TV highlights this week: Call the Midwife, Hotel Portofino and Emily Atack: Asking for It?

Here’s a look at some of the top TV programmes for the week beginning, Saturday, January 28, from Call the Midwife to Hotel Portofino.

Stock Aitken Waterman: Legends of Pop (Saturday 28/01/23, Channel 5, 9pm)

Words by Richard Jones

Love them or loathe them, you can’t deny that Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman left an indelible mark on the music industry and British popular culture as a whole. Responsible for over 100 Top 40 hits in the UK alone, the London-based trio ruled the pop charts in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Emily Atack, who has said it is "important" to make catcalling a "public health issue" as she fronts a new BBC Two documentary about her experiences of sexual harassment Photo: Little Gem Productions/BBC/PAEmily Atack, who has said it is "important" to make catcalling a "public health issue" as she fronts a new BBC Two documentary about her experiences of sexual harassment Photo: Little Gem Productions/BBC/PA
Emily Atack, who has said it is "important" to make catcalling a "public health issue" as she fronts a new BBC Two documentary about her experiences of sexual harassment Photo: Little Gem Productions/BBC/PA
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They sold millions of records, launched the musical careers of Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan, Rick Astley, Bananarama, Sinitta, and many others, and provided the soundtrack to a generation. However, as this revealing documentary series has already shown, they were despised and reviled by some who saw their “synthetically manufactured music” as a stain on the industry.

Nevertheless, as Waterman says: “If we had to do it all again, I wouldn’t change a thing.” Stock agrees: “Only looking back do I realise what a great time it was,” he adds. And finally, Aitken resolutely declares: “Like us, hate us, but you’ll never change us.”

Tonight’s concluding edition begins in 1987, with three separate performers destined to become among the biggest acts of the decade. Astley stormed both sides of the Atlantic with his first two singles, while Australian soap stars Kylie and Jason captured the hearts of the nation, before coming together for the duet the nation demanded, Especially for You.

In addition, American disco legend Donna Summer became the latest superstar to seek the Stock Aitken Waterman magic – and her career exploded again after hit single This Time I Know It’s for Real.

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Plus, a young Liverpudlian named Sonia reaches the top of the charts with her very first single You’ll Never Stop Me Loving You.

Mike, Matt, and Pete reflect on the success they had during this time, when their roster of acts and hits grew and grew. However, as their success multiplied, so did the music industry’s difficulty in embracing them. How could this independent team take on the majors and keep winning?

Sybil brings further chart hits with The Love I Lost and When I’m Good And Ready, but as time moves on, the relationship between Matt, Mike and Pete, whose personalities are clearly very different, becomes strained.

In late 1993, Stock ended his partnership with Waterman following a disagreement over their finances. However, individual success did arrive for Stock and Aitken during the 1990s thanks to Robson & Jerome and Steps.

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Despite a bitter 1999 court case taking a further toll on the trio’s relationship, the three producers got back together in 2005 and released a CD+DVD album, Stock Aitken Waterman Gold, as well as staging reunion concert Hit Factory Live in 2012, and producing a remix of the Chris Martin-written Kylie Minogue song Every Day’s Like Christmas three years later.

Stock Aitken Waterman: Greatest Hits – Part 2 follows at 10.25pm, and serves as one final reminder of the trio’s domination of the charts and influence on the musical landscape.

Call the Midwife (Sunday 29/01/23, BBC1, 8pm)

Words by Rachael Popow

When the Radio Times celebrated its website’s 25th anniversary in 2022 by asking readers to vote for the best TV show of the past 25 years, the nominees included such critically acclaimed, much talked-about series as Breaking Bad, Line of Duty, Fleabag and The Wire.

However, the resounding winner with, appropriately enough, 25 per cent of the vote was Call the Midwife. It’s a sign that despite the lack of hype, the drama has become a TV institution.

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So, why has Call the Midwife proved so popular? Perhaps it’s because that while the period drama may have a reputation for being cosy, Sunday night viewing, it has also tackled some difficult issues – this series alone has looked at the racial tensions that followed Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. It has also constantly moved on – the first episodes, which aired in 2012, were set during 1957, while we’re now up to 1968.

The show’s creator Heidi Thomas certainly believes that’s a factor. After topping the poll, she said: “When you’ve been going on for as many years as we have, you know you’re not the thrill of the new any more, so I think it says a lot about our audience’s loyalty. But also about the fact that we’re doing something right in keeping the show fresh as we move forward. That in itself, I think, is the most encouraging thing.”

