![]() ‘Human eccentricity is alive and well’: Noel Fielding, Prue Leith and Paul Hollywood with contestant George. Or, as the Channel 4 show returned, was it me on powerful hallucinogens? Did judges Prue Leith and Paul Hollywood, and presenters Noel Fielding and Matt Lucas, really open proceedings by performing a cake version of Achy Breaky Heart (“My achy flaky tart”)? Was it absolutely necessary for them all to dress like hard-living Wurzels roadies? Some things are just too arousing for pre-watershed. Whatever they’re on, it’s not just frosted icing. Talking of the police, I think it’s time for The Great British Bake Off team to be routinely drug-tested. Certain settings (crime scenes, police station corridors) could be old sets from The Sweeney given a quick vacuum. I appreciate how Manhunt sticks to being a gritty old-school police procedural, though this can go too far. Clunes is just as good as the unshowy hero masquerading as a dull plodder, whether shrugging a practical rucksack over a shoulder, or keeping a fearful eye on his impending retirement (his own “killer”, one felt). This series is not as compelling as the first, but it is still eminently watchable. Photograph: ITV/Neil Genower/Rex/Shutterstock ‘Unshowy hero’ Martin Clunes as DCI Colin Sutton in Manhunt: The Night Stalker. Some of the traumatised victims died not long afterwards, leading one detective to say: “As far as I’m concerned, he’s a serial killer.” This time, in Manhunt: The Night Stalker, also based on Sutton’s memoirs, the real-life case, played out over four consecutive nights, was the horrific series of rapes, assaults and burglaries carried out by the Night Stalker, or “Minstead rapist”, on elderly people in south-east London between 19. Martin Clunes was a revelation as real-life detective Colin Sutton, whose understated decency and puddle-hued anoraks initially made you wonder whether it was possible for the human soul to be double-glazed, but who turned out to possess piercing police instincts. The 2019 first series of Manhunt (ITV) was a superb dramatisation of the police capture of Levi Bellfield, the murderer of French student Amélie Delagrange, who also killed Milly Dowler, among others. If you want to feel old, watch a music panel show where no one recognises Buck’s Fizz in the lineup section As Covid creeps into the series’ timeline, you wonder whether, like last time, The Morning Show will pull off the trick of developing into television-about-television that matters. Cory is overacted, but at least Crudup’s Joaquin-Phoenix’s-Joker energy livens the place up. Back at The Morning Show, Bradley is struggling, and studio executive Cory (Billy Crudup) is wildly scheming. In the opener, Mitch has yet to reappear, while Alex is holed up in Maine tapping out a memoir on a – natch! – Apple laptop (Apple is so hilariously shameless about product placements, I’m only surprised Aniston didn’t exclaim in a sultry voice: “Gosh, this keyboard delivers such a precise typing experience”). Watching them bang on is like eavesdropping on a row between two co-workers: fun, until it gets boring. Perusing three of the 10 new episodes, it’s back to the relentless soapy clashing between Alex-Kong and Bradley-Zilla. Nicely done, you thought – audacious! – what next? It all led to a climactic scene where Alex (Aniston) and Bradley (Witherspoon) called out the enabling workplace culture live on air. Spoiler alert: co-anchor Mitch (Steve Carrell) was revealed as a full-blown sexual predator even after the suicide of a coerced conquest (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), he was hideously puffed up with the self-righteousness of the misunderstood man. ![]() ![]() To give it credit, the last series of The Morning Show, Apple TV+’s first mega-launch, evolved from a pedestrian treatise on the status-hungry machinations of a US breakfast show into a tense #MeToo drama.
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