11 July
BBC2
9PM
(Watch it here)
Muhammad: mad, bad, or just sad? Prophet or prick-tease? Big stinking jessie or just bent as a ninepence? Warrior-philosopher or quite simply the leader of the biggest global bombing cult the world has ever seen? These were all questions that Rageh Omaar wisely kept off his documentary about the man who has spawned so many touchy followers. Omaar famously put his kevlar body armour on and ducked flak in his hotel lobby even while the Allies were shelling downtown Baghdad, but making this was probably an even bigger hospital pass for the Beeb to sell him. As it is, he proves a fleet-footed flak-dodger, getting a bunch of Oxbridge and SOAS lecturers to fill in the more controversial bits (Could he read? Had he plagiarised a lot of his best stuff from Biblical sources?), while coming across as an honest, if slightly pious, broker. It’s a series that illustrates not just Big M’s life and times, but far more importantly perhaps, shows you just how shamefully little you previously knew about his life and times.
7
RAGEH KRAY
Annons
7 July
Channel 5
10PM
(Watch it here)
Anyone who caught the Waterloo & City line in the week before the TV debut of Candy Bar would have seen a big hoarding advertising a reality show themed around the titular Sapphic Soho niterie. Its black background was emblazoned with one massive word in bold pink font: LESBIANS. Clearly, the makers of the Channel 5 show knew their target market. Their target market was bankers who commuted from Surrey (the only class of person on this most socially streamlined of train lines), who liked to have their USPs summarised in one word, dammit, and liked it most if that word was LESBIANS, please. Intrigued by the congruence between LESBIANS and the stockbroker belt, I tuned in, also hoping in part to also establish once and for all whether LESBIANS were in fact hot, or just gross women with terrible dress sense. As it turned out, LESBIANS were just ordinary people going about their everyday lives with hopes and dreams and frustrations like the rest of us, except that one of them was Shabby from Big Brother 11 and she seemed to spend most of her time designing football shirts themed around Judas Iscariot, or waffling on about how “I find most people really boring to talk to” or making lewd reference to how she’s “got fingers in a lot of pies”. Don't eat any pies today.
7
FAT LES
4 July
BBC2
8PM
(Watch it here)
If there were any reason to love Jon Snow any more than one already does, it’s the revelation he makes at the start of this documentary: that before he entered journalism, he headed a housing charity. Jon Snow is going to have to set up a Jon Snow Sperm Bank if he is to supply demand from middle class women who want to have his babies. Less endearing is the way he lets Housing Minister Grant Schapps off lightly when Schapps claims something called ‘the market’ is going to sort out the massive sink tenancy problem. And less so too when he falls for the old ‘sure we can have that meeting where you tell me all the stuff I’ve been doing wrong later’ routine from the baddie they’re chasing. Ultimately the only bit you’ll remember a year from now is one statistic. In the whole of Britain, guess how many dodgy landlords were prosecuted by local councils last year? Wrong. Two.
6
LES LYNCH, THE LANDLORD MAN
9 July
BBC2
9.50PM
(Watch it here)
Tawiah is a nice girl. I sense she likes to be woken up with a mug of milky tea, and perhaps a croissant or some other more exotic pastry variant. She does not – and I’m going out on a bit of a limb here, but hey – like to be woken up with fingering. So when she, Mark ’Nice Guy’ Ronson and Guy ‘Still Really Nice Despite The Fact I Could Buy your Skull From Your Head And Stud It With Diamonds’ Chambers, write a song together, it seems logical that they’d write about something nice but sad, with a hook like the one they eventually settle on: “You used to wake me up in the morning”. Record company A&Rs are not nice guys, however. They are the opposite. They are A&Rs. So word comes down the wires that this song they’ve invented needs more quote-unquote ‘sexual energy’. How are kids going to get their sex-juices pumping when this song is just about being previously woken up? So they get Tawiah to go back into the studio and change that hook to: “We used to make sweet love in the morning”. Tawiah seems fairly philosophical about all this – she seems to know when to pick her battles. But remember Tawiah: first they start changing the time of day that you make love. Keep this kowtowing up, and by 2015 you’ll be gyrating in a dildo-studded pelvic girdle with Rihanna at the MTV Europe Awards.
7
RABBI WILLIAMS
7 July
Channel 4
9PM
(Watch it here)
Someone has been murdered. But who did it? And why? Find out, in this 86-minute long ‘highly acclaimed’ adaptation of a Danish drama everyone’s allegedly talking about. Or don’t, if, like us, you gave up after 20 minutes of actors doing their usual acting thing amidst some authentically grey landscapes and a ton of not-exactly-unstandard police procedural tropes (the very first scene = LITERALLY ‘a cop on their last day’. Why do they let cops go in on their last day? They should just let them retire on their penultimate day).
0
SØREN ALLDARONGPLACES