The week in TV: Adolescence; Michael Sheen's Secret Million Pound Giveaway; Chess Masters: The Endgame

The Guardian

16-03-2025

Adolescence (Netflix)Michael Sheen's Secret Million Pound Giveaway (Channel 4) | channel4.comChess Masters: The Endgame (BBC Two) | iPlayer
After the horrific death of a teenage girl in Adolescence, the camera follows a day's events in a police station in one single extraordinary shot, and then does the same at her school. But the real eye-opener is which of the two locations turns out to be more redolent of crime and menace. Stephen Graham, who co-wrote this four-part series with the prolific Jack Thorne (This Is England '86/'90, Help, Kiri, Toxic Town), plays Eddie, a father who looks on in stunned bewilderment while officers process his 13-year-old son Jamie for murder as if they were filling out their timesheets.
At the school, by contrast, bullying and fist fights happen under the noses of teachers who can barely keep order. Everything is the wrong way round. Even level-headed DI Bascombe, the detective leading the murder inquiry, loses his cool. The school 'looks like a fucking holding pen', mutters Bascombe, an impressive Ashley Walters, on the other side of the tracks from his drug-dealing kingpin in Top Boy.
The police have studied Instagram accounts and taken at face value the heart emojis the victim sent to Jamie (strikingly assured newcomer Owen Cooper). Was this a teen romance that went horribly wrong? It takes Bascombe's son, Adam, to explain that they should be looking at the different colours of the heart symbols. The girl was calling Jamie an 'incel' in code. 'It's the 80-20 rule,' Adam goes on: the majority of young women are attracted to just a fifth of men. The inquiry leads Bascombe's team towards the rank and misogynistic 'manosphere'. 'The Andrew Tate shite,' groans Bascombe's partner, DS Misha Frank (Faye Marsay). 'I've heard the boys talk about him,' says a teacher.
But this important and affecting series highlights broader issues: boys in search of an identity, and technology dividing children from their parents. Eddie has never even glanced at his son's socials.
Tate isn't the only toxic male in the US who cast his shadow over last week's new television. In his latest role, the actor Michael Sheen, who has portrayed real-life figures including Tony Blair, Brian Clough and David Frost, appears as a kind of anti-Elon Musk. While the richest man in the world wants to take a chainsaw to the social security system on which poor Americans depend, the more modestly resourced Sheen is spending his own cash to help families escape the gnawing hardship of owing money.
Michael Sheen's Secret Million Pound Giveaway attempts to do for Britain's debt crisis what the movie The Big Short – albeit without Margot Robbie in a bathtub – did for the financial crash of 2008. This is an exposé that carries the audience along with it, despite digressions about abstruse financial instruments. More than 2 million families in the UK had 'high interest' loans as of October 2024, according to Sheen, and the industry is worth £55bn. Debt is a burden if you owe it but an asset if you hold it, and one that can be traded. While a borrower's exposure increases, the miserable arithmetic of these unlikely goods means that the debt itself becomes cheaper the more it changes hands. With the help of a former insider from the murky debt collection racket, Sheen hoped to pay £100,000 to take over £1m of loans that he would write off, relieving the pressure on 900 people in south Wales, where he grew up.
Unkempt but upbeat, Sheen compares his one-man campaign to a 'heist'. He establishes his 'HQ' in a disused warehouse that looks like a location from Ocean's Eleven, 'or in my case, Ocean's One', says the star. He has to set up a company and get the backing of financial service watchdogs. Sheen's mole warns him that he shouldn't draw attention to his activities because the highly secretive debt business likes to keep it that way.
The actor meets a working mother in arrears to the tune of £12,000, which she can't clear. In a greasy spoon near the doomed Port Talbot steelworks, waitresses tell him that grown men wept at their tables at the sight of the last ships delivering to the plant, which leaves Sheen close to tears himself. A loan shark claims that he performs a public service but admits he would make a 'nuisance' of himself outside the house of a debtor who didn't pay up. 'I won't beat you up for a grand,' he says, as if that would be beneath him. Sheen points out that this predator has at least talked to him, unlike the bankers and regulators he approached.
After an 18-month wait, Sheen's heist comes off. He rips up a piece of paper representing the debt he has cancelled. Data protection rules mean he doesn't know the names of his beneficiaries, so director Paul Taylor is denied a heartwarming payoff to his film. The programme improvises, with Sheen making a speech to a cafe full of people who express their gratitude. The documentary ends in anticlimax – somehow appropriate given that debt remains grindingly remorseless for so many.
For a game with such a strict set of rules, chess has proved highly adaptable. Matches between champions of the east and west were proxies for the cold war, and garlanded players took on computers in a rehearsal of what may lie ahead for mankind and AI. The game's history on British TV has been chequered. Matches haven't been screened for 30 years, but now BBC Two has co-opted chess for its Monday-night brainbox slot.
Buttressed by Mastermind and University Challenge, two valuable pieces on the BBC's grid, Chess Masters: The Endgame sees a dozen enthusiasts compete against one another while Sue Perkins MCs. Like aficionados studying games of the past, the producers have borrowed signature moves from other shows: MasterChef's slo-mo walking shot of the contestants; excited experts following events remotely, courtesy of The Piano; and The Traitors' flaring candelabra and backstage gossip. Competitors are invited to solve a chess problem. But programme-makers also face a puzzle from which there is no easy escape, known to chess grandmasters as zugzwang. What to do about the viewers who don't understand the rules? Will they be bored stupid?
To get around this, various camera angles and sound effects made the loss of a piece as dramatic as a WWE grappler hitting the canvas. And the players are furnished with nicknames and backstories. Lula, AKA the Chess Princess, took up the game after she watched 2020 film The Queen's Gambit, starring Anya Taylor-Joy. Fifty-six-year-old Londoner Nick, 'the Swashbuckler', has a spell in prison behind him and now teaches inmates the game to help build mental resilience. He brings an unlikely vibe of Commissioner Selwyn Patterson from Death in Paradise to his matches. In another familiar ploy, one contestant is removed from the board each week.
I was disappointed not to see an eccentric genius among the players, such as the old Russian master David Bronstein, who is said to have begun one game by staring at the board for 50 minutes without touching a piece, though admittedly that might not make great TV. But I'm punching my clock and waiting for the showrunners to make their next move. So far, so good. No need to go back to square one.
Star ratings (out of five)
Adolescence ★★★★Michael Sheen's Secret Million Pound Giveaway ★★★★Chess Masters: The Endgame ★★★
Death in Paradise (BBC One) The beating heart of this Caribbean Cluedo is Don Warrington's Commissioner Selwyn, with his motorcycle sidecar, rumpled fatigues and RSC-honed command of the elusive Saint Marie accent.
Match of the Day(BBC One) We'll miss Gary Lineker when he goes at the end of the season. The BBC chairman is daft to suggest there should be more analysis and less football. Television is about show and tell, not one or the other.
Saturday Night Live (X) Mike Myers (Austin Powers, The Cat in the Hat) makes a welcome comeback as a madcap Elon Musk on the long-running comedy revue. His impersonation ('Glitch!') is even more of a tonic than whatever pick-me-up his wired tech bro appears to be taking.