FROM Capote’s In Cold Blood to David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, no one does stranger than fiction true crime as well as America. One of the TV highlights of recent years was the series American Crime Story: The People v OJ Simpson, an account of the “trial of the century” from bonkers white Bronco chase to controversial verdict. Now from the same stable comes The Assassination of Gianni Versace (BBC2, Wednesday, 9pm), and one episode in it is just as gripping.
As with OJ, Assassination starts with what we know, that the Italian fashion designer was murdered on the stops of his Miami mansion by Andrew Cunanan, and spools onwards and backwards from there. The opening section contrasted Versace’s gilded life, all servants, calm, and freshly squeezed juice, with his killer running around in a sweat, preparing to do the deed. As writer Tom Robb Smith (London Spy) showed, the grisly circus began immediately, with someone trying to flog a photo of the body to the media and a souvenir-hunting couple tearing a Versace ad out of a magazine and dipping it in the victim’s blood. American Crime Story, far from turning away from such details, cannot get enough of them. If the OJ ratings are any guide, viewers feel the same.
Will we ever get used to Top Gear (BBC2, Sunday, 8pm) without Jeremy Clarkson? That was the question which dogged the first series without the big- mouthed, large-bellied, fisticuffs-prone, denim-wearing, dad-dancing, curly-haired buffoon, and it persists still. Chris Evans showed things could get worse, much worse, and now all hopes of recovery are vested in Matt LeBlanc.
LeBlanc, let’s just call him Joey from Friends and be done with it, began the new series with a preview of the highlights to come. Since none of these featured some pillock doing handbrake turns around the Cenotaph (remember that, Joey?) we were off to a promising start. From there it went downhill as we were reminded of the supreme dullness of Joey’s fellow presenters. It is not their fault they are up against a charismatic American, but unlike Richard “Mr Anti-Health and Safety” Hammond and James “Girly Fop” May, they have nothing to compensate. They are just nice, decent blokes who know a bit about cars, and those are ten a penny.
Even Joey struggles under the weight of expectation at times, as when, searching for a way to describe the grip on a car, he said it was like “King Kong”. Clarkson would have compared it to a Scotsman’s hold on a fiver as the collection plate came round. Untrue, unfair and all the rest of it, but at least it would have had viewers shouting at the telly and not snoring into their Rioja.
Those in the market for some hot TV property should set the sat nav for Save Me (Sky Atlantic, Wednesday, 9pm). Starring Suranne Jones (Doctor Foster) and Stephen Graham (This is England) it is written by Lennie James (Line of Duty), who also stars. This tale of a teenager who leaves a video message telling her mum she is off to meet her real dad is shaping up to be as gruelling but compelling as The Missing. James plays the father in question, and what a great character he is: the deadbeat dad given a chance of redemption.
All right you lot, pay attention. The BBC has spent a lot of money (we’re talking ten Huw Edwards and a Jeremy Vine at least) on Civilisations (BBC2, Thursday, 9pm), so you are jolly well going to watch it, if for no other reason than the corporation will henceforth point to it whenever it is accused of dumbing down or showing too many repeats. “See,” Auntie will say, “look on my works, ye mighty, my Civilisations, and never despair or complain to the papers again.”
Simon Schama, being the first out of the blocks, had the hardest job to do in giving an overview of what was to come. He began well enough with references to the murderers and vandals of Isis and how we may have trouble defining what civilisation is but we certainly know what it is not. Thereafter, alas, he took to plodding through the timeline, with this object following that. Perhaps too much is expected of this follow up to Kenneth Clark’s still talked about 1969 series, Civilisation. We shall see. Mary Beard and David Olusoga will follow Schama, making the nine part series, if nothing else, a kind of TV talent show for academics: Britain’s Got Intellectuals.
Poor old Benidorm (ITV, Wednesday, 9pm), now in its tenth series and still showing its wobbly bits to the world. The regular cast are beginning to look like zombies, wandering around in search of more smutty jokes to feed on. Never mind kiss me quick; someone put the lot of them out of their end of the pier show misery, pronto.
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