The Great British Sewing Bee
BBC Two
***
Banished
BBC Two
**
It was all going so boringly. All right, the first assignment for the three competitors in The Great British Sewing Bee final was incomprehensible. The asymmetric Japanese draped top came with so few instructions that the greatest skill needed was origami. At the end of the round I still did not know if it had one sleeve or two.
Yet everyone is so nice on Sewing Bee, and when Lorna confessed to being even more flummoxed than her rivals, both Neil and Matt rushed in to help to explain. Neil got his reward: round one to him. It takes the pressure off, he told the camera. “I do not have to go full out and be risky.”
At this point, I have to report, Neil went mad. Risky! Faced with the challenge of altering a perfectly nice Delphos gown into something everyday wearable, he ripped into it and chainsawed a miniskirt, to which was attached by long straps a pair of “ankle trousers”.
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Claudia Winkleman, who does the jokes on this show, called it a “skankle”, a word that Patrick Grant, whose moustache this season gives him the look and the disposition of a wing commander, was loath even to pronounce. “I don’t,” he said solemnly, “think it is wearable.”
If Neil’s fever was subsiding, it did so slowly. Next he was designing a ruched dress for his wife based on the colours of his army service in Afghanistan. The insanity was catching. Lorna decided her “avant garde” dress required electric fairy lights. The wing commander made it perfectly clear what he thought about that.
So when Matt, another ex-army guy out to prove that real men do eat quiche, dolled his wife up in a giant portable lampshade, it hardly looked strange at all and Matt was declared the outright winner. The rivals retired, I imagine, to a darkened room. Sewing Bee will never be as fun as Bake Off. It lacks the judges and innuendos. Those silly bees last night at least made it a final to remember.
In an attempt to enliven the second leaden episode of Jimmy McGovern’s horribly executed Banished, the newlywed prisoner Tommy told his bride a joke about a polar bear. “Don’t make me laugh,” Liz admonished him. Having suffered multiple lashes last week, the last thing she needed was her wounds weeping with laughter. Happily, the joke wasn’t funny.
“What we have here,” said the fair-minded governor of the New South Wales penal colony, “is the birth of a nation.” Now that is funny, for the programme notes explicitly say “it is not the story of Australia and how it came about” but a “tale of love, faith, justice and morality”.
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Actually, it is an 18th-century version of Survival in which men scrap and barter for a diminishing supply of food and women. The food looks awful, by the way; the women, with their well-conditioned blonde hair, incredible. This may be why in every episode at least one is ordered to take her clothes off. Sadly, Banished fails to deliver on that too.