James reviews Strictly Come Dancing on BBC1, The Northman (2022) on Channel 4, and Buddha: Genius of the Ancient World on BBC4

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

This is where I review Freeview programs. Go to IReviewFreeview.com to search, listen, or indeed read and/or comment on all my reviews, past and present. And if you’re curious about the future, see the ‘What’s up next’ section at the end, or look on the website. That’s IReviewFreeview - all one word - dot com. 

In this episode, I will review:

Strictly Come Dancing on BBC1

The Northman (2022) on Channel 4 and

Buddha: Genius of the Ancient World on BBC4

‘So, what’s on the menu tonight, James?’ I hear no one cry. Well, three things as different from each other as chalk, cheese and welly boots. it’s dancing - which is sort of fine - and probably a load of backstory, which is not and pasted on smiles, which normally makes me want to vomit. Then, there’s a film featuring men with horns on their helmets, square sailed ships and - one hopes - nordic beauties in saunas and, to finish, a visit to the Om squad.

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

a painting of two energetic, colourful dancers. Behind is a large Buddha wearing a viking helmet.

Yeah, I know. The dancers have helmets with horns and the Buddha looks (literally) legless. But it’s colourful and fun and slightly better than the others. I have to say, when I started these individual episode images, I didn’t realise the effort involved. Oh, i’s so easy to make a rod for your own back.  

And so, let’s go dancing!

Strictly Come Dancing (S 22 E 1: Launch Show) on BBC1, Saturday 14 September, 7:20pm

I think I chose to review ‘Strictly’ because of my ongoing battle to extend my crinkly comfort zone of documentaries, black and white films, Police procedurals, ancient sitcoms and all those other things sluicing around the dusty innards of the Freeview channels. 

For ‘Strictly come dancing’ is exactly the sort of thing I avoid. Firmly fixed in my head is the thought it’s bad for you. A sort of brain rotting slimy thing that invades your head

 and turns you into a zombie that likes sparkles, smiles, swirly frocks and judges waving paddles bought in a sex shop. The invasion of the deadly boring dancing body snatchers.

So in the spirit of ‘I’ll watch so you don’t have to’ I sat on my sofa, coffee and toast to hand, and fired up the recording. I didn’t bring my tortoise in to watch, as he’s spent the last few days scraping out a hibernation trench, so I left him to it. In retrospect, it was a kindness. But we’ll come to that later.

It starts with a digitally enhanced glittery bus going along. Inside, people are cavorting around. The bus driver doesn’t seem to pay much attention to the road, but we’re rapidly entering fantasy land anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.

They end up on a dance floor with a band and an audience. The band plays, the passengers disembark and dance. The audience clap and whoop. I eat a bit of toast.

Intro over, two presenters present first the band, then the judges, who prance on like ponies seeing an open field for the first time, and a group they call the ’strictly stars.’ It shows how deeply this program has become embedded in the national consciousness that I recognised the first one of them - Krishnan Guru-Murthy - as a previous contender. 

So presumably all the others are relics of past shows as well. But don’t worry: several times the presenters, somewhat creepily, say they’ll be well looked after. (Ha!) God, what have I let myself in for?

Surely, now, they’ll introduce the contestants? No such luck. All the stars give little chats and back stories, with scenes of past glories, followed by more dancing. I have to confess I’d begun to get very friendly with the zapper.

Somewhere along the line, the contestants are introduced, but I think I missed the first few as by now it was all merging into a relentless cascade of smiley people I didn’t recognise - oh, wait a minute, was that Angela Rippon? Too late, she’s gone.

Then there’s a pop singer and a dancer and … well … at 30 times normal speed, with the occasional dispiriting drop into the awful reality, I’m fast getting close to the end. Hurrah! 

And indeed, everyone gets on the floor, prances about, the music crescendos, they all stop more or less together and - after hugs all round, that’s it.

100 minutes squashed into about 30 that I won’t be getting back. A whole half hour! That’s an episode of Steptoe and son, or of the IT Crowd or indeed an early big bang theory or a quarter of Vera, even a sixth of one of the longer Taggarts.

Look, don’t get me wrong. I tend to half believe the BBC when they say the entire nation has been waiting for Strictly to return to the airwaves. And half the nation is millions of people. So, good for you.

