James reviews Rumpole of the Bailey on Talking Pictures TV, Your Kitchen on Channel 5 and Charmed on ITV2

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Hello, I’m James Brook, and welcome to the thirtieth episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

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This is where I review upcoming Freeview programs. Go to IReviewFreeview.com to search, listen, or indeed read and/or comment on all my reviews. And if you want to see what I’ll be reviewing next time, visit the page ‘What’s up next.’ That’s IReviewFreeview - all one word - dot com.

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In this episode, I will review:

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Rumpole of the Bailey on Talking Pictures TV,

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Your Kitchen: 60 Years of Fads and Gadgets on Channel 5 and

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Charmed on ITV2

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‘Rumpole of the Bailey’ pops up every couple of years or so. It’s one of my comfort views. Something to dose off to. This time around, I thought it was time to watch with a more critical eye. So here it is. Add in a Channel 5 documentary in the vague hope it might be informative and useful (Ha!) Chance would be a fine thing. And to finish, some USA witches broadcast at 3PM. What? 3 in the afternoon? I’m not expecting anything that would blast the skin off a rice pudding.

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By the way, the image for this episode was generated by a free AI image generator with the prompt:

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against a backdrop of the old bailey courthouse, a girl in a witch’s hat is holding a kitchen whisk, watercolour.

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Sort of nearly OK, which - to be honest - is exactly what I could say about most of the episode images. In this one, the whisk looks a bit stupid. But there y’go.

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(Poof!)

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Whatever … here we go….

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Rumpole of the Bailey (S 1 E 3: Rumpole & the Honourable Member) on Talking Pictures TV, Tuesday August 6th 8:00pm

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For TV watchers of a certain age - no, wait, let me start that again - For us crinkly TV viewers - that’s better - Horace Rumpole needs no introduction. He’s right up there with Basil Fawlty, Del Boy and Ena Sharple’s hairnet in the pantheon of iconic Brit TV characters.

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And watching ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’ now, in 2024, is like putting on a cosy pair of woolly socks, wrapping yourself in a nice thick cardie and snuggling down with a mug of hot chocolate in a comfy-womfy arm chair by a blazing fire.

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It’s nostalgia on speed. But nostalgia specialises in remembering the nice. The comfortable. A rosy-glowed past when everything was better. A selectively remembered time of, and a longing for, a simpler age of clear cut, unambiguous characters wearing silly wigs, drinking claret and quoting Wordsworth while waiting for buses. The first cousin, if you like, of Dixon of Dock Green. (Ha!) Evening all!

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But the hay-day of Rumpole was the 1980s. Thatcher. The miner’s strike. The Falklands war. The Brixton and Toxteth riots. Privatisation. No such thing as society. The myth of trickle-down economics. (Oooo) In short, the 80s were no picnic.

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But, to me now, Rumpole is a rotund, twinkly-eyed avuncular character, winning cases with a last-minute rabbit jerked from -a hat, fond of port and pulling little tricks on his fellow barristers, most of whom are cut-out cardboard characters, obsessed with trivial things, just ripe for having their pomposity pricked.

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So, holding all this in my head, I sat down and watched.

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My first thought: gosh, he’s got more hair than I remembered! I checked: yep, it’s an early one: series one, episode three. Leo McKern, who played Rumpole, was 58 at the time. He stopped, with considerably less hair, at 72. Another triumph for male pattern baldness! (Ha!) Gets most of us in the end.

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And my second thought: I don’t remember him being this boring and so full of himself. He never shuts up. Never uses one word when 5 will do. This Rumpole - the Rumpole I don’t remember - cheerfully, endlessly, fog-horns his lengthy, adjective filled opinions and tired jokes on all and sundry. After about 5 minutes, you just want someone to tell him to shut up.

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But, I watch on. The narrative, as ever, is centred on a court case, with a sub-plot or two carefully inserted to add depth, nuance and/or comic relief.

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In this episode, Rumpole is defending a member of Parliament accused of rape by one of his researchers. This is not the sort of case he normally takes. It’s darker, and although I’d seen it at least once before, I couldn’t remember the outcome. This is undoubtedly because it didn’t fit with the picture of Rumpole I’d built over the years.

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He tries to speak to the MP alone, but his wife - a glacial, lady Macbeth figure, thin lipped and rampantly ambitious, will not leave her husband’s side, and often answers for him. But Rumpole finds a couple of points crucial for the defence.