The fact that the series has been moving forward through time means we’ve seen the midwives deal with some big social changes, including the arrival of the contraceptive pill. And in the latest episode Dr Turner and Sister Veronica arrange a men’s health talk to discuss another innovation in reproductive health – the vasectomy.

Meanwhile, Nancy is caring for Jill Mellor and her newborn baby, Mylene, although it’s the father, Spencer, who causes concern when his behaviour becomes increasingly erratic. Nancy calls on Dr Turner, who refers him for an urgent psychiatry review, but events are about to take a shocking turn.

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If he didn’t already have enough on his plate treating Spencer and explaining the concept of ‘the snip’, Dr Turner also joins forces with Nurse Crane to care for Annette Berkley, who has rheumatic heart disease and has gone against medical advice by falling pregnant again.

SAS: Who Dares Wins – Jungle Hell (Monday 30/01/23, Channel 4, 9pm)

Words by Richard Jones

The SAS selection process isn’t meant to be easy. Relentless hill marches, rigorous fitness assessments and disorientating interrogation tactics are just a handful of the grim tests used to transform regular soldiers into the toughest, deadliest warriors on earth.

In fact, the tasks can be so unforgiving and extreme, they’ve been known to have claimed the lives of those attempting to secure that coveted beige beret. After ‘The Hills’, which designed to test recruits’ endurance and navigation skills, and before the final combat survival section, the recruits face what many view as the toughest part of all.

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During jungle training, the individuals are often shipped out to the British Army Training Support Unit in Belize, Brunei or Malaysia for six weeks. Soldiers form four-man patrols, living for weeks behind enemy lines, surviving on rations, and losing up to 6kg of bodyweight.

Over the past few years, the notoriously tough TV competition SAS: Who Dares Wins has taken civilian recruits into the deserts of Jordan, the mountains of Chile and the harsh terrain of the Scottish Hebrides. But last week, the instructors headed somewhere completely different – ‘the deepest, darkest, most unforgiving jungle in the world’ in Thung Ui, North Vietnam.

Along with a change in location, there has also been a change in personnel. Mark ‘Billy’ Billingham is the Directing Staff’s Chief Instructor for this season due to his previous jungle experience, and speaking about his new role, he says: “Having been a DS on actual military SAS selection and Chief Instructor at the British Army Jungle Warfare Training School in Brunei, there is nobody better placed than myself to lead the recruits through this treacherous environment. I’m looking forward to challenging and encouraging the new recruits. However, I will not be accepting any excuses – this will be the toughest course to date!”

Rudy Reyes has stepped down to become a regular DS instructor, alongside Jason ‘Foxy’ Fox. And finally, there’s new instructor Chris Oliver, a British military veteran former Special Forces operator and Royal Marine mountain leader, who has replaced Navy Seal Remi Adeleke.

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Oliver says: “The values I intend to instil in the recruits, as part of the DS, have been forged on operations where we have lost good operators, so they had better be under no illusions – anyone who doesn’t play by the rules will pay the price.”

In tonight’s second edition, 19 of the original 20 recruits remain in the Vietnamese jungle, but one of them is stranded at the top of a 215-foot waterfall. He’s pinned to the rocks and is in fear of drowning. Will he manage to extricate himself? Billy isn’t confident and explains that he’s lost fellow operatives on similar missions.

Later, a breach of camp discipline leads to a ‘beasting’, entailing a relentless series of extreme physical tasks. And not everyone will survive. Those who do remain are then subjected to a round of ‘milling’, an extreme form of hand-to-hand combat with fellow recruits. Can they control their aggression and win the battle, or will they succumb to their opponent’s blows? As the DS say, if you can fight in the jungle, you can fight anywhere.

Emily Atack: Asking for It? (Tuesday 31/01/23, BBC2, 9pm)

Words by Rachael Popow

A couple of months ago, BBC2 viewers saw actress and comedian Emily Atack join forces with Ruby Wax and Mel B for the documentary series Trailblazers, which saw them re-tracing the footsteps of intrepid Victorian explorer, Isabella Bird.

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Now, Emily is back on the channel on a different and much more personal mission, as she opens up her life and social media messages in an attempt to understand the sexual harassment that she and so many other women have experienced online.

The presenter, who found fame on the sitcom The Inbetweeners before going on to appear on Dancing on Ice, I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! and her own comedy series The Emily Atack Show, talks about how she has been on the receiving end of unwanted sexual attention from a very young age. If that wasn’t distressing enough, she has repeatedly been told she’s somehow ‘asking for it’.

