STILL GAME, BBC1, 9.30pm
I FEAR this once brilliant sitcom is turning into Mrs Brown’s Boys. Just like an auld yin in the Clansman, its teeth have been removed and it’s gumsy and ineffectual and a bit of a bore.
Maybe the wings have been clipped to make it more palatable for a UK audience or maybe the famous falling out between Hemphill and Kiernan has taken its toll? Or maybe it should just never have been revived, having blazed brilliantly in its time, but that time is now history?
I watched the old series on Netflix, and the gulf between them and this new one is astounding.
This week, Pete The Jakey dies and there are only 15 people at his funeral. That’s what comes from being a jakey who lived under a bridge … Winston limps along as a pallbearer, prompting tears not of grief but “of pishing yerself". And Boaby decides to resign from the pub.
Prices are rising and there’s “bootleg garbage floating aboot". How will he cope with being a civilian? And how will the regulars cope with his terrifying replacement?
THE STORY OF SKINHEAD WITH DON LETTS, BBC4, 9pm
WHAT do you think of when you imagine a skinhead? Violence, tattoos and neo-Nazis, the narrator suggests, but this is not how the youth sub-culture started.
This documentary takes us back to the 1960s when that culture was born. It was about multiculturalism, “a mixed marriage between Jamaican culture and white working-class London culture”.
However, it was then hijacked by people who danced to Jamaican ska music while despising those who created it.
Don Letts tells us how he loved skinhead culture in his youth because it allowed him to create an identity from the only things that were freely available to him: music and clothing.
But the 1970s warped skinhead culture, and it was grabbed by racists.
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