TV Picks: 12th October - 19th October
Who Do You Think You Are?
Monday 12th October
BBC One, 9pm
The genealogy documentary series returns, with Jodie Whittaker (Doctor Who) tracing her Yorkshire family tree in this opening episode.
The genealogy documentary series returns, with Jodie Whittaker (Doctor Who) tracing her Yorkshire family tree in this opening episode.
The tenth series will air on 15 October on Channel 4, its new home having been acquired from Dave.
The line-up of comedian contestants was announced earlier this year, including Daisy May Cooper (This Country), Johnny Vegas (Benidorm), Katherine Parkinson (The IT Crowd), Mawaan Rizwan and Richard Herring (RHLSTP with Richard Herring).
Alex Horne created Taskmaster for a live show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2012, before it was picked up by Dave who ran it for nine series. It has since been exported to seven countries.
The RTS Award-winning comedy takes us back to the Cotswolds with cousins Kurtan and Kerry Mucklowe, played by the series creators Charlie and Daisy May Cooper.
Both Monty Python’s Flying Circus and W1A – shows produced by the BBC Comedy department five decades apart – featured a gag in which the BBC head of comedy is revealed to be a dour, humourless figure on the brink of clinical depression.
“Yes. And Episodes did a bit of that, as well,” laughs Shane Allen, when the long-running gag about his job is mentioned, thereby establishing that it could not apply to him. The tape of our conversation is fittingly – though, given some of his predecessors, not inevitably – punctuated with his deep laugh.
The series which was written by siblings Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper, who also serve as the leads is about the day-to-day of two cousins living in a rural village in the Cotswolds.
The show has recently won three RTS Programme Awards; for Comedy Writer, Comedy Performance and Best Scripted Comedy. The show has also been nominated four times at the upcoming BAFTA and BAFTA Craft Awards.
It’s been a hectic series for the show’s stars, cousins Kerry and Kurtan, played by Daisy May and Charlie Cooper. There’s been fishing, tadpoles spawned in the pond, there was an incident with some aggressive sheep… A busy six weeks in the Cotswold town the pair call home – or rather it hasn’t. And that’s sort of the point.
The RTS Programme Awards, chaired by Wayne Garvie, honours excellence across all genres of television programming and recognise exceptional actors, presenters, writers and production teams, as well as the programmes themselves.
The BBC scooped 17 awards for its programmes and talent, and also won the coveted RTS Channel of the Year award.