ONE of the perks of this job is seeing new programmes early, while you lot are slogging your way through the summer repeats.
But, see too much and things start to blur, and it seems that Brian Sewell really has replaced Dale Winton as the presenter of Hole In The Wall. That was how I ended up having to re-watch Hope Springs, the new Scottish comedy-drama. How I had to sit
through it a third time was down to me losing my notebook. Could the show stand up to such scrutiny? As it bears the imprint of a production house specialising in high camp schlock, this appeared unlikely.
Shed Media gave the world Footballers' Wives, which in turn gave the world lots of girls christened Chardonnay. Shed might also claim it gave the world a wider understanding of hermaphrodite babies, death-by-Viagra, the flammability of fake boobs and the perils of attempting to out-Beckham David and Victoria's wedding (hot-air balloons can descend suddenly into lion enclosures). But then Footballers' Wives got silly and was ruined.
The producers and writers at Shed are all Scottish, and when they revealed that Hope Springs would be set in the Highlands, I can't have been the only one envisaging a Brigadoon-esque entertainment where the sleepiest of villages wakes up gay. In fact, it's four female ex-cons skedaddling from London with £3 million from a diamond heist but, instead of Barbados, landing in a "boghole" in the height of midge season.
Early on, Glasgow played the Big Smoke; for the next seven weeks Dumfries and Galloway will impersonate the Highlands. Alex Kingston is Ellie, leader of the crims, whose Plan B is that they hide out in the hamlet and buy the decrepit hotel. All the women look like they purchased those award-winning Scottish super-bras – an invention to rival our hollow-pipe drainage and indeed our macaroon bars – when they crossed the Border, but Kingston stands out in every way. Apart from the scenery and the sheep, she's the best thing about Hope Springs.
But I'm also enjoying Annette Crosbie as the resident old bat, Paul Higgins as the polis and Ronni Ancona as the femme fatale (pregnant and soon to be wed, she's having an affair with the snake-eyed lawyer who keeps a timorous wife at home and a dead body under the floorboards, all very Shed). Yes, yes, I know it's not the most original show there's ever been. And maybe if you live in Wanlockhead, the real Hope Springs, you'd be unhappy at being portrayed as adulterous, murderous and wont to extend this qualified welcome to incomers: "No snotty English cows allowed." But can you imagine, in the Homecoming year, what a state-sanctioned, tourist board-approved comedy-drama would look like? I'll keep watching this, though one viewing per episode will suffice from now on.
If the Hope Springs crooks are smart, they'll get in Sarah Beeny for expert help on doing up the hotel. Thankfully, for our lurid enjoyment of Beeny's Property Ladder, a lot of people weren't smart. They ignored her advice and bought the most expensive taps and the most hideous gargoyles and, like the nouveau riche couple remembered at the start of Property Snakes And Ladders, decided that zebra-print throughout was a terrific idea.
As the title implies, the new show is a post-recession look at the renovation game. It dug up headlines from the boom years – "First-time buyers priced out of nine in ten towns" – which now sound properly obscene. If your home was your castle back then, then your second and even third homes turned out to be castles built on sand, which distorted the true state of the property market.
Already, the 125 per cent mortgage sounds like a relic from some far-off numbskull age, like the square wheel. What possessed banks to ever offer them? "The issue wasn't about whether they made sense in the long term," said one financial whizz, "it was about the banks being able to sell the loans on to investors – pension funds for instance – and not be left holding the bomb."
Amid the wreckage, the first episode found two would-be tycoons loaned money by the 'Bank of Mum and Dad' before the slump, who then saw their parents' investments fall woefully short, although at least they listened to Beeny along the way. After Natasha, 21, fond of baring her midriff throughout, had declared that making a couple of million in two years would be "absolutely wonderful", she admitted to modelling herself on the presenter. This "wannabeeny" had dreamed of being a big noise in property since she was 14. "That's scary," said the real thing.
From property porn to cannon porn and Ross Kemp In Search Of Pirates. As his previous series have demonstrated, our hero loves to hang out with military men, address them as "sir", join in the mess banter, adopt the lingo and tag along during action stations without compromising the mission through his famously shiny heid or soap-hardened stare. In the Gulf of Aden to investigate the resurgence in piracy, he boarded HMS Northumberland to drool about a warship "bristling with hugely powerful and sophisticated weapons", but unfortunately the opening instalment was unable to deliver the money shot of real modern-day pirates, the kind who have swapped cutlasses for RPGs (that's rocket-propelled grenades; I know this because Ross told me).
Another ex-EastEnder, Sean Maguire, fared much better in Krod Mandoon And The Flaming Sword of Fire, a sword-and-sorcery spoof where he got to bare his chest, pronounce heroically ("My name is Krod and I'll be your liberator this evening") and brandish said burning blade. I should have hated this, never having read Lord Of The Rings, not caring for tele-fantasy at the best of times (and these, I'm told, are the best) and always being underwhelmed by Little Britain star turns (here it's Matt Lucas in an outsized merkin). But the script by Peter A Knight is hilarious and in India de Beaufort as Krod's uninhibited pagan girlfriend Aneka, who'll seduce a man to learn the time of day, the ripping opener boasted the week's most formidable female, just ahead of Hope Springs' Ellie and the wannabeeny.
HOPE SPRINGSBBC1 Sunday, 8pm
PROPERTY SNAKES AND LADDERS Channel 4 Tuesday, 8pm
ROSS KEMP IN SEARCH OF PIRATESSky 1 Wednesday, 10pm
The full article contains 1093 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
