After an hour of Monty Don’s British Gardens (BBC2, Friday) I was so chilled I couldn’t argue with anyone about anything. Not that his new five-part series is without strong views; it’s just that Monty expresses them in such a charming way.
The first part of the trip started in Scotland and went on to Northumberland. Monty was well- chuffed with the direction of travel. “I’m half Scottish and whenever I come to Scotland there’s a real sense of coming home,” he said. “I love it.”
Beginning at Inverewe he went on to Drummond Castle before dropping in on a project that runs gardening classes for primary pupils. Then it was on to Glasgow and a place he was even more effusive about – the Kibble Palace in the Botanic Gardens. “The best glasshouse in the world,” he called it, and having worked there myself once I wholeheartedly agree. He wasn’t done yet. “One of the great landmarks of Glasgow”; “One of the great buildings in Scotland”; “One of the best glasshouse experiences anywhere in the world”. You get the drift.
Just don’t ask him to spend a lot of time on a tour of the futuristic Crawick Multiverse with its famous mounds. “I was slightly unimpressed,” he said of one. “It looked to me like a standing stone Walnut Whip.”
The standing stones themselves, representing the multiverse, were “a bit scruffy, proportions a bit wrong, just not working on any level for me at least”. All right Monty, keep yer scarf on.
New drama Playing Nice (ITV1, Sunday-Monday) was doing anything but playing nice with viewers’ nerves. It opened with a nightmarish vision of what looked like a toddler floating in the sea. Bad enough, but then it rewound three months to a couple being told that there had been “a serious issue” at the maternity ward and they had gone home with the wrong baby.
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How often does that happen, I wondered. I would have asked Inspector Google to investigate further but there was no time because “the other dad” was at the door arranging a meet.
The blistering pace was necessary. Left with more time to think, the viewer might have wondered if they wanted to take this trip at all, which would have been a pity. Adapted from the novel by JP Delaney, Playing Nice was a moreish slice of pulp fiction played out in gorgeous Cornwall. Sun, sea and crazy storyline.
The two couples could scarcely have been more different. Pete and Maddie (James Norton, below, and Niamh Algar) were Guardian-reading types, she was a chef, he was an ex-journalist turned stay-at-home dad. Miles and Lucy (James McArdle, Jessica Brown Findlay), were more your loadsamoney Torygraph readers. Both families wanted the best for the children, but trying to achieve it was soon bringing out the worst in them, especially Miles, the pushy Weegie.
Playing Nice (Image: ITV)
As is the law in such dramas, nothing was quite as it seemed, and being a git at the outset was no guide to future behaviour. To pull such a daring story off required serious acting chops and the Playing Nice top team had them in abundance. Hard to choose between Norton (Happy Valley), Brown Findlay (Downton Abbey) McArdle (Sexy Beast), and Algar (Malpractice), so gold stars all round.
The presence of some people in the television world is somehow reassuring, don’t you find? Sir David Attenborough, for example, or STV News’ John MacKay. The barbarians may be through the gate and have their feet on the table, but as long as these two are still calmly plying their trade things might just be okay.
To that list I would add the presenter of Simon Schama’s Story of Us (BBC2, Wednesday), although he did not get off to a cheery start. “We live in divided times,” said the historian, “an age of rising populism and tribal identity politics.” Tell us about it. On the upside, “our common culture” had seen us through before and would, one hoped, do so again.
Thus Schama took a trip through the postwar culture of Britain, from the Festival of Britain to Jarvis Cocker via Albert Finney and Ali Smith (below, with Schama). As ever, there were no obvious or dull choices to illustrate his arguments.
The script rattled along, his phrases smoothly turned and his delight infectious, as when he opened Alan Sillitoe’s original script for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. “There it is!” he cried, reading the title.
Simon Schama looked at post-war life in Britain (Image: BBC)
I had to laugh when he interviewed Cliff Richard for a segment on religion and the counterculture and confessed that his younger self once dreamed of being the Cliffster. What a funny old world that would have been.
He ended the first of three episodes with, oddly enough, a tale involving David Attenborough. Only two more episodes to go. Treasure them.