Catch up TV: Marvellous, The Driver and Gordon Ramsay’s Costa Del Nightmares

Missed the TV moment everyone’s talking about? Alastair McKay looks at the programmes you should have watched (and which you still can)
Magical realism: Toby Jones as Neil “Nello” Baldwin in Marvellous
Alastair McKay26 September 2014

How to describe Marvellous (BBC iPlayer)? Well, you might say that it’s Zelig, re-imagined by Alan Bennett, though that would do a disservice to the actual writer, Peter Bowker, and to the film’s subject, Neil “Nello” Baldwin, who isn’t fictional, even if his life story comes with a side order of magical realism.

You might start with the facts, which seem to be that Nello was a circus clown, who inveigled his way into a job as a kit-man for Stoke City, where he was hailed by then-manager Lou Macari as his best ever signing. Apart from sitting on the bench dressed as a chicken and turning up for work dressed in top hat and tails, Nello played for Stoke in a testimonial, and enlivened a TV interview with Macari by standing behind him, disguised as a highland gonk, and raising his kilt as if to show that everything underneath it was in perfect working order.

It sounds far-fetched, but the real-life Nello was on hand throughout the fictional account of his life to add context and keep the drama grounded. Did he really score with a header in that testimonial game? No, not really. But he might have done, given the extraordinary events of a life in which he apparently ignored the attempts of others to define him as a man with what are euphemistically called “learning difficulties”.

Instead, he simply decided to be happy, and his sunny disposition, allied with a kind of undiplomatic bluntness which bordered on passive aggression, seem to have taken him to places he couldn’t have aspired to had he accepted the limitations which others prescribed for him.

There was an element of sentimentality to Bowker’s version of Baldwin’s life but he didn’t shirk from the sadness. After a fleeting scene in which a Stoke player called him a “mong”, the fictional Nello (beautifully played by Toby Jones) asked the real one: “Don’t you think he was picking on you because of your difficulties?” The real Neil Baldwin replied simply: “What difficulties?”

One of Bowker’s previous dramas was Blackpool, a neon homage to Dennis Potter in which David Morrissey got all the good tunes. In The Driver (BBC iPlayer) Morrissey plays Vince, a Manchester minicab driver mired in midlife, who finds himself drifting into criminality when he accepts a job as a driver for The Horse (Colm Meaney) a local criminal with a sideline in philosophy. “We lose because we told ourselves we lost,” The Horse tells him, quoting Tolstoy. (Cristiano Ronaldo once said something similar: “We lost because we didn’t win.”)

Anyway, Vince seems to be quite good at losing — he’s one point shy of a prescription for pills to sort his depression, his wife is a market researcher who lives on a treadmill, his cab is full of vomit. It’s a great role for Morrissey, an actor whose barnacled gravitas isn’t always served by his material. It starts with a car chase but don’t let that put you off.

Speaking of midlife crises, Gordon Ramsay’s Costa Del Nightmares (4oD) allowed the sometimes troubled chef to employ several euphemisms for testicles while bringing a terrible restaurant back from the dead in Fuengirola. Ramsay was on fine form, though his casual cruelty is probably in breach of several United Nations resolutions. His hair, however, seems to have developed a mind — and perhaps some cojones — of its own, mixing a nit-nurse side-shave with a collapsible quiff. It’s a bold look in a professionally tempestuous man, so we must assume it is a matter of choice and not tonsorial misfortune.

Serial box

In Cilla (ITV Player), Sheridan Smith continued her campaign to reposition the beloved family entertainer as a musical and cultural equal of The Beatles. This week she got to work with producer George Martin, who gently advised her to tone down the Scouse notes in her singing voice. Was that wise with the tide of Merseybeat about to break?

Meanwhile, in The Leftovers (Sky On Demand), Kevin had a chat with a therapist about his aggression and then assaulted a bagel oven, while Liv Tyler tried to cut down a tree, with limited success. Worryingly, given that the creator of Lost is involved, the crazy cult seems to have an escape hatch in the ground. We must pray that the smoke monster isn’t lurking in the woods.

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