ODD couples ruled the screen this week, although only one programme had them in the title. Daddy Issues (BBC3, Thursdays) is a comedy built on an unlikely premise: not the Stockport hairdresser Gemma’s pregnancy from a brief encounter, but the idea that a witty woman with hair, nails, and beauty expertise has no female friends. “My mum’s on the other side of the world and my sister’s on remand for murder,” Gemma responds to enquiries from her midwife about support networks. Instead, two set-up scenes propel her to live with her doormat father, Malcolm.
Visiting Malcolm’s bedsit, Gemma encounters his personal hygiene, which amounts to spritzing Dettol after the event, and earmarking with an X one multi-purpose jar for drinking. Malcolm’s divorced landlord and “emotional support”, Derek, is a spiteful character, who fits into the sitcom heritage of bad influences, such as Rev’s Nigel the verger and Peep Show’s Super Hans. Malcolm’s inability to stand up for Gemma when Derek calls her a “whore” indicates the distance that their father-daughter bond has to travel.
At Gemma’s flat, the reliable comic expedient of a suspected burglary that turns out to be a messy home was given a fresh spin with the apprehension that her flatmate had been stealthily removing items to take to her boyfriend’s place. Followed around the stripped flat by her hopeful pub hook-up, Gemma informs him that Argos vouchers are now her sole desire, and, if he cannot produce them, he should leave.
With Malcolm and his daughter under one roof, Daddy Issues’ earthy exploration of family will deepen.
The presenter Jay Blades discovered, aged 21, that he had 27 half-siblings in London. Dame Judi and Jay: The odd couple (Channel 4, Sunday) was full of numbers, as the friends, who met on the The Repair Shop (TV, 26 February 2021), learned each other’s backstory. In 1957, the 22-year-old Judi Dench went from being a drama student who watched plays from the gods in the Old Vic to playing Ophelia to the theatre’s 1000-seat auditorium. At the same age, Jay’s mother was bringing up two boys alone in Hackney, having joined his Windrush grandmother. Making virtue of their contrasts, Dame Judi’s daughter, Finty, hosted a Jay-and-Judi pub quiz in Stratford-upon-Avon, the family’s home town.
“God With Us” the graffiti on Ridley Road market proclaimed, as Dame Judi sold plantains to delighted shoppers, before meeting the show’s heroine. “That touches my soul,” Janet said, after Jay predicted that he would have been “dead or in prison” but for the youth club that Janet had founded in 1979, when she was a teenage mother. “She was like a second mother and older sister, who saw we had food and something to do.”
By the end of Celebrity Race Across the World (BBC1, Wednesday of last week), the Peckham actor Kola Bokinni and his cousin, Mary Ellen, had not reached the Brazilian checkpoint hotel. After Kola’s opening declaration that he was going to “eat, pray, love the hell out of this” and Mary Ellen’s identification of a statue — “It’s a pope, innit? This is a Catholic country” — we can only assume that they have forsaken earthly success for higher matters.