The TV shows to watch this week: From Jade Goody to Dragon’s Den
The late reality TV star’s brief but turbulent story prefigures so much of what we are now going through
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Your support makes all the difference.Despite having done my best to avoid the present media fixation on Jade Goody, I have been much taken by the Channel 4 retrospective about her, a three-part documentary series that began last week.
Marking the 10th anniversary of her death, from cervical cancer, Jade: The Reality Star Who Changed Britain follows, in three “acts”, the rise, fall and rise again of Goody, probably (the title is disputed) Britain’s first true reality television star. The fact that her name and much of her story is still familiar today must say something about what she achieved.
The elements are still familiar – childhood spent in poverty with drug-addicted parents, the bubbly unfocused “chav” (to use the pejorative term of the era) who was at first despised and then charmed her way into the nation’s affections, the “East Angular” thing, the racist jibe, and then her two sons, marriage, terminal illness and death, all played out in the media. It is not just that you feel sorry for her, but you can also see how tough, shrewd and entrepreneurial she was, and she made the very most of what the media was offering her.
It is also a story of phone hacking and mutual acts of cynical exploitation, where it is not always clear who’s using who. Worth watching, as it prefigures so much of what we are now going through with the likes of Jeremy Kyle and Love Island and a national obsession with getting rich through being famous because you’re famous.
Fifty years ago, celebrity was different. They say that if you remember the Sixties you probably weren’t there. Well, given that it was all half a century ago and more and that most of the people on the planet now were then infants or not even born at the time, maybe the moment has come to revise that well-worn saying. Memories too fade. So we need, in other words, either reminding or being introduced to some of the major landmark moments.
We’ve had the moon landing and the Abbey Road zebra crossing, and now it’s the turn of the Summer of Love. In Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation, followed by Jimi Hendrix: The Road to Woodstock, BBC4 offers millennials, Generation X-ers and those who were simply too stoned to notice what the cultural revolution of 1969 was all about. “Purple Haze”, dope, counterculture, peace and inadequate toilet facilities – it’s all there.
Dragon’s Den, such an unlikely hit show, is back, and there’s a new dragon, too. “Craft supplies magnate” Sara Davies it is who wil be joining Peter Jones, Deborah Meaden, Touker Suleyman and Tej Lalvani in the disused warehouse, asking about margins, turnover and pulling faces. As if that wasn’t enough, this week’s business projects include an entirely new type of bog brush. Who said Global Britain’s days as workshop of the world are behind her?
Sky Atlantic’s Succession returns for a second series and very welcome it is too. It’s the soapy story of a billionaire media dynasty, the Roys, whose patriarch (Brian Cox) is getting on in years and planning who will succeed him. However, so are his ungrateful, feuding, spoiled, thoroughly nasty offspring. It’s like Dynasty, which you might remember, but with websites and more bile.
There’s a much more wholesome vibe about Kate Winslet’s ancestry, revealed in Who Do You Think You Are? As Winslet indicated a few weeks ago in some publicity interviews, she would indeed have been appalled to discover that any of her antecedents were rich or royal, and they’re not, though I can’t logically work out what difference that makes to anything. I mean, if someone who shared your DNA happened to be wearing a coronet back and owned a big slice of Silesia in 1719, well, so what?
Still, she finds that plenty of their Scandinavian forebears lived and died in poverty and jail, and that her British relatives featured some possible sadists. To her credit, she’s a bit appalled by all that as well.
Dutiful as I am, I should mention that the summer of sport shows no sign of let-up, and the BBC is giving plenty of time over to the Athletics European team championships. It’s all between the Poles and the Germans, apparently. It just reminds me of the legendary bit of commentary by the late David Coleman. Referring to a Cuban star of the time, Coleman observed that “Juanjareno opens his legs and shows his class”. Never mind Woodstock, those were the days.
Jade: The Reality Star Who Changed Britain (Channel 4, Wednesday 9pm); Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation (BBC4, Friday 10pm); Jimi Hendrix: The Road to Woodstock (BBC4. Friday 11.25pm); Dragon’s Den (BBC2, Sunday 8pm); Succession (Sky Atlantic, Monday 9pm); Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC1, Monday 9pm); Athletics: European Team Championships (BBC2, Saturday 2.30pm)
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