Matthew's Journal

This is the last entry on the Hugo Award shortlist for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. I'm not sure it's really practicable to compare a 9-episode series with a single feature film, but there we are.

I like the concept behind Severance, but found the tonal shifts a bit jarring; and the series ends on a cliffhanger rather than a satisfactory resolution, all of which left me rather underwhelmed.

The premise is that technology has been developed that lets an employer "sever" the work and not-work memories of employees - at work the "innie" has no knowledge of what happens outside the office, and the "outie" likewise has no memory of what they do at work. Which, of course, leads to rumours about the sort of top-secret things that "severed" employees might be doing that must be kept secret. ( Spoilers )

One bit of iPlayer I enjoyed before going to Scotland (and still available for a couple of weeks) is Remarkable Places to Eat. There are four episodes, and in each one Fred Sirieix (a Maître d'hôtel) accompanies a well-known chef (Angela Hartnett, Tom Kerridge, Michel Roux Jr, Nisha Katona) to a different city, where the chef shows him some of their favourite places to eat in that city. As well as eating there, they meet some of the front of house and kitchen staff, and also get a bit involved in the other aspects of the business (going out to buy ingredients, waiting tables, cooking some of the dishes).

Inevitably, a lot of the eateries visited are heavily booked-up and/or expensive (e.g. La Tour d'Argent in Paris, where the signature Canard à la presse costs €260 for two, and the wine lists starts at €60 and goes North of €10k), but they also endeavour to visit more reasonably-priced places - Sirieix and Roux Jr going into raptures about €5.50 jambon-beurre, for example. I also liked how they talked in the round about how the restaurants operated, including the importance of the front-of-house staff.

We don't have many guns in the UK; after Dunblane we decided that enough was enough, and by 1997 private ownership of handguns (as opposed to sporting rifles and shotguns) was largely illegal. Forensics mean the police are now able to identify handguns reasonably well from the discarded cartridges, and track their use over time. From this, a particular gun, "gun number 6" has been identified as the deadliest illegal gun in the UK - used in 11 shootings and 3 murders.

Gun No 6 (iPlayer, until the end of the year) is the story of that gun. Or rather, it is a docu-drama of what we know of the gun - none of the shooters of it (even those convicted of its use) will talk about it and neither will most of the victims themselves. We hear from the families of the dead, and we hear from other men with convictions for gun-related violence. And those ex-offenders reconstruct the 11 shootings.

It's a tricky thing to try and pull off (and I suspect there will be plenty of people who think they failed); I was struck by how easily the ex-offenders could imagine the scenarios and talk about the likely motivations for the attacks. The film-maker asked them quite probing questions about their own interactions with gun crime, and how handling a gun made them feel; and the answers largely felt honest. These were men who were glad to have made it out alive, but also pretty unsentimental about why they'd done the things they'd done.

Early on, the mother of someone murdered during an armed robbery asks "why would it be normal for someone to pick up a gun?" I don't think this film could answer that question, but it did show us a bit about both those people for whom picking up a gun was once part of life; and the devastating consequences of a single 9mm pistol.

I quite enjoyed Rellik, though it seems it wasn't popular generally. The premise is that the series starts nearly at the end of things, and then keeps moving backwards in time (along with some slightly odd backwards-video effects). It's an interesting idea, particularly the way this means you see character development in reverse - people who initially seem quite sympathetic turn out to have previously been unpleasant, and so on. Unfortunately, they seemed to think it was OK to include a lot of cop shop cliches since they were doing something new with the narrative structure. But still, it worked for me.

In a different vein, Lucy Worsley's programme on choral evensong - a gentle look at the history of the early Reformation, and how Henry VII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I each made their mark on the music of the Chapel Royal and more widely across the country. I'd have liked longer segments of music (and less talking over them), but it was still an hour well spent.

Finally, there was Chris Packham: Asperger's and Me, where the naturalist tells us a bit about how he finds living with Asperger's. I don't want to generalise, but he's very good at explaining how he relates to the world, and how his autism affects that - both its highs and its lows. It's very personal, and you can see he's describing very intimate details about himself; I think to try and get the more neurotypical of us to try and see the world a little as he does. He then goes to the US to see how they try and treat people with autism there, and it's obviously very painful - both to hear people describing autism as a disease that should be eradicated, and to see the impact of dealing with autism on the people he meets and their families. Chris is clear that now he wouldn't want his autism cured, but that equally he might have made a different decision in the past, and that he's been lucky to be able to find a career that lets him play to his strengths.

Ian Hislop is doing history on the TV again, this time "Who Should We Let In?" [available on iPlayer until 27 July], where he looks at how our attitude to immigration changed from the Victorian period where our open door policy was a point of national pride.

It's a disturbingly contemporary account, beginning with antisemitism in London's East End. Early on the press realise that lies about foreigners sell papers (the "Yellow Peril" stories about Liverpool resulted in the city council conducting an inquiry that concluded that the Chinese were in fact model citizens), and it is politically expedient to blame the woes of the poor on aliens.

It's not all depressing - the British took in a quarter of a million Belgians during the first world war, and people put them up in their own homes, rather as some people are now doing with refugees from Syria and other parts of the world. But, as the women who is hosting a Syrian refugee points out, we're a very rich nation and we are taking far fewer refugees than far smaller and poorer countries are.

This was an episode that veered dangerously close to shark-jumping on several occasions, played rather too fast-and-loose with the 4th wall for my liking, and was rather too pleased with its own cleverness. It did work, however...( spoilers )