What to stream this week: The Mitford sisters and five more picks
Outrageous ★★★½ (BritBox)
Told with a giddy energy that matches the bottles of champagne repeatedly being popped, Outrageous is a period romp about the British upper class that traverses the fine line between farce and tragedy. The show's historic subject is the Mitford sisters – six daughters of the aristocracy who became a microcosm of Europe's ructions in the 1930s. Influencers in a tabloid headline era, they were the closest of siblings who eventually became adversaries. You couldn't make this story up if you tried. Really, really tried.
It's 1931 and Nancy (Bessie Carter) serves as wry narrator – she's a budding novelist whose own family will provide irresistible material. Diana (Joanna Vanderham) is 'the beauty', soon to leave her Guinness heir husband for Britain's leading fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley (Joshua Sasse). Unity (Shannon Watson) will go beyond that – she befriends Adolf Hitler. Jessica (Zoe Brough) becomes an ardent communist. Pamela (Isobel Jesper Jones) loves her Angus cattle herd. Deborah (Orla Hill) simply wants a husband and a nice country house.
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Put two or more of the sisters in a scene and the dialogue has screwball pace and droll retorts. In adapting Mary S. Lovell's 2001 biography, The Mitford Girls, creator Sarah Williams has captured solidarity as a kind of accelerant. Growing up together – their father, Baron Redesdale (James Purefoy), believed girls shouldn't go to school – the young women pushed at boundaries and ached for agency and purpose. Everything is a lark, until it very much isn't (hint: when Unity fangirls Hitler).
There's frivolity, some truly sketchy male suitors, and ominous headlines; imagine Wes Anderson adapting Hilary Mantel. The six episodes roll through five years. The budget struggles with the sweep of history – a Nuremberg rally is done with merely dozens of extras – but the personal dynamics are fascinating. It's ultimately a story of how you respond when someone you love crosses a line you never imagined existed. There's a scene between Unity and Jessica, the sadness tinged with memories of joint silliness, that's quietly heartbreaking.
Tellingly, the conundrums the Mitford sisters impose on each other couldn't be more timely. The appeal of fascism is debated at family meals, while opposing criticisms are righteously written off as propaganda and misinformation – free speech as an absolute defence is repeatedly invoked, political street violence threatens to become the norm. It's both entertaining and horrifying, as living in the moment often proves to be, with the Bright Young Things insouciance serving as a Trojan horse. The first season concludes in 1936, and I hope there's another – their story has earnt a reckoning.
Billy Joel: And So It Goes ★★★(HBO Max)
Consisting of two episodes each the length of a sizeable feature film, this documentary about Billy Joel, one of the biggest-selling artists in the history of popular music, will hold an obvious appeal to fans. His music is prominent throughout and Joel discusses his life with pugnacious candour. But it's also of interest to novices, because Joel has long been contradictory: a populist suspicious of his own hits, a superstar who struggled to fit in.
'The most original thing I've done in my life is screw up,' Joel tells directors Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, and while they don't tug too hard on the many tangled threads of Joel's life and art this comprehensive documentary is a reminder that anyone with such a gargantuan career – over 150 million albums sold, a residency at Madison Square Garden that lasted 10 years – has an intriguing psychological set-up.
The 76-year-old, who recently shelved all touring plans because of a normal pressure hydrocephalus diagnosis, was primarily a storyteller with his lyrics, and talking about them takes him back into the highs and lows – but mostly lows – of his own life. The likes of Pink and Bruce Springsteen offer input, but Joel's real foil here is his former wife and manager Elizabeth Weber. They've been divorced since 1982, but her read on him remains essential. Very unlikely, very Billy Joel.
The Hunting Wives ★★½ (Stan)
Hightown creator Rebecca Cutter returns with this soap-tinged melodrama about switching from one side of America's cultural divide to the other. When a fresh start transplants Sophie O'Neill (Brittany Snow, The Night Agent) and her family from the East Cost to Texas, she becomes fast friends with the cadre of desperate housewives commanded by the wife of her husband's new boss, Margo Banks (Malin Akerman, Billions). The desire for female friendship is an intriguing lens, but the story is taken up with mildly outrageous behaviour and the growing shadow of a murder enquiry.
Riff Raff ★★½ (Amazon Prime Video)
This American crime-comedy, informed by far better movies from the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino, is less than the sum of its parts: Bill Murray, Jennifer Coolidge, Ed Harris, Pete Davidson, Gabrielle Union, and Lewis Pullman all have roles in the ensemble cast. Directed by Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognising Your Saints), the move struggles to lay out the many circumstances required to explain how an unexpected family gathering at the Maine cabin belonging to Harris' Vincent is soon crashed by Murray and Davidson's vengeful gangsters. Nothing really cuts through.
