What’s on this weekend? From Tigertail to Fleabag
Your guide to what’s worth seeing and reading this weekend
The Week’s best film, TV, book and live show on this weekend, with excerpts from the top reviews.
TELEVISION: Joe Lycett’s Got Your Back
Imani Cottrell for the Royal Television Society
“The new eight-part series will see Lycett once again battle both national business and solo rogues to seek justice for wronged consumers. Lycett and his consumer sidekick and ‘technical assistant’ Mark Silcox will tackle everything from cowboy builders to email scammers. The first series saw Lycett take on giants such as Britannia Hotels and easyJet, and managed to change the policies of Uber Eats, SpareRoom and RBS. Everyday customer service heroes were celebrated and people got thousands of pounds back. In a bid to get bank fraud victim Claire’s £8k back, Joe and a flashmob performed a song and dance routine at NatWest HQ, which gained 9.1 million views on Facebook. Series two is set to dial up the funny and the justice, with celebrity consumer helpers joining in and the audience playing a key part of series, even when they’re not aware.”
Friday 8pm on Channel 4
MOVIE: Tigertail
Tyler Hersko for Indiewire
“Alan Yang’s directorial debut is shaping up to be a somber, albeit entirely heartfelt, story of love and family. The film initially centers on a young Pin-Jui (Hong-Chi Lee), who relocates to the United States from Taiwan in search of a better life, though the move forces him to get an arranged marriage in lieu of staying with the woman he loves. When it turns out America isn’t exactly the land of opportunity that Pin-Jui had hoped for, he’s stuck in a loveless marriage, works a tiresome, thankless job, and, as the trailer explicitly states, becomes broken inside. As the film fast-forwards several decades, an older Pin-Jui (Tzi Ma) seeks to make amends for his past and finally build the life he once dreamed of.”
Released 10 April on Netflix
BOOK: Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O’Connell
James McConnachie in The Times
“Some of his encounters are deliciously, novelistically weird. In South Dakota he meets an estate agent marketing the ultimate gated community - a man who believes in the existence of a rogue planet called Niburu that is supposedly on a collision course with Earth and who keeps insisting that O’Connell score women for attractiveness. On the Highlands eco-retreat he befriends an artist who likes to work with natural inks made from oak galls, but has been unable to source them since ‘the online vaginal-health community’ decided they have a tightening effect. In an abandoned classroom in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, he is drawn into a discussion about whether or not the DJ Dr Alban — he of It’s My Life — is a qualified dentist.”
Published 10 April
STAGE: Fleabag
Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out
“The monologue is not the TV show, even if the first series (and a couple of lines from the second) was extrapolated from its DNA. There’s no Hot Priest, foxes or gins in tins. In fact, there are very few other characters. Fleabag’s sister, Claire, and deceased best friend, Boo, are still conjured by Waller-Bridge as she sits alone on a stool. But she spends more time launching into a marvellously obscene pout and doing an impression of the rodenty guy she meets on the tube. It is self-contained, a parallel universe version of the character that remains grubby, bedsitty and tragic.”
Streaming online at Soho Theatre website from £4. All proceeds go towards charities including the National Emergencies Trust, NHS Charities Together and Acting for Others.