Battle of the Bagpipes review: 'a stramash, a squawk-fest or an iconic instrument'

Battle of the Bagpipes Sky Arts ***

Susan Calman’s Grand Day Out Channel 5 ***

Paul Whitehouse’s Sketch Show Years Gold ***

One, two, three ... blow! It's Battle of the Bagpipes. Picture: Peter Devlin/Sky

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder BBC iPlayer ***​

Secrets of the London Underground Yesterday ***

Okay, so we were rubbish at the football at Euro 2024 but the Tartan Army were irrepressible and “Flower of Scotland” and “Highland Cathedral” made for stirring skirling on the marches through German cities to the stadia. Might we do better in Battle of the Bagpipes?

This doc follows a hundred pipers (an’ a’ an’ a’) in three big, boffo events including the biggest of the lot, the World Pipe Band Championships, and beginning with the Piping Live! fest in Glasgow. “There are more pipers here this week than anywhere in the world at any other time,” beams organiser Finlay MacDonald.

Emma Buchan from the People's Ford Boghall & Bathgate pipeband nails her colours in Battle of the Bagpipes. Picture: Peter Devlin/Sky

This would be William Shakespeare and fellow bagpipe-hater Alfred Hitchcock’s idea of hell. Alternatively, giving the concentration of pipers in one handy location, an opportunity for a dastardly collaboration, maybe dragooning them onto a sludge boat and sending them down the Clyde.

Just kidding. The first of three programmes switches between civilian bagpiping and military and we meet Trooper Ryan Smart of the Royal Tank Regiment who introduces himself thus: “I like tanks. There’s not much more I can say, I just like tanks.” But the young Englishman also likes piping, which is why he’s at Redford Barracks in Edinburgh, the Army’s centre of bagpiping excellence, along with a rookie Scottish squaddie, Kevin Gunn, with more urgent reasons for joining up: “I really needed some discipline aboot me. I was a total nutcase.”

Will these two still be piping when they’re 64? Richard Parkes has been at it for half a century, all that time in the same band, Field Marshall Montgomery out of Northern Ireland. He’s been pipe major for a while, for the band’s 13 world championship triumphs indeed, which must make him the Pep Guardiola of bagpiping - in fact, let’s call him Pipe Guardiola.

Home contenders at the worlds include Inveraray & District, led by Stuart Liddell. To the untrained and unappreciative ear, bagpiping might seem like a stramash, a squawk-fest, but Liddell doesn’t miss wrong notes during intensive practice. “It only takes one a***hole,” he grumbles. The underdogs are People’s Ford Boghall & Bathgate but the enthusiasm of 19-year-old Kerr McQuillan – “I was born to be lead drummer of this band, I dreamed of it” – will have you rooting for them. There’s also the fact that Boghall is a charming Scottish place name. It’s close to Pumpherston and Skinflats, also charming Scottish place names.

Susan Calman's Grand Day Out visits Jersey. Picture: Channel 5

Right at the start of this series, narrator Bill Paterson describes the bagpipes as “an iconic instrument”. Right at the start of the seventh run of Susan Calman’s Grand Day Out, the Glasgow comedian, newly arrived on Jersey, describes Bergerac as having “an iconic theme tune”. Bless summer telly, it knows we’re on holiday or at the very least spending time outdoors and away from the idiot-lantern and so needs to hype itself up.

A childhood infatuation with the Channel Island crimebuster has drawn Calman to the self-governing Brit dependency that’s much closer to France. Now, I normally steer well clear of travelogues but there’s been such a splurge of high-end, enormo-budget TV recently that I feel quite stuffed. Sometimes a potato is all that’s needed.

I’m not being derogatory about Calman for, first off, she’s in search of the Jersey Royal. There are some for sale at the roadside, payment via an honesty box, the existence of which, she reckons, is “the sign of a really beautiful place that in a world which is quite mistrusting, makes me well up”. Then she’s digging up the protected status tatties on a violently sloping farm requiring a winch-and-cable contraption which reminds her of pre-Health & Safety funfair rides.

Calman is an engaging guide: funny, curious, deft at extracting info as well as potatoes and her “right good tootling around” isn’t simply going through the motions with an opened Wikipedia page, the routine of some celebrity travellers I could name.

Emma Myers in A Good Girl's Guide To Murder. Picture: Joss Barratt/BBC

“Genuinely iconic.” That’s Paul Whitehouse talking about a classic comedy moment. What is wrong with everyone this week, don’t they know that the more the word is used, the lesser its impact and the greater the groaning? Ah but Whitehouse knows. “Woops, cliche alert!” he adds quickly.

Paul Whitehouse’s Sketch Show Years has reached the 1980s for reminisces of Kenny Everett (not funny then, not funny now), Hale & Pace (not funny then, surprisingly improves with age) and Not the Nine O’Clock News (Constable Savage, still brilliant). Whitehouse prefaces the latter skit with a warning to delicate flowers and those keen to be offended. He does this reluctantly. He stresses these were different times; why can’t everyone? And anyway, could certain police forces really claim the thrust of the humour doesn’t have any modern relevance?

Whitehouse doesn’t forget the good work of BBC Scotland’s Comedy Unit – impresario: Colin Gilbert – and not just because as a budding gagman he managed to sell a joke to Naked Video. “It didn’t push the envelope,” he admits. “Whatever that means.” Rab C. Nesbitt (quick, another alert!) was the Unit’s biggest success but I laugh loudest at Andy Gray emerging from the loos at Glasgow’s Central Station and thinking he looks fabulous in a peach Miami Vice-style jacket with rolled-up sleeves, blissfully unaware that a loo roll snagged in his white breeks is unspooling behind him as he saunters across the concourse.

In a thin week for new drama, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder can grab itself some extra attention, though with a title like that it might have come anyway. The bloodthirsty should beware: it’s based on a young adult novel and you’ll probably find it a bit tame. But Emma Myers makes for a winning schoolgirl sleuth as, under the auspices of a class project, she re-investigates a killing which rocked her town five years previously. Her character Pip would seem to have the requisite attention-to-detail, rejecting the amorous intentions of a boy because instead of “specifically” he says “percifically”.

Secrets of the London Underground has reached series four. How did that happen? What untold stories can possibly still lurk? Well, the first escalator began trundling in 1911. In a single week nine dresses were shredded and one finger – “a moveable terror,” declared the Pall Mall Gazette. This was Earl’s Court, also the concealed location for a WW2 “spare time factory” where staff would come off shift and make tank parts.

Bring on series five. Summer telly, it’s iconic!