James reviews The Smallest Show on Earth on Film4, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder on BBC1, and Susan Calman’s Grand Days Out on Channel 5.

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

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.

In this episode, I will review:

The Smallest Show on Earth (1957) on Film4, 

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder on BBC1, and

Susan Calman’s Grand Days Out on Channel 5.

That’s an ancient film almost as old as me, a new, very interesting review of a murder mystery and a Channel 5 travelogue headed by a comic who made me laugh way back. Channel 5? A sort of documentary? Yeah, why not: give them another chance.

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

A teenage schoolgirl, holding a bow and arrow in front of a film screen showing a black and white cowboy film van gough style.

Umm …I have to admit, pretty much what I expected, but I’m not sure anyone will get the bow and arrow reference until later. Ah well, can’t win them all.

So: here we go … 

The Smallest Show on Earth (1957) on Film4, Wednesday July 10th, 11:00am 

God, this brought back memories. Of what I’m not sure: more a sensation of enjoyment than anything else, and a rice paper thin image of men gasping for water in a desert.

So, when I saw it was on, I had to watch. And if I’m watching, I might as well review. 

It’s a black and white UK comedy film set in the 1950s. Y’know, that mythical time before TV, cynicism and kitchen sink drama ruined civilisation. When we all had coal fires, drank Camp Coffee, travelled by bus and put another layer on come October. The time of never had it so good.

It promisingly begins with the delivery of a letter to a young married couple: Matt (Bill Travers) and Jean (Virginia McKenna). He’s an aspiring writer and she’s got a fetching ponytail. Funds are low, but they’ve got each other.

It’s the letter that will upend their lives! They have inherited a cinema! In a town called Sloughborough! Wow! Call a taxi! Catch a train! Chuff chuff chuff.

Once there, they see the massive, opulent, modern Grand Cinema! Think of the money! They can go to Samarkand!

In the solicitors, mercenary nostrils aflare, they hear the details. Oh dear, whoops. 

Of course, they haven’t inherited the Grand Cinema! Where’s the film fun in that? 

Nope. It’s ‘the Bijou Kinema’ - spelt with a ‘k’ - locally known as ‘the flea pit’. It’s small, derelict, squashed between railway lines and not even open.

Never have 4 nostrils deflated so quickly.

But beetle-browed Albert Hardcastle - owner of the Grand - wants to buy the Bijou for a car park, and makes a derisory offer of £500 for it.

As an aside, I asked AI to use the mars bar index to tell me how much £500 in 1957 is worth today. I was stuffily informed it wouldn’t use the mars bar index (based on the cost of a mars bar then and now) as it was unreliable, and would give me the official inflation figures instead. I considered that rather uppity and we had an argument. Crikey! More and more, AI is treating us like small children. Quite soon, it’ll be telling us to drink our Horlicks and go to bed.

Anyway, £500 then would be somewhere between £12,000 and £15,000 today: a very useful sum, but not that life changing. 

So anyway, Matt and Jean decide to look as though they’re going to reopen the Bijou in order to get a higher price. So they rehire the 3 cinema employees - a disparate bunch in advance stages of decrepitude - and polish the place up a bit. 

Hardcastle learns of their ‘lets pretend to open’ plan, so they have to either give up and sell, or keep going. Now, let’s guess which option they chose. Mmmmm, so difficult! Well, considering the film’s still got at least an hour to run, I’d say they keep going. Bingo! Of course they do.

(Ha!)

Oh, what larks! Whenever a train passes, the whole building shakes and Quill - the projectionist (Peter Sellers, post Goon show but pre Inspector Clouseau) has to cling on to the ancient equipment to stop it falling to pieces. And to sell more ice cream, they hire a sassy girl with a pointed frontage, turn up the heat and show films of desert survival.

So my memory of thirsty men in a desert is not false. There’s still life in the little grey cells. 

