clutch of reserves waiting back home

to replace the m.

This kind of reality TV is rarely tainted by even a

whiff of reality. For all the talk of skills and hard work,

this is more like winning a ticket to Willy Wonka’s

factory: chosen through some kind of lottery, dazzled

by possibility and gin-infused cuttlefi sh, set a series of

artifi cial challenges, then booted out for not being up

to one of them.

In Puglia, the team arrived at a converted farmhouse,

where the trainees were asked to present their chef ’s

A dazzling

cookery challenge

worthy of

Willy Wonka

Tim Dowling

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