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In the main sub-plot, Rumpole’s son, Nick, and his American fiance Erica are over from the states. Nick has to decide if he should work in the US or the UK. Rumpole invites them to come along to the Old Bailey courthouse and see him in action.

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They do, and see him relentlessly attacking the girl who says she was raped. He brings up her past relationships and her struggles with mental health. Despite a note from the accused MP to ‘leave her alone,’ Rumpole reduces the girl to tears. It is unpleasant and demeaning to watch, but effective: the girl has been exposed - at worst - as a totally unreliable witness.

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Afterwards, in the wine bar, Rumpole is cock-a-hoop and orders champagne. But Erica is disgusted with what he has done in court, and attacks him for it. Rumpole defends himself. Nick stays silent.

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When Rumpole finally gets to talk to the MP without his wife in attendance, he emphasises the MP must say two crucial things when being questioned in court. The MP won’t commit himself and implies it’s a relief to get away from his wife, even if this does mean eating prison food.

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Now, a spoiler alert at this point. If you don’t want to know what happens, turn the sound off, count to 15 and turn it back on.

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In court the next day, when asked the crucial questions, the MP simply says he can’t remember.

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Even when the judge gives him another chance, he says the same thing. The defence case is scuppered and Rumpole loses.

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His natural ebullience - already decreased by the failure in the case - is further dented when Nick tells him he’s accepted the job in the U.S. so won’t be returning to live in the UK. Left hanging like smoke in the air is the feeling that seeing him in court, and the argument with Erica, was a possibly decisive factor in this decision.

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For once, Rumpole is left silent and subdued.

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(Hmm)

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Right at the start, I said this is not how I remember ‘Rumpole of the Bailey.’ He’s got more hair, he’s far more obnoxious, the case is dark, and he loses.

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His formidable wife Hilda (forever known as ‘she who must be obeyed’) plays but a small part, and the lives of his colleagues are not explored.

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As a result, we have a tight little drama that is both believable and reasonably compelling, but is not as widely based as later episodes. Rumpole is a dominating, elephant-like bore, making it difficult for other characters to be other than cyphers. There is little opportunity for the debunking of inflated self-importance, which is a humorous staple for later episodes.

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Have I got it on series record? Yes, I have. I’m keen to see - now I’ve noticed it - Rumpole slowly evolving from being a bully and a bore into the kinder, gentler, less abrasive figure I so fondly remember.

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(Ha!)

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Bring on the nostalgia! Speaking of which …

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Your Kitchen: 60 Years of Fads and Gadgets on Channel 5, Tuesday August 6th 9:00pm

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Well now. In my little grandpa annex my ‘kitchen’ is about 2 metres of work surface, a Belfast sink, a microwave oven that only microwaves, a one cup kettle, cupboards, drawers, a freezer, a fridge, a skinny washing machine, a portable one ring induction hob and a 20 cm saucepan with a lid.

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Oh - and a toaster, of course. Life without toast? Unthinkable!

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I cook one meal a day, at midday. It’s a healthy mix of noodles, frozen veg, frozen fish chunks and a stock cube. It takes 20 minutes and I call it Grandpa’s nourishing soup, but my grandkids go urrgh. And that’s about it on the cooking front, apart from a microwaved poached egg on toast for tea.

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So it was with a more than jaundiced eye I started watching ‘your kitchen. 60 years of fads and gadgets.’ Rather like a caveman looking at a caravan, I’m thinking, I know what I’ve got will do for me, so what have they got that I might possibly need?

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Well, the answer is nothing. But we’ll come to that.

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The documentary begins with a boring but expected paean to ‘the kitchen’. The heart of the house. The most used room. Where the family gathers for good things. Where beautiful smells originate. They make it sound like holy place. Which it isn’t. It’s just a room with a few gadgets, a sink, and probably a dead rat under the floorboards.

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Annoyingly, despite the subtitle promising 60 years of fads and gadgets, it starts in 1980. Unless my maths is completely wrong, it should have begun in 1964. Two minutes in, and I’m already feeling cheated. Where were the lava lamps and fondue sets? Pfft! Vanished and gone.

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But there’s a perky narrator, talking heads and Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ which was a disastrous policy for affordable housing, but good news for landlords and breakfast bar manufacturers. We saw 1980s go-getters hurrying along streets, and a robot toaster before an in-depth look at the first big gadget of the day: the microwave oven with a turntable.