Somebody Feed Phil (season 8) ★★★ (Netflix)
One of Netflix's longest-running shows, this culinary travel show continues to take Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal from one tasty global locale to the next. More a chatty enthusiast than sombre gourmand, Rosenthal is visibly delighted by good food – his face finds the most delightfully idiosyncratic shapes when he bites into something he enjoys. Phil's format is quick-fire stops, and this latest season fills a major gap in his planner by finally featuring an Australian episode that covers Sydney and Adelaide. The outside perspective makes for a refreshing change.
Sold! ★★★½ (Binge)
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Mark Humphries has been many things on our TV screens, from sketch satirist to game show host, but he may well have found his defining purpose with this tragicomic documentary about Australia's housing crisis. As a self-deprecating truth-seeker working with long-time collaborator Evan Williams and The Chaser 's Craig Reucassel, Humphries manages to cut through the unsettling numbers, partisan policies, and grim ramifications of a housing market that, over the course of this century, has flipped from inclusive to exclusive. The explanations are concise and bittersweet – it's your choice to laugh or cry.
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So, he could scarcely have imagined that one of Hollywood's biggest heartthrobs would end up playing a character based on his life experience in a movie. Donnelly said it was surreal to find himself filming in a garage at Brands Hatch, with Pitt asking for advice on where to stand and how to enter the car. ''Hey Brad, if I were you, just stand at the back of the car, walk around it, touch it, just ask the car to be good to you today, pray that you're going to be both quick and safe',' he recalled saying. Martin Donnelly with Brad Pitt during production of the F1 movie. Credit: CNN Donnelly said that he never dwelled upon the inherent dangers of high-speed racing. 'If you have something in the back of your mind about having an accident, you're not driving that car at 100 per cent, you're at 99 per cent,' he explained. 'In my mind, (accidents) happened to other drivers, not me.' Nevertheless, as he described telling Pitt to climb from the left-hand side of the car, he accepted that he has always been a superstitious driver. 'My daughter once did a feature on me at school and said, 'Dad, can you write down all the superstitions you have,' and there were two A4 pages of it. She says, 'Oh my god, dad, you need some help!'' In assisting with the production of the movie, Donnelly was forced to relive the most traumatic experience of his life, experiencing it for the first time in the third person. The director recreated the crash and filmed it repeatedly, prompting him to wonder: 'Is this what I'm known for?' 'I watched them get a mannequin in yellow overalls and a helmet fly out of this car 15 times and all these cameras are taking pictures,' Donnelly said. 'And then it would drop and be dragged along the ground. For me, that was a reality check because I've never seen it happen.' Donnelly said that footage was never used in the final edit, perhaps because nothing could match the intensity of the original television recording, which he said he didn't know would be used until he saw the movie in the cinema. While he said that he feels 'honoured and privileged that Brad Pitt chose my accident and my life to document', the 61-year-old admitted that the whole thing is bittersweet; his crash came at a cost. 'This is what I've been reenacted for,' he lamented. 'And my friends at the time — Damon Hill, Jonny Herbert, Eddie Irvine, David Coulthard have all gone on to be very successful and very rich. Why wasn't I given a chance to have that? Because when they were my teammates, I kicked their asses!' But then he stops himself, recalling the fate of one of F1's greatest ever drivers Ayrton Senna. The Brazilian famously walked to the site of Donnelly's accident at Jerez and watched as the rescue teams fought to revive him on the track. Senna was close to Donnelly and clearly affected by his friend's clash in 1990. Credit: Getty/CNN They were close, and Senna offered anything he could do to help with his recovery. Four years later, Senna himself was involved in a devastating crash at the San Marino Grand Prix, and he was not so lucky. 'I do believe that I could easily have become a world champion but then I come back to reality. I'm still talking to you,' he said. 'My friend Senna is dead. He had all the millions in his back pocket, three-time world champion, but who's he going to share it with? 'His death on May 1st, 1994, was the final nail in the coffin for me to say, 'Hey Martin, look around you, you're in the paddock, you're still involved with the sport that you love. You've got no right to complain'.'
