Star Trek: Picard (Amazon Prime)
Avenue 5 (Sky One)
Travels in Euroland With Ed Balls (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Crazy Delicious (C4) | All 4
It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it. It is now, apparently, “a symbol for fractal neuronic coding. The theory was that Data’s entire code, memories, could be reconstituted from a single positronic neuron.” My, how Gene Roddenberry’s little baby Star Trek is all growed up, as are we, from those first 60s wisps of hope-through-tech for humanity via the groping confusions of unintended consequences in a real-life techno-social world, on to this darker, cleverer, wilder beast.
There has surely been in all its iterations, from Eugene’s original to all the Voyagers and Discoveries and the lovely JJ Abrams’s filmic reboots, a challenge for the makers of Star Trek: to stay true to the legions of diehard fans, the most outre elements of whom would possibly be more at home in a locked basement playing with soft cardboard goats (or spreading “amusing” internet memes), and the potential hordes of next-gen folks who just want a damn fine story of staunch antiheroes and weird villains and perhaps a hardscrabble philosophical question or two to take to their beds and sleep on. Also, doing all that while not making the rocks wobble.
Star Trek: Picard, the newest incarnation, in which Patrick Stewart returns a couple of remarkably unlined decades later as Jean-Luc Picard, the second most famous Federation cap’n ever (there will only ever be one James T Kirk), is, I have to say, another glory. Sophisticated, thoughtful, frightening: if anything is America’s sharper, adult answer to Doctor Who, it’s this. The opener features a J-L P in retirement in his glorious French vineyard, magicked first light of dawn chasing off the last syllables of the night’s wind; and just enough nods to 2434 or whatever to permit a hi-tech world, in rural France or whizzy rocket San Fran, of genial peace, harnessed technology, eco (-nomic and -logical) satisfaction. Yet there are still Romulans (miffed at having their planet blown up), smart semi-human droids (outlawed, since they blew up… er, Romulania?), and Data’s twin daughters (!), the best of whom comes to an awful end, the mimsiest of whom the ageing J-L P just has to go looking for in the multiverse, abandoning (boo) his terroir. I hope I’ve got at least some of this right; yet it is generally terrific, and far from the rocks wobbling we get some hugely new cutting-edge effects, and also former Borg drone Seven of Nine, from Voyager, rocket fuel to a thousand teenage fantasies, male and female. Crucially, it is kind and (eventually) optimistic. With much green blood.
I possibly shouldn’t have watched it right after Avenue 5. Armando Iannucci has a history of doing this kind of thing – spoofing old genres, but doing it somehow better. The Thick of It beat Yes Minister. And Avenue 5 beats both Mars Attacks! and Galaxy Quest in its sheer oof-per-minute wiggles and giggles. So Hugh Laurie is a rugged beardo cap’n on a tourism starship, and it all goes wrong. With a tiny gravitational shift that sends fat tourists in a yoga class lurching and bumping, to the extent that an eight-week honeymoon tour around the stars turns into a three-year voyage to get home. We are left with tourists in space, for years, and a captain who was only brought in as an actor to feign beardy competence, and no functioning engineers.
The corporate, as ever, is the enemy. “I need to know who to blame … and if you’re OK?” It’s star actor-heavy, yet lines such as “They’ve over-ridden the Gorn Hegemony… sterilised it so it’ll be qualitative, might even have saturated this place with antileptons … cheeky fuckers”, delivered as soft asides, utterly win it for me. I hope they never get home.
I do miss Ed Balls from politics. His rough good sense, his earnest kindness. Early in his Travels in Euroland he says, after meeting some kindly Dutch bigots, “There’s no doubt the kind of politics I believe in feel under threat at the moment. But if you dismiss everybody who votes for one of these parties as extreme and nasty you’re missing what’s really going on… you have to listen, have to understand why they’re asking for change.” That explained Labour’s bubble-Twitterati loss perfectly. But this series, sold as Ed getting to the heart of the rise of populism in Europe, achieved nothing of the sort. He empathised hugely with the “tradition” of Dutch fishermen, the way-we-were-ness (um… pulse fishing? In 1820?); but this felt like a series desperately in need of a hint of a solid question. Ultimately, the programme makers – and you felt Ed – pretty much gave up, cowed by the hugeness of the unformed question. I wish he’d continued questing. He’s perhaps too kind.
Heston Blumenthal has done many fine things, yet a large Heston sin was showing off about, basically, “food that pretends to look like other food”. Now it’s a thing. Worse, it’s a show.
Crazy Delicious was neither, though I can see why they went for the title: what I can’t see is why Channel 4 felt the need to branch into another cookery thing when they already have the Big Kahuna, Bake Off, on their own doorstep. But apparently we can’t get enough of brave or troubled or demented contestants sobbing through ovens and meunières and mandolins. Perhaps this will be the week when we hit peak Bake Off spin/rip-off.
Delicious? No. At one stage there were “strawberry-flavoured chicken wings retch vom”. That’s what it says in my notes anyway. Crazy? They tried, with a hallucinogenic set, somewhere between Willy Wonka and a disastrous mushroom session in the haunted grove behind the halls of residence, a little of which was meant to be an edible garden. Three “food gods” in white Grecian robes – geddit? – sat high above the multicoloured chop-shop below, a confused mix of the Garden of Eden and Arcimboldo’s cheese dreams. There was crazed Swede Niklas Ekstedt: “Heff you put any spices in this? I taste human.” Admittedly, he might have said something else. And “soul food guru” Carla Hall, who said things such as “wow … and the king of flavours pulls it out!”, long back when we were still struggling to remember which contestant was which. And Heston, blinking confusedly from behind those specs, which were increasingly failing to hide his alarm at having signed on.
The relentlessly upbeat presenter Jayde Adams told poor Hardeep, one of the contestants, who had struggled to temper his pink chocolate enough to have it drop all cool and nice from a big egg mould and was bereft, close to tears: “The thing you’re going to have to do now, right, is” – and Hardeep’s eyes widened, in hope – “is… problem solve! Be positive!”
Such presenters are fond of burbling such things: that’s why the drier Noel and soon-to-be-badly-missed Sandi can work so well while still being encouraging. Jayde’s advice went not one whit towards helping Hardeep get the damned egg out of the mould.
Elsewhere, they had to “reinvent” a hot dog. My one-word question consists of three letters and an interrogation mark. It’ll probably be a raging success.
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