But, to be honest, I’m not sure I have much more to say. Pouring scorn is all very well, but it can get tedious to write and is often unpleasant to read. 

So… (sigh) well, one of my very early reviews, before I had really settled into this whole podcast thing, was of ‘Gladiators.’ At around 70 words, it’s the shortest review I’ve ever written. It goes:

‘Oh God, I don’t think I’m up to reviewing this. I’ve just had a poached egg. Five minutes in and I’m already wishing I’d gone for a walk in the rain instead.

Too much glitz, too many well toned bodies with bulging muscles, too much fake camaraderie. No thanks.

Like Christmas, I’m bailing out and giving it a miss. Ah: there’s the off-switch. Click!’

And that’s pretty much - give or take a muscle or two - my take on ‘Strictly.’ 

So I’ll quit while I’m behind.

Ah: there’s the off-switch. Click.

Next up:

The Northman (2022) on Channel 4, Saturday 14 September, 9:00pm

This is a sweaty, intense, bloody film, big on the swearing of oaths, men with beards and witches prophesying a fateful death. Emotions are epic, but the scale is small. There are no monumental armies clashing over plains of blood, but there are sweeping landscapes, dwarfing insignificant humans, plodding from one small settlement to another. 

Throughout the film, there are recurring images, reflecting the deep mysticism of the time. A towering tree, a river of fire, the small, menacing figure of a Norn holding the threads of destiny. When a thread is cut, a life ends.

So, forget about the Norse legends and myths as presented through the distorting mirror of the Marvelverse. This is a far more visceral mythology, more felt and believed than seen. And that’s what I really like about this film: the melding of the gritty reality of early 10th century Scandinavia with visions and prophesies organically surfacing from within troubled minds. 

OK, so, when I say ‘gritty reality’ I mean the director - as with any historical drama - has to take an educated punt at what things were really like. In the absence of time machines, we don’t really know how life was lived 50 years ago, let alone a thousand. And ‘The Northman’ supposedly takes place around the year 900. But, to me, it was authentic and logically consistent. People were suitably grubby: it was not surprising they believed in Odin, or Valhalla, and that witches spoke with the authority of the Gods. 

It starts with a Viking king returning from a raid. He has chests of treasure. He and his tweenage son, Amleth, undergo a ceremony to make him heir to the throne.

Then the king’s brother kills the king and becomes king in his stead, taking Amleth’s mum as his wife. He issues orders that Amleth is to be killed, but he escapes.

Fade out. Fade up with the caption ‘Some years later.’

Immediately - as if there was much doubt from the moment the old king’s head was chopped off - we know we’re in the well worn, thoroughly understood tropes of a revenge story. 

The parallels with Hamlet are apparent. Murdered father, uncle marrying mother, the impossibility of escaping one’s fate, everyone ending up dead. Even the names ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Amleth’ are straightforward anagrams.

But, thank god, the Northman doesn’t have any of those long tedious speeches that routinely ruin every Shakespearean play I’ve ever seen. Not that I’ve managed to watch any from start to finish. Life, quite frankly, is too short to bother with Shakespeare.

Interestingly, though, a bit of research tells me that both Hamlet and The Northman are based on the same Scandinavian legend. Well, there y’go. Who would have thought?

Meantime, back in the film, we pick up Amleth maybe two decades later. He’s now a hulking, brutal warrior, twice the size of most other men, leading a raid on a small settlement. Cue a lot of blood and yelling, with Amleth going around off handedly killing everyone he comes across. But later, at the victory feast, he is pensive. Maybe his conscience is beginning to stir?

So he goes for a walk, and in the smouldering ruins of a barn where many were burnt to death, he meets a witch. Or perhaps she is a Norn, holding his thread of fate. She reminds him of who he is. That he’s a prince with a dead father to revenge. She even tells him he’s got to get a semi-magical sword, adding a quest into the mix.

So, he now has a murderous purpose in life: find the sword, kill his uncle. But how to start? I was half expecting him to go riding off alone, to meet various other warriors, gathering a band of brothers with special skills before, in a tediously over-plotted and complex scheme, the king is deposed and all the wrongs of the past are set right.

(Ha!)