There is also a rather touching scene where the cashier (Margerate Rutherford, as magisterial as ever) plays the piano while a romantic silent film - complete with captions - is shown. The usher (Bernard Miles being Bernard Miles in a uniform) quavers ‘It’s like the old days.’

But Hardcastle plays dirty, smuggling a bottle of whiskey into the projection room. Quill cannot resist and come the evening he’s in an alcoholic stupor.

Matt takes over! Oh, what a hero! But he doesn’t understand the equipment, doesn’t know what he’s doing and there’s just too many levers to pull.

In a superbly directed sequence of everything going wrong that could possibly go wrong, the film is shown - to the whoops, yells and boos of the lively audience - backwards, forwards, speeded up, slowed down, upside down, out of focus and even split screened, ending with the film catching alight and the smell of burnt celluloid.

They have to refund the entrance fees.

It’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back. They decide to call it quits and sell to Hardcastle. All is lost. Oh No!

But do not fear. Galloping over the horizon comes the pre-ordained narrative arc common to most dramas and certainly to light-hearted comedies of this era: with about 10 minutes to go, at the low point, we need a triumphant finale.

Spoiler alert: put your fingers in your ears and count slowly to 15 and a half if you don’t wish to know what it is.

The usher, carrying a can of fuel, wanders off towards the Grand Cinema, and next day that cinema is just a smoking ruin.

To stay in business, Hardcastle buys the Bijou for a shed load of money and commits to keeping the staff on.

Matt and Jean (now pregnant) depart for Samarkand and all is just wonderful.

Yep, they never had it so good.

To me, the interesting thing about this film is how - more or less - it’s as I remember. Best summed up by the word ‘fun.’ There are no jokes as such and I can’t remember a funny line, but the direction skilfully exploits the comic potential, there is a definite affectionate chemistry between the leads and the plot skips along nicely.

And - by today’s standards, it’s commendably short: about two thirds of a Midsomer Murder, but without the dead bodies.

So if you’ve 80 minutes to spare on a wet afternoon, don’t just lie there worrying about climate change or using your belly button to hold the salt while you eat celery, but watch this film. You could do a lot lot worse. 

Moving rapidly on: 

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder on BBC1, Thursday July 11, 9:15pm

OK, erm.. ‘fess up time. Please: pay attention. I messed up my recordings, and watched the second episode thinking it was the first.

I’ll repeat that: I didn’t watch the first episode. I watched the second. But I thought it was the first. Got it? Now another thing: I even went on and wrote my review on this basis. Which gives the whole thing a slightly different tilt. I thought the lack of an introduction was deliberate. That starting after the story had started was a different (and refreshing) conceit by the writer. (ha!) I picked up what I needed to know anyway. Now, I don’t feel the need to watch the first episode, and certainly not to rewrite the whole review.

So, my review of part two of ‘a good girl’s guide to murder’ while thinking it was part one, starts now.

(cough)

This is worth a look just for the brilliant title. ‘A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder.’ Is it a guide to help good girls to murder people, or if you’re a good girl, how to stop being murdered? Or even just a slightly better book than the previous effort ‘the average guide to murder for girls?’

(ha!)

Fittingly, for a murder mystery, it’s none of these things. The central character, Pip, a wide-eyed 17 year old schoolgirl driving around in the family’s enormous Volvo estate has started a school project into the disappearance and possible murder, 5 years before, of local schoolgirl Andie.

Right at the beginning of the beginning I had problems sorting out my hearing, so I may have missed some preliminary explanation. But I found the opening scene, with Pip interviewing a waitress in a bleakly hygienic fast-food joint, refreshingly intriguing. I didn’t know who they were talking about or what was going on.

Effectively, we join Pip’s project well after it starts, and have to pick up the pieces and retrospectively assemble them into coherence even as we are being fed more information. At first, for instance, I didn’t know if Andie was a boy or girl. But then ‘Andie’ is referred to as ‘her’ so that bit drops into place. You just have to pay attention.