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Almost everything in the blockbuster F1 movie is fictional, but the protagonist's spine-chilling origin story really happened exactly as depicted on screen. Brad Pitt's character Sonny Hayes is haunted by a high-speed crash which initially cost him his Formula One dream, but for the man who survived that crash in real life, there would be no Hollywood ending. In 1990, Martin Donnelly was a promising British racing driver with the Lotus Formula One team, but a suspension failure in a practice session for the Spanish Grand Prix sent him hurtling into the Armco barrier at around 257km/h. The aftermath is one of the most horrifying scenes ever witnessed in motorsport. Donnelly says he has no memory of the crash, but he told CNN Sports that his car effectively became a bobsled without any steering or braking control prior to the moment of impact. 'The carbon fibre tub shattered like a car bomb, and I went with the energy,' he said. 'I got thrown out by about 60 metres and travelled through the air and along the ground like a rag doll.' Donnelly remained strapped to his seat, coming to rest awkwardly in the middle of the track. As cars navigated their way past him and through the field of debris, the marshals in Jerez waited for the arrival of doctor Sid Watkins, but the assumption was that Donnelly was already dead. When Watkins flipped open the visor of his helmet, Donnelly's face had turned blue. He was unconscious having swallowed his tongue, had broken many of his bones — including both of his legs — and his internal organs had been so traumatised that he would be clinging to life on a respirator and kidney dialysis for weeks. After being helicoptered to hospital in Seville, a priest was summoned to read him his last rites. Donnelly was lucky to escape with his life and both of his legs, and although he was subsequently able to resume his motor racing career, he never returned to Formula One as a driver. At least, not in real life. Over three decades later, seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton and the other producers of the movie perused F1 archives to find the crash upon which to base Hayes' narrative arc, a decision that was quickly made once they viewed Donnelly's dramatic incident in Jerez. Hamilton made the call to seek permission, blindsiding Donnelly one Saturday night at home. 'I thought it was going to be one of those cold calls for central heating or double-glazed windows,' he recalled. 'I was quite aggressive ... it's not every day you receive a call from a seven-time world champion!' When asked what had made him so good as a young racing driver, Donnelly joked with CNN Sports: 'Well it wasn't my good looks, that's for sure.' So, he could scarcely have imagined that one of Hollywood's biggest heartthrobs would end up playing a character based on his life experience in a movie. Donnelly said it was surreal to find himself filming in a garage at Brands Hatch, with Pitt asking for advice on where to stand and how to enter the car. ''Hey Brad, if I were you, just stand at the back of the car, walk around it, touch it, just ask the car to be good to you today, pray that you're going to be both quick and safe',' he recalled saying. Donnelly said that he never dwelled upon the inherent dangers of high-speed racing. 'If you have something in the back of your mind about having an accident, you're not driving that car at 100 per cent, you're at 99 per cent,' he explained. 'In my mind, (accidents) happened to other drivers, not me.' Nevertheless, as he described telling Pitt to climb from the left-hand side of the car, he accepted that he has always been a superstitious driver. 'My daughter once did a feature on me at school and said, 'Dad, can you write down all the superstitions you have,' and there were two A4 pages of it. She says, 'Oh my god, dad, you need some help!'' In assisting with the production of the movie, Donnelly was forced to relive the most traumatic experience of his life, experiencing it for the first time in the third person. The director recreated the crash and filmed it repeatedly, prompting him to wonder: 'Is this what I'm known for?' 'I watched them get a mannequin in yellow overalls and a helmet fly out of this car 15 times and all these cameras are taking pictures,' Donnelly said. 'And then it would drop and be dragged along the ground. For me, that was a reality check because I've never seen it happen.' Donnelly said that footage was never used in the final edit, perhaps because nothing could match the intensity of the original television recording, which he said he didn't know would be used until he saw the movie in the cinema. While he said that he feels 'honoured and privileged that Brad Pitt chose my accident and my life to document', the 61-year-old admitted that the whole thing is bittersweet; his crash came at a cost. 'This is what I've been reenacted for,' he lamented. 'And my friends at the time — Damon Hill, Jonny Herbert, Eddie Irvine, David Coulthard have all gone on to be very successful and very rich. Why wasn't I given a chance to have that? Because when they were my teammates, I kicked their asses!' But then he stops himself, recalling the fate of one of F1's greatest ever drivers Ayrton Senna. The Brazilian famously walked to the site of Donnelly's accident at Jerez and watched as the rescue teams fought to revive him on the track. They were close, and Senna offered anything he could do to help with his recovery. Four years later, Senna himself was involved in a devastating crash at the San Marino Grand Prix, and he was not so lucky. 'I do believe that I could easily have become a world champion but then I come back to reality. I'm still talking to you,' he said. 'My friend Senna is dead. He had all the millions in his back pocket, three-time world champion, but who's he going to share it with? 'His death on May 1st, 1994, was the final nail in the coffin for me to say, 'Hey Martin, look around you, you're in the paddock, you're still involved with the sport that you love. You've got no right to complain'.'