But no, none of that crap. The day after meeting the witch and getting his mission, he sees some prisoners being branded. He casually inquires after them, and is told - by a fortuitously well informed axe grinder - that they’re being sent to Amleth’s uncle (the king killer) who migrated to Iceland with his wife (Amleth’s mum) after being deposed by another king. (whuh!)

It’s too good an opportunity to be missed, so he brands himself (ssst!) and joins them on a boat, and they all sail to Iceland. Fortunately, the chaps in charge don’t realise they’ve got an extra slave, even though he’s enormous.

On the boat, he strikes up a relationship with Olga, a beautiful slave with a mysterious aura about her. This meeting is important and signalled by a well crafted sequence of recurring visions and images. 

I have to admit, by this time (and we’re maybe a third of the way through now) I’m so immersed in the film’s reality, I don’t think to question mythological events, but simply accept that - in this world, there exists a whole shadowy superstructure of cause and effect that does - materially - affect the world in which these people live.

Valkyries will come down and transport you to Valhalla.

And you, as the viewer, can either accept and enjoy the film, or not accept, and so find the pace lacking and the events depicted as irrational, even stupid.

For me, it wasn’t a choice I deliberately made. I was drawn in - seduced even - by what I saw on the screen. Not so much a willing and deliberate suspension of disbelief, but a more gradual and unnoticed withdrawing of incredulity.

Or, to put it more simply: I was hooked. (Ha!) I’d just escaped from the glitzy awfulness of ‘Strictly come dancing’ and was now enraptured by some ancient Nordic folk, probably riddled with lice, rickets and rotting teeth, going to Iceland in an open boat. Is there no end to the vagaries of the human mind?

Ah well. In Iceland, the story starts to motor, and although the path our hero takes has twists, turns and ambiguities, the narrative arc of triumphs and disasters is familiar. 

So I’m not going to detail, event by event, how it plays out. I’m assuming, if you’ve survived this far, then the likelihood is you’ll make it to the end, and I don’t want to embellish this review with spoiler alerts. Not necessarily because I think your enjoyment would be lessened. Because a criterion of a great movie - or a book or play, whatever - is knowing your enjoyment won’t be spoiled if you know what happens next.

I am constantly re-reading books I have already read and re-watching films I have already seen. There is a comfort to it.

But it’s different first time in. Think of ‘Alien,’ or ‘Silence of the Lambs.’ That sugar rush of uncertainty as they build towards their final climatic endings can only be experienced once.

Needless to say, I strongly recommend ‘The Northman.’ At times, it might seem slow and ponderous, but stay with it and go with it: become swept along by inexorable fate. (Ha ha!)

And now: snip! The thread of fate has been cut, and we are set free to watch:   

Buddha: Genius of the Ancient World on BBC4, Monday 16 September, 1:55am

Somehow, more by accident than design, I seem to have stumbled on what might be considered the perfect foil to both the hollow inanities of ‘Strictly come dancing’ and the assumed reality of the myths and legends of ‘The Northman.’

In her intro to ‘Buddha: Genius of the Ancient World’, Bettany Hughes says around 2 and a half thousand years ago, mankind underwent a profound transformation, when rationality overrode superstition and belief. An ethic that does not rely on the Gods. The world is now explained in terms of natural forces.

Wait. ‘rationality overrode superstition’? ‘does not rely on the Gods’? Ha! Take that, you debunked Valkyries and witches in the ‘The Northman!’ Take that, the pasted on plastic smiles of ‘Strictly!’

Yeah, OK, I’m not sure of the logic behind that strictly pop, but felt I needed something to sort of even things up. An adjustment for the sake of Karma, maybe?

Not, I have to confess, that I know what Karma really means, even after watching Hughes striding purposefully around the Indian subcontinent, and listening carefully to what she has to say about Buddha. I know Karma was mentioned early on, but I’ve forgotten what was actually said.

But a relevant aside here.

Once, when I was a student, I was hitchhiking back to college and was given a lift by a philosophy lecturer. So, naturally, I asked him ‘what is philosophy?’ He didn’t hesitate, and immediately came back with a phrase I’m sure he used time after time. He said, rather smugly, ‘Philosophy is thinking about thinking.’

And I don’t really think my conception of philosophy has evolved any further. If you think about it, thinking about thinking is an invitation to vanish up your own mental backside. So perhaps best not done? I don’t know.

