Damned: UK comedian Jo Brand turns her focus to social work in new show


With so many entertainment options, it's easy to miss brilliant TV shows, movies and documentaries. Here are the ones to hit or miss.


Before Jo Brand was the celebrated, award-winning actor and screenwriter she is today - heck, even before she was part of the British "alternative comedy" scene of the 1980s - she spent a decade working as a psychiatric nurse at hospitals in England and Wales.

It was that experience that would inform Getting On, her deep, poignant sigh of a workplace satire set in the geriatric ward of an NHS hospital.


Getting On, which Brand co-created and starred in, was so compassionate, keenly observed and perfectly formed that even the later American remake was a thing of exquisite, uncomfortable humanity (that series, starring Alex Borstein, Laurie Metcalf and Niecy Nash, is still on Foxtel On Demand).

In Damned, Brand turns her focus to social work - her mother's profession, as it happens. Some obvious similarities invite comparison with Getting On, but Brand, co-creator Morwenna Banks and their writing partner, Will Smith (The Thick of It, Veep) keep the tone lighter and incline a bit towards the farcical.

Alan Davies and Jo Brand.

Alan Davies and Jo Brand.

Brand plays Rose Denby, a veteran child-protection worker at a local authority that's being gutted by budget cuts.

Possessed of great experience and wisdom, along with a particularly sharp tongue, Rose is not entirely perfect. She's constantly late and frequently distracted by the slipshod job that she and her useless, semi-estranged husband are doing of raising their own kids, and she also has to deal with a mother who has begun showing signs of dementia.

Rose has a kindred spirit of sorts in sardonic colleague Alastair (Jonathan Creek's Alan Davies), but the rest of their outfit is little help. Nitin (Himesh Patel) is a priggish ex-cop with a strange terror of authority; receptionist Nat (Isy Suttie) is a ditz with a difference but a ditz nonetheless; and boss Denise (Georgie Glen) is tough as old boots.

Telephones trill unanswered in the background throughout, and those phones that do get answered pipe in sad things, whether they be complaints about neighbours being Muslims, or enquiries about the recommended daily alcohol allowance for a 12-year-old.

The home visits and frustrating bureaucratic meetings that Rose and Alastair eventually get around to serve to highlight multiple facets of thorny real-life problems, and the inadequacy of available options. There's even a bit of sympathy for the likes of Denise, charged with implementing unjust decisions handed down from on high. It all stays quite funny, though.

Watch Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil on Netflix.

Watch Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil on Netflix.

Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil

An odd but thoroughly enjoyable Basque horror movie based, evidently, on an imaginative Basque legend. It's the 19th century, and a blacksmith has sold his soul to a demon - only to renege on the deal and keep the demon locked up in a cage in his workshop.

When a girl orphaned by her mother's suicide blunders into the shop, she sets off a chain of events that could lead her to the very gates of hell. It's all quite entrancing, in a delightfully bonkers way.

The Teach is on SBS On Demand.

The Teach is on SBS On Demand.

The Teach
SBS On Demand

An immediately engrossing Polish mystery series in which a teacher named Pawel (Maciej Stuhr) arrives in a small town and begins investigating the murder of a teenage girl who would have been one of his students.

The list of suspects immediately seems to encompass the whole town, from her boyfriend and other classmates to a creepy PE teacher and corrupt businessmen.

It's astutely written and performed, and certain Polish idiosyncrasies (enormous indoor plants, frequent slugs of vodka) give it a real sense of place.

Comedian Celia Pacquola.

Comedian Celia Pacquola.

Live at the Apollo

There's quite the Australian contingent in this season of the British comedy showcase series.

The ebullient Celia Pacquola steals her episode with a performance that will encourage viewers to check out her barnstorming special Celia Pacquola: The Looking Glass, which is also on Stan.

Adam Hills and Sam Simmons are as good as you'd expect, and the format gives them a reasonable amount of time to establish a point of view and actually deliver some material. Non-Australian highlights include Gina Yashere and Michelle Wolf.

Johnny Cash.

Johnny Cash. Credit:AP

Remastered: Tricky Dick and the Man in Black
Netflix, from Friday, November 2

In 1970, US president Richard Nixon invited country-music legend Johnny Cash to perform at the White House. It was no random invitation.

The Republican Party was working hard to co-opt country music as part of its "Southern Strategy" to peel racist Southern voters away from the Democrats.

To this end Nixon himself had travelled to Nashville's Grand Ole Opry to play the piano on stage. Cash's own innate conservatism all but ensured he would accept Nixon's invitation.

But, as this absorbing instalment of Netflix's music documentary series shows, things didn't go according to Nixon's plan.

Documentary makers Sara Doser and Barbara Kopple enlist an impressive cast of Cash intimates - including his sister Joanne, brother Tommy, son John and manager Lou Robin - to explain how Cash had come to be a very different man to the one that Nixon imagined him to be.

Nixon's personal request that Cash play songs disparaging anti-war protesters and welfare recipients upped the ante.

This fine little film provides absorbing biographical and historical context before turning its focus to that one awkward evening.

Catch Chasing Ice on Docplay and Netflix.

Catch Chasing Ice on Docplay and Netflix.

Chasing Ice
Netflix, Docplay

Last year filmmaker Jeff Orlowski brought us the stunning feature-length documentary Chasing Coral (Netflix), which brought home the shocking scale of mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.

Five years earlier he brought us this spectacular but depressing documentary following the work of photographer James Balog in chronicling the rapid retreat of glaciers in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska and Montana.

An executive from the German reinsurance giant Munich Re is on hand to explain that big business knows full well that global warming is real.

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