Knee deep in nostalgia

TV REVIEW

Sunday night nostalgia continued with aplomb at the weekend with Upstairs Downstairs (BBC One) following hot on the heels of that other similar creature, the less than accurate but perplexingly popular Downton Abbey and the peculiarly successful Call the Midwife.

Heidi Thomas’ pen was behind Call the Midwife, which finished its run on Sunday with a whopping 9.2 million people tuning in to see comedian Miranda Hart’s character Camilla Fortescue-Cholmeley Browne, an unfeasibly posh woman with a gift for midwifery, tie the knot. Already commissioned for another series, it was, as far as I could make out, a cross between All Creatures Great and Small and Heartbeat spin-off The Royal.
Thomas is also behind Upstairs Downstairs, but if the Beeb is hoping to emulate the wildly successful Downton, events would want to pick up considerably. Opening with a substantially smaller viewership of 6.5 million, the main problem is it lacks a convincing script. The ingredients are all there for a cracking show. London in 1938 is filled with pre-war hysterics involving gas masks and sticky tape on windows, with a dollop of politics thrown in the pot for good measure. For all this, however, the opening episode somehow lacked punch. Ed Stoppard’s Hallam Holland found himself at the heart of the Munich Pact incident, yet there was more tension to be found in a tennis racket. Even Percy’s reappearance and wistful yammering about her wonderful life in Germany was drab. If ever there was a young lady that needed a good shake!
The show’s original creators and stars – Eileen Atkins and Jean Marsh – are also both missing, though Marsh may return when she recovers from a real-life stroke. Atkins’s matriarch, on the other hand, was central to the first season’s proceedings but is now an urn of ashes on the mantelpiece. Although Lady Agnes (Keely Hawes) tried to infuse her spirit in the house by quoting her stern-brow advice for the benefit of others, she doesn’t have the same ability to deliver a caustic line that Atkins offered, much akin to Maggie Smith’s Violet Crawley in Downton.
The absence is notable, although her interfering half-sister (Alex Kingston) is no doubt intended to fill the gap.
It isn’t all negative though – the first episode did have its moments, particularly the gassed monkey incident and revealing of butler Pritchard’s pacifist Quaker beliefs. Adrian Scarborough does rather well as the buttoned up Pritchard and is a wonderfully calm antithesis to Anne Reid’s bustling cook. So far, all the better moments have occurred Downstairs, now if only those above quarters could get their act together.
If you feel like taking a walk on the weird side, try on spooky NBC drama Grimm (one of two shows with a heavy fairy-tale theme on air at the moment, the other being ABC’s Once Upon a Time which will air on this side of the Atlantic later this year).
Tapping into the darker Brothers Grimm tales, a run down of the first episode, which airs on Watch, went something like this. Portland homicide detective Nick Burckhardt (David Giuntoli) is leading a normal life with fianceé Juliette (Bitsie Tulloch) and partner, Hank (Russell Hornsby). Out of the blue he starts seeing rather strange things like a business-woman momentarily morphing into a zombie, or a guy checking through his mail turning into a werewolf.
While this would have most people out in search of the men in white coats, Nick takes it all in his stride until his cancer-stricken aunt turns up on his door with some pretty heavy weaponry and hoard of ancient storybooks. Turns out  Nick is one of the last living members of the Grimm family and those fairy tales are actually true. Nick now has the power to sniff out the evil lurking inside the perps, the first of which is based on the age-old tale of a wolf with a penchant for little girls in a red cloaks.
This is a fairly hokum premise and while it is quite dark with a few scary moments, there is some comic value to be had from ‘reformed’ werewolf Monroe (Silas Weir Mitchell) who decides to help Nick navigate the bizarre world he’s about to encounter.
The one episode I have seen isn’t enough to declare whether Grimm will have a future in my schedule but with the impending demise of Fringe, there could be an opening.
Newspaper circulation is dropping year-on-year since the dawn of social media and online editions; the closure of The Sunday Tribune last year ranked among the heavier casualties witnessed here. Elsewhere, papers are closing at a steady rate in the US and the collapse of Murdoch’s News of the World was one in a list proving the newspaper publishing industry is on a rather rocky footing.
Beginning with the unravelling of the 2010 WikiLeaks scandal, Storyville: Deadline – The New York Times was a grim account of the pursuits of the print publishing industry. The documentary on BBC Two on Wednesday night dealt with the problems facing print media in the digital age, from the collapse of advertising revenue to the freely available 24-hour up-to-the-minute news on the internet and advent of social media.
Going behind the scenes in one of the English-speaking world’s largest and more respected titles, the situation at the New York Times offered an interesting insight into an industry under threat.
Journalist David Carr’s personal account and commitment to his job was particularly riveting. His story is also one of the reasons I suspect the paper is haemorrhaging cash on such an astronomical scale. When he told his editor, “I’m doing two more weeks of reporting on it, then I’m going to take a week to write it and then I’ll show it to you,” I nearly choked. There are not too many in the industry still working to those deadlines.