BUCKET, BBC4, 10pm
MIRIAM Margolyes plays Mim – a maddening, loud, eccentric old woman – in this new sitcom.
She’s celebrating her 70th birthday (70 is the new 30, she insists) by working her way through a bucket list, and the first item is a holiday with her irritable daughter. Other plans include: “Kiss a frog on Lake Titicaca.”
Mim is crude, and absolutely blind to everyone’s discomfort as she gossips about sex and her daughter’s masturbation habits.
Frog Stone plays Fran, her drab and weary daughter. Her only hope in life is that she’ll quietly get the promotion she wants, but Mim barges in and is intent on forcing some colour and activity into her existence.
The comedy tries to make us cringe on poor Fran’s behalf, but often goes too far and sounds like a grubby schoolboy wrote it, with lines such as “Would you rather dry hump Ann Widdecombe or rim Donald Trump?”
GUERILLA, SKY ATLANTIC, 9pm
TELEVISION reminds us again that this is where the big stars are flocking. In this new series, Idris Elba and Frieda Pinto star in a story about racism and police brutality in 1970s London.
It opens with a black man giving a fiery talk in prison to fellow convicts: “When you’re black and British there’s a constant struggle to understand who you really are” and he reminds them that they are “the children of those who broke their backs to build the Empire” and so they are forever locked in a struggle with “the white man”.
There is a horrible scene of police violence against a black man and a white Irishwoman, but when black activists try to get their people to protest, they cry “Jobs first, man!” Before they can take on a political struggle they need work and a roof over their head.
As the protest movement tries to come to life, right-wing hooligan-ism is also on the rise, and Special Branch is keen to stamp out any black uprising.
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