‘One of the last TV shows I do’: Barry Humphries in the new season of Who Do You Think You Are?
In Who Do You Think You Are? the late comedian sifts through his family history and discovers a very royal scandal.
Who Do You Think You Are?
SBS 7.30pm, Tuesday May 2
The late Barry Humphries kicks off the 14th season of the ancestral search show Who Do You Think You Are? He heads to Wiltshire, Kent, Westminster, and Hackney, to explore the saucy 18th century history of his family. Confident that he is the most interesting person in his family tree, he is delighted to discover that his humble grocer ancestors found themselves muddled up in a royal scandal: “We’re getting closer to the juiciness I was hoping for,” he says. Filmed just months before his death, Humphries makes the prophetic prediction that “it might be one of the last TV shows I do because, despite my appearance, I’m quite old”. Other guests this season include actors Peter Helliar and Kerry Armstrong; musician John Waters; Indigenous choreographer Stephen Page; and journalists Jenny Brockie and Derryn Hinch.
Drops of God
Apple TV+
This is a weird one: A French production is based on a best-selling 44-volume Japanese Manga, which impacted the East Asian wine market so significantly that it more than doubled wine sales in Japan the first year it was published. The Europeanised Apple TV+ series, helmed by Call My Agent! writer Quoc Dang Tran, centres on Camille Leger (Fleur Geffrier), the estranged daughter of a renowned oenologist, who is summoned from Paris to Tokyo to visit her ailing father, Alexandre Leger (Stanley Weber), only to have him cark it on the plane ride over. As per his “unconventional” will, Camille must compete for his legacy — the world’s largest collection of wines, worth upwards of $100m — in a three-part taste test against his protege Tomine (Tomohisa Yamashita), a wine buff, and Alexandre’s elect child. Here’s the catch: Camille cannot consume a sip of wine without getting nosebleeds, a condition connected to her childhood, where her father brutally and secretly trained her in his trade until the pressure manifested in a physical trauma response.
Shrill
Binge
Television has a bleak history of failing to capture the nuance and complexity of weight and body image, so what a delightful surprise Shrill is. The Hulu series, an adaptation of Lindy West’s memoir, is a witty, warm, and radical comedy about thriving plus-sized journalist, Annie, played impeccably by Saturday Night Live standout Aidy Bryant. It’s hard not to draw comparisons with Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking Girls, as both shows are about writers in their 20s navigating friendships and relationships, and learning to take up space in a world that so often demands that women be small and unobtrusive. Unlike Dunham’s difficult Hannah, Annie is impossible to dislike. She’s blundering, shy, and sweet. The only complaint is that there just isn’t enough of it; Shrill was capped at three seasons of six episodes each. It’s rare that a new comedy leaves you asking for more.
Gavin and Stacey
Stan
James Corden’s days of being a late-night TV show host are coming to an end, so cast your mind back to 2007, before he shipped off to the US to terrorise the waitstaff at Balthazar and held celebrities hostage in Carpool Karaoke, to the time he co-created, with Ruth Jones, one of the sharpest, cosiest comedies of the 21st century: Gavin & Stacey. For three seasons (and two Christmas specials) this word-of-mouth hit tracked the romance between Gavin Shipman, from Essex, and Stacey West, from the Welsh small town Barry. The serial killer surnames are about as brutal as this show gets; the drama in this show is completely benign — there’s an entire episode devoted to ordering Indian takeaway. Gavin and Stacey’s biggest strength is its supporting cast members, including Corden as the ultra-lad best mate to Gavin, who has an appetite matched only by Jones’s Nessa, Stacey’s No.1 confidante, a leather-clad sexpot with a checkered past that includes a stint in the pop group All Saints and trysts with the likes of Tom Jones and Prince. And of course, the legendary Alison Steadman, who plays Gavin’s mother, Pam, in a role that is essentially a hammed-up version of Bev from Abigail’s Party.
Killing Eve
Stan
With Jodie Comer making her Broadway debut in Australian playwright Suzie Miller’s Olivier-winning Prima Facie, it feels like an opportune time to revisit Killing Eve. The show, created back in 2018 by Fleabag mastermind Phoebe Waller-Bridge (who signed a $20m-a-year deal with Amazon Studios and hasn’t made a new show since), is about a gleeful, childlike assassin, Villanelle (Comer), and a mousy secret agent, Eve (Sandra Oh). Eve is trying to hunt down Villanelle, but there’s a mutual attraction that simmers underneath. The first two seasons of this show are astonishing (Waller-Bridge directed the first, Emerald Fennell the second), a deranged, hilarious spin on the spy thriller. Unfortunately, the last two seasons lost the plot. But it’s worth watching – if not for Villanelle’s outfits alone. To this day, the pink Molly Goddard princess dress in the first episode remains seared in our psyches.
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