When the online abuse began to escalate over lockdown, Emily decided it was time to speak out and she began sharing her experiences with her followers, which prompted many of them to tell their own stories of being harassed – and to admit that they had come to accept the abuse as normal.

Emily says: “Over the last two and a half years I’ve been speaking out about my own personal experiences of online sexual harassment. Within that time, one thing has become clear, I’m not alone. With this documentary, I am hoping to find answers to the many questions I’ve been asking myself my entire life, and I hope it will go on to help thousands of others too. It’s been wonderful working with Little Gem and the BBC on a project that is so incredibly close to my heart.”

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In this programme, Emily meets up with experts and online safety campaigners to find out why this behaviour has been normalised for so long. She also reaches out to some of the men who have sent her sexually explicit content to try to understand their motives.

Emily, who has previously taken her campaign to make cyber-flashing illegal to parliament, asks what more can be done to make women and girls safer online, asking whether it’s the law that needs to change or if we also have to look at our attitudes. But one of the more difficult questions raised by the documentary is why so many women who have been on the receiving end of negative attention feel like it is their fault.

Emily admits that she has often used humour as a defence mechanism, but now she’s ready to stop trying to laugh it off and start exploring the real toll that the abuse has taken on her and the ways in which it has shaped her. By talking about her experiences with others – and opening up to her parents about the issues for the first time – can Emily stop blaming herself and put the responsibility back where it belongs?

Building Britain’s Superhomes (Wednesday 01/02/23, Channel 4, 10pm)

Words by Rachael Popow

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It’s not unusual to see property developers on British TV – just switch on Homes Under the Hammer on a weekday morning to see people trying to make a profit from transforming houses.

However, the would-be entrepreneurs featured on the daytime show tend to be hoping to keep their budgets low, the plans simple and the turnaround time as short as possible. As the title suggests, Building Britain’s Superhomes introduces viewers to a developer who’s working on a whole different level. The man in question is Nottingham-based Guy Phoenix, and this two-part series will take viewers into world of lavish multi-million-pound construction and interior design.

It’s not just his business that make Phoenix an obvious choice to be the subject of a two-part documentary. He’s also gregarious, ambitious, and tenacious, and has his eyes on the ultimate prize – to build the world’s most expensive home. He also has a unique approach to his job. Phoenix is completely self-taught – he dropped out of school, and has no formal training or qualifications – and claims to be the only developer in the world building high-end homes completely ad-hoc without relying on plans or artist impressions.

If someone said that on Grand Designs, it would probably prompt Kevin McCloud to give a concerned monologue to the camera, but it’s an approach that appears to be working. Fuelled by his vivid imagination, Phoenix’s properties sell for millions.

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As Clemency Green, Senior Commissioning Editor for Features and Daytime at Channel 4, says: “Guy Phoenix has a reputation for pushing the boundaries when it comes to building – and then pushing them some more… We can’t wait to bring viewers an exclusive insight into the luxurious and flamboyant world of one of the country’s most sought-after property developers.”

Now, cameras are following Phoenix as he takes on a challenging new project, which involves transforming a dated hillside house into a modern superhome, complete with luxury touches such as a glass flooring and an indoor pool with a waterfall. He also takes viewers on a VIP tour of some of his other superhomes in the UK and the south of France, where he transformed a rundown plot into a palatial seven-bedroom villa, complete with helipad.

Perhaps most intriguingly of all, we’re promised that the series will feature a glimpse of Phoenix’s own des res. And while he may pride himself on not using drawings, it seems that the developer doesn’t just turn up and hope for the best, as he’s used his own property to test out some of his more audacious ideas, which have included installing a shark tank in his living room.

Well, what’s the point of building extravagant creations for other people if you don’t occasionally get to bring your work home with you?

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Cold Case Forensics: The Murder of Rachel Nickell (Thursday 2/2/23, ITV1, 9pm)

Words by Sarah Morgan

Are we in danger of being overloaded with true crime documentaries? In recent years, perhaps due to the success of Netflix’s all-conquering Making a Murderer, the number of them hitting our screens seems to have exploded.

The streaming giant is pretty prolific; it feels as if a new entry in the genre appears on the platform every week – the likes of Our Father, Tiger King, Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes and I Am A Killer among those keeping viewers on the edge of their seats.

But we’ve been ‘treated’ to such programmes on other channels too – Channel 4’s In the Footsteps of Killers, for instance, is currently midway through its second series, and follows the efforts of Professor David Wilson and ex-detective Dr Graham Hill, with help from Emilia Fox, to crack cold cases.