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A turntable! Wow! Before, you had to nudge your special microwaveable cooking pan round manually every minute or two. But now you just plonked it in, pressed a button, and hovered around for the beep.

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This somewhat obvious innovation caused microwave sales to explode.

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And, predictably, disappointingly, the program wheeled out some celebs to cook using a monster microwave dating from 1985. Now regular listeners will know I’m not a celeb fan. The idea gives me hives. Bring on a celeb and I reach for the remote.

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But, here’s a thing: they didn’t look like celebs and I only vaguely recognised one of them. And - crucially - instead of mugging relentlessly to the camera, they just put on aprons and got on with the job. Which was to cook what was ambitiously referred to as ‘a 3 course meal’: corn-on-the-cob, a steak and rum-baked bananas.

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Note: that isn’t steak and chips with peas on the side or even steak, mash and gravy, but a single lump of meat on a plate.

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So Aprons on, they gave it a go and a few beeps later the corn-on-the-cob was declared delicious and the steak edible. Even the sad looking rum-baked bananas tasted OK.

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Well, that’s a relief. Hurrah!

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The celebs were wheeled off and the pace started hotting up, moving swiftly on to MFI flat-packed kitchens, a Schreiber commercial featuring a couple of Australians, and a wok.

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A wok? I suppose some might find a metal bowl with a handle interesting and/or nostalgic, but not me.

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They finished the 1980s with a look at yuppies eating take-aways in gadget filled kitchens and a pitch for the deep-fat fryer, which came with scary government backed infomercials showing how easy it was to burn your house down by leaving a chip pan unattended.

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For once, I was quite glad of the adverts barging their way in, but put them on pause while I made toast.

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The 1990s bought BSE (pictures of drunk looking cows) and recession. Kitchens responded by becoming rural. Chintz curtains, tiled floors, and that jug with a plunger for making coffee retailing, we were helpfully informed, for £36:50 at Argos.

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But IKEA arrived in 1996 and chintz took flight and fled.

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We all went scandi-style, had TVs in the kitchen and watched Ready, Stready, Cook and Jamie Oliver. Pasta! Wow.

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Time to wheel the celebs back. Confronted by a pasta maker, a lump of dough and a requirement to make tagliatelle, they gamely had a bash and …. well, managed it. Hurrah!

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You will have doubtless noticed this review is becoming a machine-gunned litany of items from the documentary, rather than a review per se.

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It’s a lazy way of writing and serves little purpose other than filling up the time. But documentaries often have that effect on me. Instead of expanding my mind and giving me an appreciation of what is going on, I find it hard to think beyond ‘oh, what have they just shown me?’ And you get locked in, trudging along an uninteresting rut of little relevance.

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So: I’m going to break out. Leave the rut. But before I do, let me mention the celebs were handed a spiralizer and a courgette and asked to make courgetti? Courghetti? (Ha!) Apparently it’s courgette spaghetti, which looks disgusting and nothing like spaghetti. They seemed to enjoy doing it. Why? Don’t ask me.

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Oh - and one more thing - apparently, once your kitchen is fully wified and joined to the web, AI will inform you when you’ve run out of frozen peas. Oh, joy. I suppose, eventually, it’ll just automatically order your peas - and whatever else it thinks you’re short of - and direct your self-driving car to Tesco’s to collect, without you having to even move from your ergonomically designed multi-screen workstation.

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Well, I think I’ve got ten years left. With any luck I’ll pop my clogs before that comes to pass.

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But, here’s a thought: who then would know how to make Grandpa’s nourishing soup?

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(Ha!)

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Now, let me sum up. ‘Your Kitchen: 60 Years of Fads and Gadgets ‘ was well put together, with articulate and knowledgeable talking heads. Thankfully, the celebs looked human and were not used much. Some bits were interesting, but which bits I can’t now remember.

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Did it make me want to cook more? Certainly not. Did it make me want to buy a kitchen gadget? Nope. Am I going to re-arrange my kitchen? No.

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So, to loop back to the question I posed at the start: what have the people in the caravan - or in this case people in a modern kitchen with a looming AI takeover - got that I could possibly want? The answer is still nothing.

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But - as I have often said - that’s just me.

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Ho Hum. On with the motley!

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Charmed (S 2 E 6: That Old Black Magic) on ITV2, Wednesday August 7, 3:00pm

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Umm. For watchers of broadcast TV, the post lunch landscape is pretty bleak. Cheap to buy content only there to fill in the gaps between commercials. Not meant for concentrated attention, more for catching people on the go doing other things, like hoovering the carpet.

