Thelma’s Gypsy Girls
Channel 4′s controversial traveler franchise has spawned another spin-off: Thelma’s Gypsy Girls sees teenagers from the traveler community learning the dressmaking trade from Thelma Madine, wedding dress creator extraordinaire from Big Fat Gypsy Weddings.
Serena Davies found it all rather touching in The Telegraph. “The girls, all teenagers, are pretty with flickers of charm but belligerent and heartbreakingly ignorant,” she wrote. The girls attended a non-traveller party in Sunday night’s episode, and learned that socialising outside the community was not as bad as they’d feared: “It was then I found myself thinking it might be worth putting myself in their sequinned, glitter-spangled platforms for a moment or two, before rushing to judge,” said Davies.
But The Guardian’s Tim Dowling caught a whiff of exploitation: “The girls are terribly young, thrust into an alien culture that at times genuinely frightens them. I for one felt uncomfortable peering down this particular peephole.” The problem, said Dowling, is that this programme is reality television, rather than an observation of reality: “What scant sociological insight there was to be derived from series one has long since evaporated… If this wasn’t happening on television, it wouldn’t be happening at all.”
The Hollow Crown, BBC Two’s 4-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays, has had a rough ride in the schedules, pointed out Alex Hardy in The Times (£), going up against Wimbledon with the first episodes. Hardy hoped that the series will get more viewers now the tennis is over: “How much these histories deserve to be watched. They are bristling with texture, from episode to episode, and within each episode… for this Saturday’s third play, Henry IV Part 2, we were back where we started, cinematographically — with sweeping shots of tingling beauty.”
Thrills and spills of a different order were to be found in World’s Most Dangerous Roads, which tasks comedians with driving a particularly taxing route. Liza Tarbuck and Sue Perkins had to negotiate roads littered with unexploded bombs in Laos, indicated by red-painted trees: “It’s certainly a way to tighten the concentration when it comes to not nudging the red trees in a 12-point turn, anyway,” wrote Will Dean in The Independent.
Across the pond, Sunday saw the start of season five of meth-dealing drama Breaking Bad. At Salon, Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu provided an in-depth analysis of a show critics have hailed as a television great, tracing its treatment of the nature of evil back to Milton’s Paradise Lost: “This is a human-centered vision of the origin of evil. It is Old Testament at its core.”
Watch a clip from Thelma’s Gypsy Girls below.