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Fox has, of course, spent years solving fictional crimes as Nikki Alexander in the BBC drama Silent Witness. Now ITV is launching a new three-part true crime documentary featuring a real-life forensic scientist who leads her own version of the Lyell team.

Dr Angela Gallop never intended to spend her career delving into the murky world of murder – she studied botany at the University of Sheffield and biochemistry at Oxford. But after finding that few people were interested in her doctorate research into sea slugs on the Isle of Wight, she joined the Forensic Science Service (FSS) in 1974.

Four years later, she visited her first crime scene while looking for clues concerning the murder of 18-year-old Helen Rytka, who was later revealed to be a victim of Peter Sutcliffe, aka The Yorkshire Ripper.

Since leaving the FSS in 1986, Gallop has set up her own forensic companies; her expertise has led to her involvement in several high-profile cases, including the mysterious hanging of Italian banker Roberto Calvi in 1991, the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed, the killing of Damilola Taylor and the Pembrokeshire coastal path murders.

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“She is the doyenne of her profession,” William Clegg QC, a retired defence lawyer who specialised in serious crime, told the Guardian for a profile piece about her. “If I had a forensic issue in a case, then it was always the same instructions to the team: phone Angela Gallop.”

This new series discusses her work on a trio of other well-publicised murders – those of Rachel Nickell, Lynette White and Stephen Lawrence. All three were described as ‘cold’ before she and her team’s involvement. Convictions have since been secured for them all, and the programme reveals the tireless scientific work that enabled that to happen.

Gallop herself makes it sound simple: “Every contact leaves a trace. It’s just whether or not we’re clever enough to find it.”

Thankfully she and her team are. So whether you’re a fan of true crime documentaries or not, you have to admire the work and skill of those featured in this particular entry in the genre.

Hotel Portofino (Friday 3/2/23, ITV1, 9pm)

Words by Sarah Morgan

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It’s cold outside, the nights are still long and the mornings dark. So here’s a little escapism for you – a chance to envelop yourself in the warmth of the Italian Riviera during the Roaring Twenties.

Although Friday night on ITV1 might seem like an odd slot for such a drama, it’s provided a home for other cosy series in the past, including Grantchester and Midsomer Murders. And while Hotel Portofino is new to the channel, there are some viewers out there who may find the storyline familiar – that’s because it first appeared on the streaming service BritBox last year.

“I wrote Hotel Portofino in the autumn of 2020,” explains its creator, Matt Baker (no, not the former Blue Peter presenter). “With the prospect of a second national Covid lockdown looming in the UK, I wanted to write something unashamedly sunny and escapist.

“The story is intended to be a piece of entertainment, but there are also obvious and fascinating parallels between the 1920s and the present decade, if you choose to look; just like today, in the 1920s the established order was reeling from a catastrophe of its own making, and new hierarchies were beginning to emerge as individuals and groups who had traditionally been without power began to assert and emancipate themselves.

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“The characters in Hotel Portofino divide loosely between progressives and conservatives, between those who are liberated by the foreign charms of Italy and those who reinforce their prejudices.”

A second series has already been commissioned, which is good news – it’s a wonderful little show featuring a great cast, including Anna Chancellor, Oliver Dench (the great-nephew of Dame Judi), and Mark Umbers.

But it’s Natascha McElhone who leads the way as Bella Ainsworth, owner of the titular establishment. When we meet her and the rest of her family, the hotel has only been open for a few weeks, but its efforts to cater for the needs of its upper-class clientele have already hit a couple of snags – there’s a staff shortage, the guests are rather demanding and a local politician seems determined to drag Bella kicking and screaming into the cauldron of Mussolini’s Italy.

Her family life isn’t easy either. Her caddish, spendthrift husband wants their son Lucian to find a wealthy wife who will secure the future of the Ainsworth estate back in England, while Lucian himself and his widowed sister Alice continue to carry the mental scars inflicted during the First World War.

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“The challenge with period drama is to find the right balance between authenticity and engagement – you want the audience to feel like they are stepping into a different but recognisable world, to be fascinated by the difference of past lives but also to recognise the ongoing universality of the human experience,” says Baker.

“It was a challenge to see the world through the characters’ eyes and to capture their voices, but it was also rewarding and fun. I hope that sense of fun shines through in the dialogue and in the characterisation that our wonderful cast and crew have so subtly but believably brought to life.”

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