SARAH VINE'S My TV Week: The Crown meets The Thick Of It
SARAH VINE’S My TV Week: The Crown meets The Thick Of It
QUEEN OF OZ
Fridays, 9.30pm, BBC1 and iPlayer
Rating: 
Watching the BBC news the other night, a trailer for Queen Of Oz, Catherine Tate’s new show about an obnoxious, selfish, entitled spare to the British throne, came on.
They showed a clip that was both unfunny and vulgar and, if you hadn’t already watched the show and didn’t know the context, deeply off-putting.
Clearly someone at the BBC doesn’t really approve of Tate and her brand of politically incorrect comedy, and would sincerely prefer if viewers didn’t sully their consciences with it.
Rather in the same way that the irrepressible popularity of Mrs Brown’s Boys (another full-throated poke at the woke) pulls in audiences and drives Auntie to distraction, Tate remains one of the few TV comedians who still dares to push people’s buttons.
The Queen Of Oz, Catherine Tate’s new show, is about an obnoxious, selfish, entitled spare to the British throne
That said, this is a mixed bag. The premise itself is quite a fun idea, not least because it has some salient topical resonances.
I mean, where could she possibly have got the notion of a spoiled, druggie, petulant, red-haired younger sibling of a future king who hates her dysfunctional and emotionally stunted family and ends up in exile on the other side of the world?
In this case Georgiana, Tate’s character, is there under duress, not out of choice – but the parallels with our own beloved Prince Harry are obvious.
The trouble is not the concept, a rich comedy seam that so far remains reverently unmined, but Tate herself. She turns the character all the way up to 11, when quite honestly an eight or nine would have been fine.
In the same way that David Walliams and Matt Lucas always managed to take the joke just that bit too far in Little Britain, here Tate does the same. Put it this way: subtle it is not.
The opening scenes where, hungover, she throws up on a child while visiting a school are enough to turn most people off.
In her review, Sarah Vine says the parallels of Tate’s character, Georgiana, with our own Prince Harry ‘are obvious’
The TV critic says the show is a ‘mixed bag,’ and that ‘the premise itself is quite a fun idea, not least because it has some salient topical resonances’
And her delivery – she inhabits the character as a cross between Nan, her hugely popular Noughties creation, Princess Margaret in her Mustique days, and Don Corleone – is full-on, to say the least.
But stick with it, and there is some good stuff here. Not least the supporting cast of characters, which are funny and well-written and help elevate the show into something more.
Robert Coleby as Bernard, a stupendously dry Sir Humphrey character, Jenna Owen as Zoe, Georgiana’s beleaguered press officer, Niky Wardley as Anabel, her wonderfully thick lady-in-waiting, Anthony Brandon Wong as Wei Wei, the fabulously bitchy master of the royal household, and David Roberts as Richard Steele, an Australian media mogul not entirely unreminiscent of other Australian media moguls. Think The Thick Of It meets The Crown.
It hits its stride about halfway through episode two, when Tate’s character settles down a bit and the writing and narrative start to take off.
Episode three, in which Georgiana’s smug brother Freddie (Daniel Lapaine) comes to visit and she escapes to go drinking with the locals in a dive bar, is really quite fun.
A 90s hit… WITH EXTRA WRINKLES
THE FULL MONTY
DISNEY +
Rating: 
Despite the extra wrinkles, not much has changed for The Full Monty characters. Pictured: Robert Carlyle and Mark Addy
Nineties nostalgia is all the rage, so what better time to bring out a series based on the 1997 hit film about a group of unemployed Sheffield steel workers who form a striptease act to make ends meet? Even better if you can have the original cast…
Despite the wrinkles, not much has changed for our characters. And there are obvious political parallels: 1997 saw the dying days of the post-Thatcher era and the rise of New Labour; here we are, with a struggling Conservative government and another Labour mirage on the horizon.
I remember Robert Carlyle being the star of the original; here it’s Mark Addy as Dave. He’s now a school janitor haunted by the loss of his child, and he gravitates towards a vulnerable pupil.
The kid is caught stealing food: Dave turns a blind eye and they become pals, their relationship a vehicle for the underlying issues here.
There’s no escaping the political agenda of this show, but you don’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool socialist to appreciate it.
This is a world where there’s a procedure for everything but a solution to nothing, where the wrong people get rewarded and where bureaucracy trumps common sense – and where humans get chewed up in the process. We can all relate to that.
Admirably insightful…
Sarah Beeny Vs Cancer is a mix of hard pragmatism and soft emotion that perfectly reflects the awful reality of dealing with, in her case, breast cancer. Pictured: Sarah Beeny
It’s a bit of a thing these days for celebrities to document their mental and physical struggles: it’s becoming quite a crowded space and, affecting as these stories are, there is a danger of them becoming a cliché.
But Sarah Beeny brings an admirable degree of insight to the genre in Sarah Beeny Vs Cancer (streaming on Channel 4), a mix of hard pragmatism and soft emotion that perfectly reflects the awful reality of dealing with, in her case, breast cancer.
An added dimension is that her mother, Ann, died of the disease aged just 39; in the midst of her own treatment, Sarah finds Ann’s medical records and explores the contribution she made to the research which now helps save so many lives.
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