The week in TV: Facing Franco’s Crimes; The Marvelous Mrs Maisel; The Family Secret; His Dark Materials

Storyville: Facing Franco’s Crimes – The Silence of Others (BBC Four) | iPlayer
The Marvelous Mrs Maisel | Amazon Prime
The Family Secret (C4) | All 4
His Dark Materials (BBC One) | iPlayer

Surely as a reaction, possibly an emetic, to the waves of oh-so-cynical maudlin tinselled pap that have been filling our airwaves since about Halloween – I’m learning to truly hate that halitotic John Lewis dragon – there was some deeply serious television on show this first week of December. Uncynical, challenging, unsentimental and all the more engaging for it.

Take, for instance, a Storyville that had you changing your mind at least three times within the hour, a pretty good sign for those who still like to exercise a brain. Facing Franco’s Crimes: The Silence of Others explored the legacy of Spain’s civil war, and crucially the 1977 Pact of Forgetting, a bipartisan left-right agreement two years after General Franco’s death, which let out thousands of political prisoners. Yes, but it also let his fans get on with, in many cases, running much of the country: small towns, tiny mayordoms, all still held by acolytes (or their sons or daughters; yet who taught them?) of the celebrated dictator, keen amateur murderer and torturer.

A tiny band of ageing leftist brothers (and, crucially, sisters) have, since the millennium, taken up the cudgels on behalf of memory: they ideally want that 1977 amnesty rescinded, in order that some can get “closure” before they pop – closure for dead mothers, fathers, brothers, in largely unmarked graves. Meanwhile, they’re taking a snowballing number of cases to universal jurisdiction, in Argentina, which operates regardless of time or borders, seeking answers only – in this case via a spirited female judge – to whether a crime against humanity occurred.

The programme was executive-produced by Pedro Almodóvar, and thus was filmed in some beauty and style: the sculptures by Francisco Cedenilla, high above El Torno in Extremadura, still linger. (They were, a week after unveiling, shot up by rightwingers: Cedenilla said that only validated them.) But it also came baggaged with huge questions. Surely, I wondered, the pact of forgetting had its advantages? Crimes of both right and left were left unexplored, and the bulk of Spain got on with forgetting, which meant by and large that the country could live with itself, thrive even.

Even the family of one woman, lovely bitter old Maria Martin, still mourning her “disappeared” mother, were split: the sons (no fascists these, whatsoever) argued, with some logic, that renaming streets, for instance, was to deny the fact of history, to bleach the blood on the cobbles. It’s a huge and obviously current argument, as are the nuances between “justice” and “vengefulness”. And in Argentina, the fact that schoolchildren can tour prisons and torture-sites is widely seen as a celebratory educative right: I always fret that the boot might switch foot, democratically or less so, and then… precisely who will be doing the the “educating”?

Yet as this searing, careful programme progressed, my doubts finally evaporated like spit on a griddle. It wasn’t just the camaraderie of the wheelchaired ex-longhairs, still celebrating every niggling legal victory in someone’s tiny kitchen with wheezy laughs and raised glasses: it was that, occasionally, political compromise camouflages the fact that there was a Good side, and a Bad. And perhaps it is only as we grow old that we remember that, actually, we do not want to forget.

A brief respite from all this pre-Crimbo solemnity came courtesy of the marvellous The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, returned for a thoroughly welcome third series. Sheesh but it’s good. Amazon’s award-winning comedy, to which stars are reportedly lining up to beg cameos, launched in fine randan style, with a bunch of high-kickers and crooners entertaining a US army base in the late 50s – complete with shades of Blues Brothers military morons. And so Midge Maisel has got herself in train to the sublimely talented Shy Baldwin (the songs alone are worth the subscription), and… wouldn’t it have been almost good to be in the US army in the 50s? Apart from the moronism, and Korea, you’d get to wear a cool uniform, dip their toes off the Philippines, be treated free to century-defining soul singing and the finest female Jewish comic until Joan Rivers dared to come along.

The fast interplays between Rachel Brosnahan as Miriam, Midge, and her dumpy manager Susie, who fails to be insulted even when a USAF dipstick tries to recruit her as a bugler (“got the cheeks for it, young man”, in the innocent days when misgendering someone was, counterintuitively, less offensive), are all glory.

But nothing compared to her interplay with Dad, maths prof Abe, who attempts to reconnect with his own activist glory days by getting jailed alongside Lenny Bruce. Bruce is played by Luke Kirby, with a laconic energy and some glorious truth-telling. And there will be more of him this series, which will be a fine thing. Because most of what Bruce told us, through those short years, about freedom of speech, about desire, about violence, has been utterly undercut since, his beloved radicalism somehow having ceded that right to the right. Go on, just watch it.

I’m by and large no fan of these warnings, nor of all the “if you have been affected bys” after a teatime drama about some kid who eats too many doughnuts being bullied. Yet these warnings were prescient and necessary in Channel 4 documentary The Family Secret, the most bravely honest hour’s watch of the week.

Kath had confronted her abuser, who had crept into her bed when she was seven and he 11 – her brother, Robert. She confronted Robert, 25 years later and in a relatively kind meeting brought about by moves for restorative justice. She made short work of his use of “intimacy”: “it was rape”. A couple of her honest questions, about entitlement and “what right did you think…”, honestly bamboozled 36-year-old Robert. “It was only really release,” he said.

I was frankly amazed at how Kath went on to live a fizzing, full life. It seems unlikely he might sill prove a threat: he has made some kind of squirrelly peace with the past and seems, currently, ineffectual. Kath on the other hand is a gleam, a lighthouse, a ball of strong-jawed energy.

His Dark Materials has weekly grown in stature, though a little narrative energy has been lost along the way. It reconnected, thrillingly, with the audience last week. But where are all the daemons? Are they hiding under Lyra’s skirts?

I was almost drawn to Channel 5’s Can You Really Afford to Retire?, but that was before I remembered that few people get value from reviews that consist of only one word. I suppose I could have stretched it to two (equally emphatic) words, the second of which would have been “off”.