There’s a chap, Ravi, helping Pip. I wasn’t sure who he was, but soon it becomes clear he’s the brother of Andie’s boyfriend, who killed himself after being blamed for her disappearance.

As I said: stay on your toes!

Resolutely, Pip ploughs ahead. She discovers small nuggets of information which she writes or tapes to the whiteboard in her bedroom. (Ha!) Of course she has a whiteboard, and spends quite a lot of time just staring at it. Ravi re-arranges a few photos into chronological order, revealing another small truth. They trick a friend into admitting Andie was also seeing an ‘older guy’. 

But as she makes these small gains, you get the ominous sense of building danger. A tennis playing friend of Andie’s tell her to ‘stop digging.’ She goes camping with friends in a forest, and at night sees the light of a torch - or possibly from a vehicle - near their tent. She finds a note warning her to ‘stop digging.’

She must have felt like an unwanted archeologist, but she and Ravi confront the friend, who - under duress - brings yet another name into the mix: Max Hastings. 

No: not the journalist who didn’t say ‘I counted them out and I counted them back’ during the Falklands war, but a rather dangerous, attractively smouldering young man who might, to schoolgirl eyes, seem to be an ‘older guy.’

And it also transpires Andie might have been pushing drugs: so into the mix, surfacing like a dangerous shark - is the prospect of drug dealers - real criminals. You feel Pip’s safe little urban, cathedral citied world is seriously under threat. 

This is all excellently done, with hints, factoids and smiling images cooked astutely into a delicious stew of potential murder, menace and foul play.

Of course, everyone might be innocent and Andie just fell over, knocked her head, lost her memory and has been a Trappist nun - if there is such a thing - for the last five years or so. But somehow I doubt it.

Emma Myers is excellently believable as Pip: intelligent and determined, with - as she herself admits - a tendency for obsession. Her vulnerability is enhanced by her physical smallness: in any group she is dwarfed by the others.

Her fellow investigator, Ravi is given considerable depth by Zain Iqbal: by the end of the episode it’s hard to tell if he’s a good guy or a bad guy. Who knows: maybe he’s both. Could be a hero! (Ooooo)

All the acting is solid and authentic, which is crucial for this type of drama. After all, a small schoolgirl investigating a murder? That’s only one small step away from being ‘Famous Five solve a mystery.’ 

But then, in fairness, it could be argued that all murder mysteries, with their incremental gathering of facts, rumour, supposition and clues, are always powered by puzzles of varying complexity. What distinguishes dross from excellence is the superstructure assembled around these narrative motors. The characters. The settings. The cunning with which it is put together and revealed to the reader. Without these, they are empty and meaningless. (Ha!) Ultimately, if a cruise ship was only a hull and the engine, only the desperate would get on board.

(Ha!) I promise that will be the last tortured analogue I inflict on you! For a while, anyway. 

Appropriately, the episode finishes on a bit of a cliff-hanger. Pip blags her way into Max Hasting’s bedroom and is delving through his drawers when he - garbed only in a towel round his waist - comes back from a shower. She’s a somewhat nerdy 17. He’s an experienced 24. Chemistry, as they say, fizzes.

As you must be able to tell, I enjoyed this very much. Series record? You bet!

Susan Calman’s Grand Days Out on Channel 5, Thursday July 11, 9:00pm

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s hard to write a review of a TV program so unobjectionable that being nasty would be like kicking a kitten. But how many times and in how many ways can you say something is bland, nice and would have been liked by your granny? 

Once or twice: maybe three times at a push. There’s nothing to get hold of. It’s like wrestling a blancmange. Whatever you do, you get covered in niceness. It’s the opposite of wrestling a pig or maybe Nigel Farrage: it doesn’t matter how right you are, everyone gets splattered in shit.

Ha! Sorry about that quick segway into politics, but really, what an awful man.

You see what happens when you need to write about bland niceness? You end up having a pop at dreadful people, firing verbal arrows into the void.

Anyway, back to the program under discussion: ‘Susan Calman’s Grand Days Out.’