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So I came to ‘Charmed’ with my mind made up. I would not enjoy it. I had derogatory phrases swirling in my head and comparisons with other things I could do with my time: going for a walk; reading a book; picking fluff from my navel.

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But, but but but …. I did find it a cut above the common ruck of daytime telly.

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‘Charmed’ does have a definite charm. It wasn’t instantly forgettable mush. In fact, even now, a couple of hours later, I still remember most of it.

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The story starts with a couple of hikers exploring an old mine. Cobwebs. Warning symbols that something dangerous is lurking. But of course, these are ignored. They take a rock sample and release a witch with swelling frontage and a boa constrictor around her neck. She might be grateful for being released, but so what? She shrinks them down to lego size and feeds them - kicking and screaming - to her snake. Yummy.

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Having established evil is afoot, the credits are run.

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Then we meet the central characters: three attractive sisters, all witches, living and working in a US city seemingly populated entirely by pretty girls and hunky young men.

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One of them - who seems to know everything - tells two of the witches that a recently reappeared evil witch will try to destroy them. They have to find the witch’s wand and give it to The Chosen One, who is the only person who can stop her.

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How he has this knowledge I have no idea, but it’s certainly an efficient way to set up the story. And that’s not all: he knows who The Chosen One is, and takes them along to a college, where he’s seen sitting on a wall practicing magic with a ping-pong ball.

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They tell him the situation, but he doesn’t believe them, thinking it’s all a joke. Then the third sister turns up with the wand (discovered when she was filming a version of Bargain Hunt) and it immediately glows when he holds it and does some strange stuff. But - would you believe it! - he remains in denial.

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Also, there’s a bit of romance going on, with handsome men jockeying for attention. After all, you have to fill up the bits between the special effects somehow.

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Meantime, the evil witch has not been idle. She needs to make a special spell, so when a lone walker passes the cave, she puts her hand into his chest and pulls out his heart. There’s no blood, but maybe a bit gory for 3:20 on a Wednesday afternoon?

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It’s all shaping up nicely. On one side we have the good guys and a Saviour who doesn’t have faith in himself, while on the other is a very nasty witch with special powers. Hovering between is the powerful artifact that can decide the result.

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Now, at this point, I’m not going to give a spoiler alert. (Chuckle) Meaning of course I just have. Anyway, I’m arrogant enough to assume anyone listening to this podcast already knows how tit finishes. After all, we’ve all seen it enough times.

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Briefly put, the three witches (the good guys) are nearly destroyed, but then The Chosen One gets some faith in himself, vanquishes evil and all is good.

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The fun of these shows lies not necessarily in seeing what occurs, but in judging if it takes place in the way you expect. You come to expect the expected.

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That’s why, when a character in a long-running series meets an unexpected end, it can feel shocking. You think, ‘he can’t die! He’s got to be here tomorrow, or next week.’ It’s like a friend suddenly being mowed down by a bus. I’ve never forgiven the BBC for killing off Nigel Pargiter in the Archers. That was 13 odd years ago, but I’ve not listened since.

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Oh, we can so easily invest fictions with the attributes of reality. Conversely, we can cheerfully ignore the reality of reality. Even as I sit here, tap-tapping away, the largest iceberg in history is slowly turning in the harsh waters of the South seas. It’s twice the size of Greater London and would stretch from Luton to Tunbridge Wells. But am I worried this is further evidence of cataclysmic climate change? Not really. The appalling fact the whole human race is possibly due for extinction within the life-time of my grandchildren is so totally incomprehensible, my mind just refuses to think about it in any meaningful way.

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I’d much rather give myself five stars for non-cleverly predicting the common story-arc of a run of the mill fiction about witches.

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Speaking of which, (Ha!) let me wrap up.

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‘Charmed’ is a well put together piece of fluff. But sometimes we need fluff. Maybe I did when I started watching. Right now, I’d probably be far more scathing. But - right now - harsh reality has intruded on my thoughts, and that is always a bit of a downer. After all, ignorance is bliss, and ‘tis a folly to dwell on icebergs.

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(Ha!)

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And that awkward misquote from Thomas Gray concludes the reviews for this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

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Don’t forget, contact me via email to contact@ireviewfreeview.com or through the website Ireviewfreeview.com where you can also click on the page ‘What’s up next.’ to see what programs I’ll be reviewing next time.

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Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.