Finally … A perfect rom-com
Netflix has made an adaptation of David Nicholls’ bestseller, One Day, that fans will love.
One Day
Netflix
If your plans for Valentine’s weekend also involve loafing on the couch in the good company of a pad see ew, this is the show for you. Finally, we have an adaptation of David Nicholls’ bestseller that fans will love. For the sake of Anne Hathaway, and her ridiculous attempt at a Yorkshire accent, it’s best to cast the terrible movie of 2011 from our minds. If you’re yet to read Nicholl’s book, it tells the decades-spanning love and friendship story of Emma and Dexter, who meet at the Edinburgh University grad ball on July 15, 1988, and, after a (not quite) one-night-stand, become forever entangled in each other’s lives. Each episode revisits the pair every year on the same day — either together or separately. Emma, played by the magnificent Ambika Mod — who broke out (and broke hearts) as Shruti in This Is Going To Hurt — is a working-class girl from Leeds with a chip on her shoulder; Leo Woodall (who you may recognise as the chavvy scam artist from season two of The White Lotus) is every bit as good as the “profoundly unserious” posh boy Dexter. This is a rom-com at its most delightful: warm, witty, and occasionally, quite devastating. Also, it must be mentioned, the soundtrack rips, with needle-drops from Frankie Knuckles, The The, Nick Drake and The Fall.
Our Hobby is Depeche Mode
YouTube/Vimeo
While we’re discussing love, one of the most underappreciated and purest forms of it is fandom, and that’s what this bizarre and beautiful documentary is all about. Depeche Mode has not toured Australia in three decades, so some may not be aware of how big and beloved they are to this day. I didn’t realise until last year when I was in Leipzig for Wave-Gotik-Treffen, a music festival to which tens of thousands of goths flock every year, overtaking the city in a shroud of black. Depeche Mode played to a sold-out stadium of 70,000 — a scale we tend to associate with pop monoliths like Taylor Swift. This film, by Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams, was commissioned as part of a greatest hits package by the band’s label, Mute Records, but never released. Instead of telling a paint-by-numbers story of the band, it zeros in on its diehard European fans, with a particular focus on Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union, where Depeche Mode’s music has been sacrosanct since it was only available on illegal bootlegged cassettes in the 1980s. As one Russian fan, Allan, puts it: “It wasn’t 5000 or 10,000 or 100,000 people listening to Depeche Mode … The entire country listened to them.”
Mr Bates vs the Post Office
Channel 7, February 21st, 8:30pm
7Plus
You’ll have steam coming out of your ears by the time you’re finished with Gwyneth Hughes’s dramatisation of the Post Office Horizon scandal. In one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history, thousands of subpostmasters were falsely accused of theft and fraud due to errors in the expensive Horizon IT system. Between 1999 and 2015, more than 700 were prosecuted for their crimes, with scores sent to jail — including one pregnant woman. Lives were obliterated, and tragically at least four people died by suicide. This four-part drama tells the human story through Alan Bates (an astonishing Toby Jones), a humble postmaster who, like many victims, was told by the Post Office that he was the only person to report problems with Horizon. He finds other ordinary, despairing people and forms a campaign group who, with scarce resources, battle the Post Office bosses in court. Miraculously, this drama accomplished what journalists and campaigners have been attempting for two decades: it kicked the government into action. One week after airing in Britain in January, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak committed to a new law that would exonerate and compensate all known victims.
The New Look
Apple TV+
What a month it has been for fashion victims! First, we had Disney+’s luxurious biopic series on Cristobal Balenciaga, and now, here’s Ben Mendelsohn adopting a gloriously silly French accent as Christian Dior. Apple TV+‘s The New Look thrusts us into the glamorous — and morally dubious — world of the Paris elite, towards the end of World War II. It’s 1943, and Dior is a striving nobody, toiling under Lucien Lelong (John Malkovich) in creating evening gowns for the Nazis. It’s rotten business, but he’s giving the money to his sister, Catherine (Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams), who is part of the resistance — make of that what you will. Dior’s soon-to-be-rival is Coco Chanel (a dreamily cast Juliette Binoche, who coasts through this). Chanel is living in the Ritz Hotel, which was then a Nazi headquarters, where she hosts her boyfriend, the German spy Hans Gunther von Dincklage (Claes Bang). As far as historical dramas go, this is questionable. But there’s enough frothy intrigue and gorgeous frocks to hook you in.
Maryland
Britbox
This show plays a sly trick on you. It opens, like so many British TV dramas, with a dead body on a beach. Cut to a scene where a woman receives a large wad of smuggled pot. You think you know what you’re in for — it’s another Broadchurch, or Shetland, or any other murder mystery series that you sink into like a warm bath. Womp womp, this will subvert your expectations in every way. For one, the body found on the shoreline of the Isle of Man is no murder victim and the police — who have minimal presence here — don’t treat it as such. It belongs to an elderly woman we come to know as Mary, the mother of two daughters: Becca (a predictably amazing Suranne Jones), a housewife still living up north near her parents; and Rosaline (Eve Best), a high-flying career woman in London. Becca and Rosaline aren’t quite estranged, but they’ve grown apart, and there’s some tension. The central mystery here is why Mary was found dead in the Isle of Man when she told her daughters, and her husband, that she was holidaying in Wales. At its core, this is a beautifully observed family drama, with a meaty mystery to keep it ticking along.