(sigh) Right!

I’ve always known Susan Calman as an irregular regular on radio 4’s 6:30 comedy quiz shows. But a few years ago - as far as my listening and watching habits are concerned - she quietly vanished from view.

Which was sad as she was a witty, engaging and often cheerful presence.

But now she’s reappeared, driving around in what looks like a decorated, semi-converted ice-cream van, cheerfully visiting sites and places where people might go for a ‘grand day out.’

In this episode, she visits Nottingham.

Which means - of course - Robin Hood, bows and arrows, caves, tanning, knitting, Torvill and Dean, Byron, engineering and (er) Batman and pickleball?

We’ll see.

First up is the Major Oak, a vast, ancient tree held upright with metal struts and cables. She chats with a forester before - on hearing a hunting horn - beetling off to find Robin himself! (Oooo!) He shows a photo of a boy dressed as Robin.

“I’ve always wanted,” he needlessly confesses, “to be Robin Hood.”

Oh, she’s a busy lass, is Susan. And a completely unselfconsciously natural at this sort of chatty, informal, seemingly unscripted interactions with people and places. You warm to her immediately. She’s nice.

At the National Ice Centre she has a quick swoon at Torvill and Dean’s Bolero costumes and laughs with genuine delight at synchronised skaters swooped gracefully and harmoniously over the ice. They’re hoping to make it an Olympic sport. Well, if synchronised swimming can get there, I don’t see why not. At least when skating, it’s all on view, not half hidden under water.

Time now for the Batman connection! Wow! 

Ha! as if.

It’s a sleepy small village spelt G-O-T-H-A-M - ‘Gotham’ but pronounced ‘Goatham.’ According to a local sage (who unconvincingly dresses up as Batman in his spare time, to wander aimlessly around the unthreatening streets of what looks like a newish Wimpy estate. Oh, there’s so much danger among the Volvo people carriers.) anyway, according to him, the name - ‘Goatham’ was pinched and the pronunciation changed. Without so much as a ‘by your leave.’ How dare they! He also pointed out that Robin - of Batman and Robin - initially dressed a bit like Robin Hood.

(Poof!) Case proven, I think.

Leaving the lame Batman behind, our intrepid presenter uses a 19th century circular knitting machine to knit a cylinder - very useful for making woollen cats. Susan takes one with her. She even gives it a name, but I’ve forgotten what it is.

A visit or two later and it’s time for a five-minute filler. Maybe to be cut if the number of commercials was better than expected? Whatever. So of course, Susan hares off to play pickleball. Yep: pickleball. (Ha!) Did I miss something?

I asked AI the following: 

‘is there any connection between the creation or development of pickleball and the UK county of Nottinghamshire or the city of Nottingham?’ 

In short, the answer was: no.

But she has a go anyway and declares it exhausting but fun.

Filler duly created, we’re into the final straight. Newstead Abby. Lord Byron. The original and best Byronic hero. Susan and a guide examine Byron’s bed, a luxuriantly draped four poster with crowns perched on each corner. But small. Not even king-size. 

Susan said, “So, this is where it all happened.”

Her guide agrees: “Indeed. With women and men. He loved people.”

They look at a typical meal Byron would eat. Not a mere menu printed on a page, but repulsive looking objects on uninspiring pewter.

“Mash! Fish! Cabbage!” says Susan. “All you ever want on a plate.”

Her guide joins in: “Yes. And covered in vinegar.”

(Urrghh)

Too much historical accuracy.

And that, along with a quick trailer for the next episode, was that.

As I said right at the start, it’s all pretty much OK. She’s an engaging, unpretentious host and thoroughly adept at seamlessly moving from one topic to the next. If you want to watch something while doing something else, then ‘Susan Calman’s Grand Days Out’ should be right up there with party political broadcasts and Come Dancing. In essence, it’s fun, easy, and dangerously bland. 

And that misquote from Lady Caroline Lamb concludes the reviews for this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

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.

Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.