Blood and Gold: The Making of Spain (BBC4) | iPlayer
That’s So Last Century (C4) | 4oD
The Secret Life of 6 Year Olds (Channel 4) | 4oD
Capital (BBC1) | iPlayer
In Blood and Gold: The Making of Spain, Simon Sebag Montefiore stared into the camera in slightly unnerving close-up and a big straw hat and identified in no uncertain terms the ingredients of nation building. “Vim! Vigour! Power! Virility!” he offered, with the kind of plosive delivery that made you feel a sudden pang even for the wild mummery of Simon Schama. Someone seems to have told BBC history presenters they must militantly colonise attention from the title sequence and subsequently rule it with a rod of iron. In the first 15 minutes of Sebag’s journey through the genesis of Spain his every utterance was accompanied by a cymbal crash or drum roll or snatch of manic flamenco as he route-marched us in the elephant steps of Hannibal, speedboated across the straits of Gibraltar and offered a dizzying shorthand of the mythical castrations and serial beheadings and land grabs and “fortunes made in fish paste” that led eventually to the Islamic invasion of al-Andalus in 711AD.
Once you had grown accustomed to the feverish narrative pace there was, however, plenty to be learned about the creation of the “western caliphate” in Cordoba by the Ummayad invaders, some of which seemed relevant to our own caliphate-building times. The Ummayads exercised both grim brutality and demanded fierce unity; they created a culture of extraordinary devotional architecture and relentless expansionism. The good news, I guess, for contemporary western policymakers was that the Ummayad reign eventually fragmented and collapsed under the strains of its own theocracy, infighting and moral corruption. The bad news was that this “hollowing out” process took about 400 years.
In That’s So Last Century they were also dwelling on “the olden days”, but in this case the ancient history in question was about 1997. The relics of our own civilisation have been produced with fast-forward restlessness and built-in obsolescence. Exhumed from landfill for inspection by Channel 4’s predictable crowd of “ohmigod” commentators – James Corden, Jimmy Carr, Dom Joly, Vic Reeves and the gang – were the sad gadgets so recently thought state of the art: the clunky Walkmans and VCRs, the comical carphones and dud Sinclair Spectrums, the instamatic cameras with added cube flashbulbs. Joly and Reeves and the rest attempted to explain these bizarre plastic boxes to their kids. Most concepts seemed way beyond them: the idea that you had to take your roll of selfies to the chemist and wait a week for them to be processed; the notion that video games once took half the day to load; the weird absence of portability that characterised the ghetto blaster.
There is really, as you quickly discovered, only one joke to be made about defunct beige gizmos that once topped every Christmas list: what did we see in them? Still, Jimmy Carr pressed on with his lame porn gags. It was the kind of programme that made you want to reach for your iPhone, and make doubly sure that the interesting text that you had been anticipating every half an hour for about the last 15 years, had not finally landed.
One of the pleasures of The Secret Life of 6 Year Olds (as with the earlier programmes devoted to the previous two year groups) is that it features groups of children interacting with one another unencumbered by screens of any kind. That is, unless you counted the surveillance cameras mounted in every playhouse and sandpit, conveying the furtive snogs and whispered confessions of the 10 chosen children to the resident psychologists, the Ant and Dec of this particular jungle.
Once you had got over your curiosity about what kind of parent would volunteer their child for the two-week invasion of privacy (perhaps they saw it as a decent grounding for what they might expect in adulthood), the exposure of minor power struggles and moral dilemmas was full of insight and comedy and heartbreak. In the previous episode, Elvin and Beatrice had bonded over a shared interest in fairness and structured play. This time around, Radio 4 listener Beatrice succumbed to the more anarchic charms of the inveterate kiss-chaser Eloise. Try as he might, Elvin, who had promised Beatrice presents of sea shells and everything, couldn’t hold back his tears at the betrayal. That is, until he seduced her back to best friend forever status with reckless promises of “real-life Minecraft”.
The third and final part of Capital, the deft adaptation of John Lanchester’s great London novel, finally answered the vexed question of “who is doing their business in Jiffy bags and posting them to the good residents of Pepys Road”. The series captured precisely the way in which neighbours’ lives in London often only accidentally overlap. In the foreground the absurd bankers’ bubble in which Roger (Toby Jones) and Arabella (Rachael Stirling) lived finally burst and they were forced to cash in on their house. The real drama was elsewhere though: in the deportation back to Zimbabwe of traffic warden Quentina (Wunmi Mosaku), and the false imprisonment without charge of Shahid Kamal (Danny Ashok) under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Peter Bowker’s script, adroitly made these subplots, particularly the tensions within the Bangladeshi Kamal family, all too human. Roger and Arabella, meanwhile, were, properly, the only true caricatures on show. “We can change,” Roger insisted as the couple confronted a range of choices suddenly more complex than a Farrow & Ball paint chart. Arabella did not seem quite so sure.
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