A vibrant doco on one of Australia’s best-loved bands
A classy and long-overdue Wiggles documentary; an unsung drama about San Francisco life; a hidden gem of the made-for-tv era, and everything else we’re watching this week.
Looking
Binge
With the release of Andrew Haigh’s newest film, All of Us Strangers — which stars two of Ireland’s finest actors, Paul Mescal (Normal People) and Andrew Scott (the “hot priest” from Fleabag) — just around the corner, now seems like an apt opportunity to revisit the director‘s gorgeous, unsung HBO series: Looking. The show, which originally ran for two seasons in 2014, centres on three gay friends living in San Francisco: Patrick (Mindhunter’s Jonathan Groff), a clueless Colorado transplant and video-game designer, for whom disastrously embarrassing hook-ups are de rigueur; his best mate Agustin (Frankie J. Alvarez), who is one of those “artists” that never seem to make actual art; and the slightly older Dom (Australia’s Murray Bartlett), the Lothario of the gang. The “drama” in this show is refreshingly low-key — there are shades of HBO hits like Girls and Sex and The City – but really, it feels like a millennial spiritual extension of the 1990s adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.
Stuart: A Life Backwards
Binge
Whatever happened to made-for-TV movies? Those meaty, character-driven adult dramas like Ryan Murphy’s 2014 AIDS crisis film The Normal Heart, or ITV’s astonishing The Naked Civil Servant, which saw John Hurt take on the role of the self-declared “exhibitionist and martyr,” Quentin Crisp. Call it another casualty of the streaming era. Stuart: A Life Backwards (2007) is one of those made-for-television gems that you likely would never come across unless you’re the kind of person who spends an ungodly amount of time on Tom Hardy’s Wikipedia page. In the film, set in Cambridge, Hardy plays Stuart Shorter, a violent, disabled, homeless, drug addict, who has been in and out of jail since childhood. He meets the English-educated Alexander Masters (Benedict Cumberbatch), an aspiring writer who is making his money working at the centre for the homeless. An unlikely friendship — and a book, “the first biography of a homeless man” — is born. This true story is deeply sad and often terribly funny. It’s a thrill seeing a young Cumberbatch and Hardy.
This is England ’90
Stan
Director Shane Meadows’s humble 2006 film This Is England was as close to flawless as anything — and his three-part TV show spin-off isn’t far off. The snag is that only the final instalment — This Is England ’90 — is currently available to stream (the others are available to buy on Apple TV should you be tempted). The show revolves around a group of working-class mates coming of age in the Midlands in 1986, ’88 and ’90. It captures a delightful nostalgia as we witness that gang’s evolution from gobby skinheads to stylish mods and finally, to Madchester freaks. However, cosy viewing, this is not — there are relentlessly bleak themes such as suicide, racism, and rape. But there is enough warmth to these characters to convince you to stick with it. The performances across the board are astonishing, with special kudos to Vicky McClure of Line of Duty, who portrays Lol, a drained single mother, and Joe Gilgun, who plays her careworn ex-fiance, Woody.
Hot Potato: The Story of The Wiggles
Amazon Prime, from October 24
Emmy-nominated Australian director Sally Aitken (David Stratton: A Cinematic Life) has brought us a documentary that feels long overdue: the story of The Wiggles. Four friends with a partiality for vibrant skivvies on a whim recorded a children’s album in the early ’90s and became one of the biggest Australian music exports in history (“These tickets were hotter than the Stones and Springsteen,” a US broadcaster says near the start of the film). The archival footage and photographs in this film are simply extraordinary — the early pictures of Anthony Field, Murray Cook, Greg Page and Jeff Fatt make them look less like a troupe of children’s entertainers, and more like a critically-lauded shoegaze band of the era. This sunny, classy documentary — which takes us through the entire three-decade career of the band — is just the tonic we need right now.
Ghosts
Paramount+
This glorious, goofy show has come to an end. BBC’s Ghosts, from the team behind Horrible Histories, is a weirdly comforting exploration of death. So it goes: Alison and her husband Mike (Charlotte Ritchie and Kiell Smith-Bynoe) inherit a crumbling old estate from one of her distant relatives. Their grand plans to renovate and flip it into a luxury hotel are turned upside down once the couple realises the place is plagued with ghosts from across the ages who died on the property grounds. These include a caveman, a ‘90s MP who died during a sex scandal and must spend his afterlife pantless, a Victorian poet, a secretly gay World War II officer, a witch-trial victim, and a Georgian noblewoman. These spirits are not malevolent — that is, unless you find nagging to be a noxious trait — rather, they are just bored. While the show is mostly concerned with being silly, it occasionally strikes poignant notes, and the half-hour episodes just fly by.