And that’s the trouble with this stuff. It’s slippery. It’s words spawning words, thoughts giving rise to thoughts. Dealing with it is a bit like trying to kill the hydra, which sprouted two heads whenever one was cut off. Incredibly hard to pin down, almost impossible to master.

On the one hand, you’re tackling the very essence of what it is to be a thinking, rational entity. On the other, it’s all just arty-farty, up in the air nonsense with little relevance.

And one of the problems is - of course - that in deciding if it’s arty-farty or not, you’re actually indulging in philosophical thought. Maybe.

Cricky, it makes your head spin.

Ummm. Let’s go back to Hughes, who is tracing the Buddha’s life. He left his wife and young child and started wandering about, searching for the truth. So far, so moody teenager in a huff. 

He is not impressed by the Brahman caste system and toddles off to have a look at cities, which then were just emerging. Hughes walks along the top of a wall and asks us to imagine caravans of spices arriving from Afghanistan. 

‘It was a time,’ Hughes says, ‘of intense questioning.’

So random and uncomfortable individuals are stuck in front of the camera to ask the basics, such as ‘can we control our desires?’ and ‘what is justice?’ culminating in ‘what happens to us when we die?’

All good stuff in a program about the philosophy of the founder of a religion. If Buddhism is a religion. More on that later. 

As a guide through this, Hughes is an excellent, friendly, knowledgeable presence. She shows Buddhist monks going up and down a ski lift, and tells us about Samsara or the endless cycle of birth and rebirth. She hauls in modern day scholars and professors, nodding politely when they talk of complex concepts.

Like all good lecturers, she makes it understandable. And I think, yeah, good. I now know what Buddhism is all about. Hurrah! There doesn’t seem to be much reliance on God: you should do good deeds etc etc regardless of divine requirements. 

I’m a committed atheist, so maybe I could be a Buddhist as well, why not? A religion where it doesn’t matter if god exists sounds like the right sort of religion for me.

But I don’t think I’ll become a monk. The thought of owning only 8 personal items and wandering around a Tescos carpark in the winter, dressed in a robe with one shoulder exposed and carrying a begging bowl, doesn’t really appeal. Nor do they seem to have much fun. It’s all very well contemplating your inner self, but what if your inner self is as facile as a pancake in the first place?

In fact, now the TV is switched off and Hughes’s beguiling fluency is a couple of days in the past, I’m rather going off the whole idea. Why do I ‘need’ to be anything in particular? Can’t I just sort of bumble along, doing more or less what I’m doing now?

I suspect, had I been paying more attention, or remembered a greater part of the logic, I would understand why just carrying on as before is not acceptable. Religions always seem to want to make you better.

But I think there’s nothing wrong with just carrying on having a normal life and trying not to do harm. 

The big questions of ‘why are we here?’ and ‘when we’re not here, what then?’ are surely unanswerable, and to me, people claiming to have the answer are disingenuous at best and downright fraudulent at worst. Too often it means men with stupid hats, robes and probably BO assuming the moral high ground and with it  - like as not - temporal power. A theocracy is not a sane way to organise society.

(Ha!) It’s been a while since I went off on a religious rant. And if anyone has been offended, then, well, tough. If your beliefs take offence at me shouting from the sidelines in the rain, then it is a fragile thing indeed and - just perhaps - you should give it up. Become an atheist like me or, perhaps, a teapot agnostic.

All in all, ‘Buddha: Genius of the Ancient World’ is a fine documentary and makes a good fist of explaining complex ideas without getting too bogged down in the detail. Bettany Hughes has a knack for a telling phrase and a laudable liking for striding around ancient temples. 

The others in this mini-series are on Socrates and Confucius. I shall certainly be watching: after all, the universe is under no obligation to make sense.

And that very slight misquote from Neil deGrasse Tyson concludes the reviews for this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

Next time, I will review:

Rising Damp (S 3 E 4: The Good Samaritan) on That’s TV, Friday 20 September, 8:30pm 

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (S 18 E 8: Chasing Theo) on 5USA, Friday 20 September, 10:00pm and

City in the Sky on BBC2, Saturday 21 September, 10:00am

3 reviews again? Yep, and it might become - for a while at least - the new norm. So it’s a much loved sitcom from the 70s, what looks like an American police procedural and a program with an interesting title. Who knows? One of them might be good.

As ever, 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.

Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.