I Am Victoria
Channel 4
★★★★☆
Buffering
ITV2
★★★☆☆
Suranne Jones was well cast in I Am Victoria, being an actress who can pull off “brittle, hell-woman perfectionist” just as effortlessly as “fragile, tormented soul undergoing a slow-motion breakdown”. Jones’s big challenge here was to make Victoria sympathetic. She was a control freak who polished the chrome on her kettle and was too busy to kiss her husband (Ashley Walters), but not too busy to shout at him for failing to put the cushions back on the bed.
But she managed it, especially near the end where her face creased into a road-map of anguish as she hugged her husband and children just after she had contemplated suicide. She also had a feckless, selfish sister who tapped her for £3,000 and didn’t even say thank you. We knew that Victoria was driven to hard graft and domestic perfection because she’d had very little growing up.
Dominic Savage’s drama skilfully eked out the information that her just-so shimmering life in a gorgeous house was all an act, Victoria’s entire existence a performance. This was shown most compellingly when she was looking in the mirror practising her “everything’s wonderful!” gameface and rehearsing greeting people with a grinning “How are YOU?” while dead behind the eyes (we’ve all met one of those women).
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When their friends came over for a micromanaged dinner, the dropping of a bowl of crisps became Victoria’s unravelling. Within minutes she was snarling at herself, scrawling “pathetic” on the mirror in lipstick and asking the poor un-fed couple to leave. The excruciating soirée became a sort of Abigail’s Party without the laughs. There was literally no levity here, unless you count when Victoria sank her teeth into a carton of Alpro oat milk to stop herself screaming.
In the final scene, as she sat ramrod straight at the kitchen table in a white shirt, laptop in front of her, you assumed she had reverted to her old ball-busting self. But, no, she was logging on for a therapy session, admitting her vulnerability. A great performance with Jones acting as much with facial expression as dialogue.
The premise for Buffering, a comedy about a highly sexed children’s TV presenter who doesn’t like children, is delicious. Especially since its star and co-creator, Iain Stirling, was a popular presenter on CBBC (he now narrates Love Island) and his character here is called, er, Iain. When “Iain” in Buffering was slagging off the daubed pictures the kids had sent in, I thought he probably did the same off-camera on CBBC. I’m sure I would. I imagine Humpty, Jemima and Big Ted got some stick from the Play School presenters once the cameras stopped rolling too.
It’s a decent comedy, although the reliance on gags about sexting from Iain’s flatmates became a little tiresome. Stirling is funny and there were some good lines, such as when he said of Dick and Dom: “Nice guys, but one of them stinks of BO and no one can tell which one it is.”
Episode two showed it isn’t just going for cheap gags by featuring a miscarriage, rather tenderly. It’s still a bit juvenile in places, but there’s enough funny here to keep watching. I think Stirling’s former CBBC fans, now teenagers (including my daughter), will like how he is quite cleverly sending himself up.
