Monday's best TV: Snatches and Rebel Women: The Great Art Fightback

Female talking heads: the eight women challenging the status quo, whose monologues make up the series Snatches
BBC/ Amanda Searle

At last, some good drama on a Monday night. Let’s not beat around the bush (pun only half-intended), Snatches is excellent.

It’s a series of monologues inspired by women who have challenged the status quo, commissioned for BBC Four to mark 100 years of women’s suffrage.

If this sounds worthy, it’s not — it’s too clever for that. And each episode is just 15 minutes long (perfect for short millennial attention spans).

The name Snatches was originally suggested as a joke by Vicky Featherstone, the Royal Court Theatre’s artistic director, who is curating the eight-part series. But BBC Four was “rather amused by it, it’s reclaiming the word, isn’t it?” she has said, and it caught on.

It kicks off with Romola Garai in Compliance by Abi Morgan, the timely tale of a young, insecure actress meeting a powerful male producer.

The intensity of watching a monologue makes it feel more like theatre than television, but because it’s TV we get to see Garai’s tortured expression up close as she tells her harrowing story. Garai is one of the best actresses around and this performance feels real, drawing you in with pace and raw feeling. You sense her ambition and pride; followed by fear, hot shame and loathing. She is also a skilled mimic of the producer and his female secretary, who is oblivious to any exploitation.

The second episode, by young playwright Theresa Ikoko, is more hopeful. Corinne Skinner-Carter plays an older woman reflecting on her life as a protester, with a glint in her eye. She is the sort of person you would want on your side — forthright, brave and funny. She means business, she relishes resistance, violence and conflict, and is impatient for change.

Occasionally, this episode veers into lecturing but she’s a captivating orator: “We can’t wait 10 years like our mothers… we can’t be grateful for the crumbs at the table if we can’t get a seat at that table… we are trying to drag the world forward and this is to do with the oppression and exclusion of any group.” Agreed. The BBC could start by showing Snatches again, this time in a primetime BBC One slot.

Talking head: Jodie Comer
BBC/ Amanda Searle

If Snatches leaves you fired up, follow it with Rebel Women: The Great Art Fightback, which shows how far we have come. It starts in 1970, when being a female artist was to live on the margins of masculine culture. For a change, there’s not a single male voice in the show — they have had years to get their story across. Instead we hear from a roster of impressive women.

There’s Judy Chicago, who tried to make minimal art like the men, before she realised she had to be herself and set up a women-only feminist art school in California. There’s footage of women declaring “people with cocks don’t have to do the washing up”, and exuberant cheerleading routines where they wore unifoms spelling out C**T.

Chicago recalls meeting a timid Suzanne Lacy, who went on to produce work that highlighted rape as an issue. There are moving interviews with artists such as Margaret Harrison and Carolee Schneemann, who are only just getting retrospectives, after 40 years of having their shows shut down by police because it didn’t conform to accepted standards of decorative, female art. They aren’t bitter, they take action.

The show left me inspired to find out more about this long list of women who have changed the art scene. This feminist revolution will be televised and it’s a riveting watch.

London Live

Cockleshell Heroes - London Live, 8pm

No TUNA has caused as much mayhem, not even the one we didn’t cook properly the other night, as the HMS Tuna. This was the submarine that transported 12 Royal Marines to the starting point for a raid, one where the odds of their survival were lower than Robbie Williams being booked for another opening ceremony.

Former Marine and Special Boat Service operator Lord Ashdown recounts their seemingly mission impossible (made into a 1955 film), which sent 12 men to paddle up the Gironde estuary and plant mines on Nazi craft moored in Bordeaux.

London Live: Danny Dyer's Real Football Factories
Dave Benett

Danny Dyer’s Real Football Factories - London Live, 9pm

While there are a few football factories pumping out replicas of the World Cup ball to feed back- garden dreams of scoring the winner in the final, with luck the so-called “football factories” of hooligans will be dormant during the tournament. They’d be mad to go to Russia anyway.

Those who see more to a Saturday afternoon than, you know, watching the match, are met by Dyer, and this week he travels beyond zone six to meet the troublemakers who patrol the stadiums of Birmingham.

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