Episodes; Thalidomide: The Fifty Year Fight; Vikings; Coast Australia – review

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/may/17/episodes-thalidomide-coast-vikings-review

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Episodes (BBC2) | iPlayer

Thalidomide: The Fifty Year Fight (BBC2) | iPlayer

Vikings (History Channel) | History

Coast Australia (BBC2) | iPlayer

Episodes shouldn't, perhaps, work. The tale of a husband-wife writing team (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) who are persuaded, with a refreshing lack of reluctance, to sell out and take their fictionally Bafta-winning (and very British) comedy to Hollywood, thence to have it "made over" with gleeful disregard for such restrictive critical concerns as, for instance, taste – is surely too close to the experiences of many homegrown authors and film-makers for the memories to be anything other than vile at best. The Greig/Mangan original comedy, for instance, fictionally starred Richard Griffiths as a tweedy teacher in his twilight: transposed, the writers are both starstruck and horrified to find the grinsome Matt LeBlanc, Joey from Friends, in his place.

But it does work – and how. Partly through the subtlety of the writing, by Jeffrey Klarik and his partner David Crane, also of Friends fame: Friends, of course, wasn't written with British audiences in mind, but might as well have been, and its appreciation of "our" sense of humour (and our preconceptions about how the Americans could never quite "do" it) meant it became a crossover dream. As Episodes is now proving: it's been garnering much critical praise over there. Partly, too, thanks to the chemistry between Greig, Mangan and Matt LeBlanc, who's playing a lightly fictionalised version of "Matt LeBlanc" – kindly, vainglorious, deeply shallow to the extent that he has drunkenly invited his crazed stalker into his bed.

And one of the simple delights lies in seeing how far Tamsin Greig has come, from stoic work as Debbie Aldridge in The Archers, to a revelatory gift for comedy as Fran in the sublime Black Books, to – ta-dah! – sunny La-La-Land: Toto, we're not in Ambridge any more. This is just telly that makes you smile. Incidentally, one of the gags involves Matt, arrested on a borderline DUI charge, to be met with a beaming desk-sergeant who proudly boasts that his sister was nurse No 4 or something in one Friends episode. Matt does his winning best to pretend to remember her. (He's still booked.) On Good Morning Britain the other day, Matt popped up, only to have Ben Shephard remind him that he, Ben, had once "played" an interviewer in one Friends episode. Matt did his winning best to pretend to remember him. A trouper.

I can't see a facile link, my usual speciality, from smilegood telly to the most harrowing documentary of the week, so I'll just say quiet thanks again for the fact I wasn't a thalidomide baby, as I was smack-bang in the at-risk group. Thalidomide: The Fifty Year Fight told many stories about this, the worst disaster ever inflicted by medicine, but chiefly that of David Mason, whose baby daughter Louise he first met as "a torso with little… little flowers… where her arms and legs should be."

It was a tough call (it was a tough watch) over who suffered the worst unwarranted repugnance – the children, the mothers, David himself? But the mothers, I think: not only heartbroken, and with severely disabled babies, later children, to care for daily, but also facing perennial guttersniping from neighbours, "friends", family about how it had been the mother's fault. There were suicides. Those were no less kind days: in some areas, significantly worse.

I had never understood the grim specificity of thalidomide's effects on a newly pregnant mother. Take a pill on day 20, and the baby was likely to suffer central brain damage. Day 21 – eyes. Day 22 – ears, face. Day 24 – upper limb damage. In one day, the taking of one little tablet, famously marketed just to ameliorate morning sickness, was capable of rewiring the genome code for, say, a complete set of arms. And David Mason suffered in a differently cruel way: his own lawyers ganged up on the establishment side against him and he was vilified by fellow parents of thalidomide sufferers for refusing to give up his battle against Distillers Company, who'd marketed the German drug in Britain without sufficient testing. There were tears, near fights, as these people, who had suffered so much, bickered violently over whether to take the early derisory settlement or, David's choice, hold out. With the help of the Sunday Times, and Ralph Nader – I have to say clever Harry Evans, seen here in his finest moment, has aged better – David won. This was the ugly story of a good battle: of a man of principle, and fine journalism, and a feisty proprietor: Rupert was fresh enough off the boat to still loathe the establishment, and unleashed a splenetic guerrilla poster campaign against Distillers, and there was a result. But cases continue.

Vikings is hokum, but terrific hokum. The tale of the handsome Ragnar Mufflebeard or some such, and his rebellious dreams of travelling westwards, where the sun sets, it features longships, crossbows, sunstones, sunboards, gore, looting, roasting-halls and plaited maidens, and is as loosely based on the true Viking story as were the Mr Men books on the writings of Gertrude Stein. So far, though, it's marvellous fun.

Coast made, in its nine charming domestic years, demi-semi stars down the pub of the likes of Neil Oliver, Miranda Krestovnikoff, Alice Roberts and Nicholas Crane's umbrella. Not quite Hollywood A-listers, however – yet it was one of those, Mr Billy Bob Thornton (currently continuing to wreak delightfully wicked havoc over in Fargo) to whom my strange mind was unerringly drawn, specifically a quote of his in the movie Armageddon. "Well," he tells the president, as the meteor looms, "our object collision budget's a million dollars, that allows us to track about 3% of the sky, and, begging your pardon sir, but it's a big-ass sky out there." Australia is frankly a big-ass continent. So why, when Coast Australia is on for just under an hour, did they allow Neil Oliver to timewaste with a full 5.22 minutes of foreplay-filler-guff before the nice theme tune even schlepped in?

We know what it is. It's Coast. Gone to Australia. Not that hard to get one's head around, certainly not as hard as getting your head around the impossible skies, nor the setting sun over the Kimberley, for which a new colour-word and several new adjectives must urgently be invented. Nor frankly the glowing pulchritude, furnish'd and burnish'd by Adelaide sun, of forensic anthropologist Xanthé Mallett, just one of a cracking new team of specialists: so just let us get on with watching the bloody stuff.

This was absorbing – but, don't come the raw prawn with me, it was basically travel porn. Crucial difference is most of us had a faint chance of going to the domestic Coast places, and few have the chance, as is the lot of Xanthé and co, to view these forlorn otherwordly landscapes in real time, with shorts and a tinny. But I flew to Broome once, in a tiny plane, and watched all this with both joy and lump-in-throat heartache.