David Pollock on last week’s TV highlights, including some classic 90s TV interviews by Ruby Wax, new Scottish comedy Ladybaby and Sixteen: Class of 2021.
One of the great joys of the week, televisual or otherwise, was stumbling across When Ruby Wax Met… (BBC Two) on Sunday evening. It might have looked from afar like a nostalgic highlights show from a famous broadcaster’s ‘90s heyday, but it proved to be much, much more than that.
With the benefit of hindsight, many of Wax’s interviewees were dial-shifting cultural figures, and Wax wasn’t all she seemed either. Back then, she played the semi-fictional character of a stereotypically ‘kooky’, overbearing American loudmouth, with a strong “love her or hate her” element to her success.
Now she’s a leading mental health professional with a Professorship and an OBE to show for her trailblazing work in pushing the subject towards public recognition. What’s really unmissable in this three-part series, then, isn’t just the array of big names she speaks to, but also her commentary in conversation with her old producer.
We saw her very much not get on with Donald Trump in Las Vegas, and in the present break down how he asserts power, particularly over women; get into a jacuzzi with the charming and chilled-out Goldie Hawn, reflecting on her own on-camera fear of her body being seen; psychoanalyse the mercurial and out-there OJ Simpson; and bond with the late but ever-brilliant Carrie Fisher, whom she remained friends with for decades. It was a brilliantly entertaining show and a striking cultural artefact.
Ladybaby
Another unmissable show of the last seven days was Ladybaby (BBC Three/BBC Scotland), a short comedy pilot which surely has at least one series in it, seeing as it’s just about the funniest thing to have emerged from Scottish television in recent memory.
Amy Manson is Suzie, an irresponsible and emotionally immature Edinburgh woman whose social life extends to toilet sex with local pub DJ Harry (Richard Gadd) and bouncing on her flatmate Alana’s (Hanna Stanbridge) trampoline after 9pm. Out of the blue, young Kate (Mirren Mack) meets Suzie in a pub toilet (Harry is just on his way out) and reveals she’s her daughter.
Kate’s the result of a geography field trip in the Lake District when Suzie was 15, after she and Kate’s biological dad had used their condoms to waterbomb hikers instead. The pair meet and attempt to bond. “You’ve got a horse?” asks Suzie. “Wow, wish I’d been adopted!” Next time they see one another, Suzie’s turning up drunk at the hospital where Kate works.
Ladybaby has everything, including acres of potential and uniformly great comedy performances, especially from Manson and her inspirationally-cast parents, Phyllis Logan and Ford Kiernan. Kirstie Swain’s script ties it all together though, at once filled with perfect insight about the emotions of adoption and seemingly endless, near-knuckle gags about sex, bodily functions and the awkwardness of relationships. We need to see more.
Sixteen: Class of 2021
Against such a striking mix of the classic and the contemporary, please also make time to go back and see Sixteen: Class of 2021, Channel 4’s documentary about schoolchildren at a pivotal year in their lives – in this case, through the height of pandemic lockdowns. Where some viewers might have formed a picture of the pandemic generation as eternally fraught and pitiable, this warm and human insight shows the opposite – a bunch of smart, resilient, refreshingly normal kids getting by how best they can.
