Elizabeth is Missing, The Royal Variety Performance, My Grandparents' War, Kirstie's Handmade Christmas, reviews
By Alison Rowat Senior politics and features writer
Glenda Jackson returned to television after 27 years for Elizabeth is Missing (BBC1)
WITH it being Golden Globe nominations week there has been much ado about which actresses will win the top accolades. Before you ask, I can confidently guarantee that, unlike the Booker and Turner awards, there will be no "everyone is a winner/all shall share the prizes" bobbins. Are you kidding?
The smart money is on Olivia Colman for The Crown, Killing Eve's Jodie Comer, or the all-conquering Phoebe Waller-Bridge for Fleabag. Olivia, Jodie, Phoebe, all thoroughly modern names, and all beaten for the acting honours this week by a gal called Glenda. It is a name, like Carol, Christine, and Alison, you don't hear much anymore.
It was no ordinary Glenda, though, who put in a dazzling performance in Elizabeth is Missing (BBC1, Sunday). This was Ms Jackson of Women in Love, Elizabeth R, two Oscars fame, though my favourite cast listing for her has to be "Woman kissed by Eric" in the Morecambe & Wise Show.
In Elizabeth is Missing, Jackson played Maud, an eighty-something who is being lost to Alzheimer's. Maud fears her friend Elizabeth might have come to a bad end. As she tries to raise the alarm, Maud's mind is drawn back to a previous missing person, her beloved sister Sukey. One way or another she means to find answers, though to which mystery we do not know.
What an absolute gift to any writer, in this case novelist Emma Healey and dramatist Andrea Gibb, to have Jackson as your lead character. Maud was at turns wildly funny and hugely exasperating. Above all, Jackson was not afraid to make her unlikeable, or to sugar coat the ravages of this cruel disease. Like her devoted but shattered daughter, one wanted to hold the sparrow-like Maud close, or run away; there was little middle ground. Superb, if harrowing.
Only one of those adjectives apply to The Royal Variety Performance (STV, Tuesday). Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan, hosts for the 107th show, were not that bad, even throwing in some Ben Elton, "little bit of politics" material into the cosy mix. The Royal Variety is indeed the world's longest running entertainment show, in more ways than one. Robbie Williams, a Britain's Got Talent winner, Lewis Capaldi, Harry Connick Jr, the cast of Mary Poppins, on and on it went for TWO AND A HALF HOURS. The royals in attendance were the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (the Duke of York being at Pizza Express in Woking, presumably), who gamely fixed grins on their faces and got through the evening just fine, unlike your increasingly hysterical reviewer who had to be sedated with several Magnums.
My Grandparents' War (Channel 4, Wednesday) has been late to the party in this anniversary-crammed year, but it has been worth the wait. This week it was the turn of actress Kristin Scott Thomas, who traced the career of her naval commander grandfather, William.
Scott Thomas revealed that her family call her "the admiral"; command clearly runs in the blood. Her grandfather had been in the thick of it, including years spent protecting the Arctic Russian Convoys. "The worst journey in the world," Churchill had called it. Weather atrocious, ships in constant peril, and if a man fell overboard they could not stop to rescue him. William was at Dunkirk and there for D-Day, too. Like many of his generation he kept the horrors he had seen to himself, meaning much of this was a revelation to his granddaughter. "The admiral" duly cried at several points, with joy, pride (particularly when she was given his medal), and sorrow for all those lost.
A lot of old faces were back before the cameras in The Scandals that Shook Scotland (BBC Scotland, Thursday) as the documentary series looked at the life and court times of one Thomas Sheridan, Esq. It was a brisk canter through the tale but all the not so juicy details were there. Even after so long, the reporters who worked on the story, including Paul Hutcheon, late of this parish, still looked amazed at the twists and turns the story took. Give him a Magnum, someone.
Every December I think she won't be able to do it. But here she was, back for Kirstie's Handmade Christmas (Channel 4, Tuesday), and lo if she did not out-faff herself this year.
The Location, Location, Location host believes doing it yourself at Christmas is the ideal way to keep stress levels at a peep. So there she was, decorating a tray with resin – a task that involved using a heat gun at one point – making a nine foot tall wire and paper Christmas tree, plus her own Camembert cheese, and an ice bucket made from, er, ice.
Making your own ice bucket; surely God's way of saying you have too much time on your hands. Any Magnums left?