The Decameron review: 'A bawdy Black Death romp which mocks the rich'

Zosia Mamet and Saoirse-Monica Jackson dodge the Black Plague in The Decameron. Picture: Giulia Parmigiani/Netflix

Time Bandits Apple TV+ ****

The Decameron Netflix ***

McDonald and Dodds (ITV1) ***

Lisa Kudrow leads the Time Bandits on thrilling new adventures with Kal-El Tuck as their junior history expert. Picture: Apple TV+

Piglets (ITV1) ***

There’s a brilliant moment at the start of Time Bandits which seems to encapsulate family life and how it’s lived now. An 11-year-old boy is being mildly reprimanded by his father who says: “What good’s history to anyone? You’re stuck in the past – literally.”

“Yeah,” adds his mother, “it’s over. Get into the future.” She’s glued to her phone. “Technology! Touch screens! Updates! Upgrades! We’ll get you a new one.” She’s sat next to her husband on the sofa who’s glued to his phone. “We can be chatting to someone while we’re talking to someone else. Ooh, I’ve got a message. Ooh, it’s from you: ‘What you up to?’”

Now, I could take a whole lot more of this, the Haddock family behaving much like the Brockman family in Outnumbered with Kevin wise beyond his years, but Time Bandits is a reimagining of the Terry Gilliam fantasy classic and our young hero - happy as a geek playing Risk on his own and not really bothered about being picked last for football behind the lad on crutches with the broken arm - is absolutely thrilled when a Viking bursts through his wardrobe. “Sorry Mum, sorry Dad, adventure calls my name!” he yelps. But just before adventure, nerdiness. “Perhaps you could tell me,” he asks the gatecrasher, “why did the Vikings suddenly stop their murderous ways and adopt agrarianism?”

Tala Gouveia and Jason Watkins as McDonald and Dodds. Picture: ITV

Kevin, stupendously played by Kal-El Tuck, is eager to learn and to leap into the next whirlpool-portal with a gang of time-travelling thieves led by Lisa Kudrow - off the side of a 19th century Chinese pirate ship and emerging after 3,000 years at … “Stonehenge! Under construction!” He pumps the builders for info. They’re like modern builders, vague about the job – “Very much a venue for hire” – but confident it’ll “be ready next Tuesday”. And – Time Bandits is stuffed with good jokes – the gift shop selling little toy Stonehenges is already open for business.

Two Scotsmen pop up in new dramas, though I don’t spot them right away, such are their characters’ unprepossessing demeanours. Is that really John Hannah, suppurating from a bubonic plague and about to croak his last? A check of the titles reveals it is. And from the Black Death to, well, a fellow who looks like he could be a roadie for a doom-metal band called Black Death but is actually a tree surgeon as gnarled as the old oaks preoccupying him – say hello to John Gordon Sinclair.

Hannah first. This is The Decameron, loosely based on the short stories of Renaissance writer Giovanni Boccaccio. They’ve been adapted by Kathleen Jordan who got the idea during Covid when struck by the blithering tin-earedness of celebs whingeing about being trapped inside their mansions while the planet was convulsing.

So how do they cope with a pandemic in Italy in 1348? Oh, idiotically, such as when handmaiden Licisca (Tanya Reynolds) sticks flowers up her nostrils in the hope they will repel the “bad air” which is obliterating half of Florence. I mean, that’s like suggesting that in 2021 we should have injected ourselves with bleach and who in their right mind would propose such a thing?

With the dead being tipped into the Arno by the barrowload, an exclusive bunch of aristos are invited to escape to the country and party away the Black Death in a grand villa. Licisca has been loyally tending the gushing pores of Hannah’s paterfamilias but is tricked into joining his daughter on the trip only for the pair to fall out en route, the noblewoman’s tumble from a bridge enabling Licisca to assume her identity at the big hoose.

Reynolds was in Sex Education. Most of the cast come from terrific shows where they weren’t the star striker but part of a hard-working midfield, including Zoisa Mamet (Girls), Saoirse-Monica Jackson (Derry Girls), Leila Farzad (I Hate Suzie) and Tony Hale (Veep). The Decameron can’t quite be rated terrific but it’s a bawdy romp which has fun at the expense of the entitlement and inanities of rich folk and I’m always up for some of that.

Sinclair’s job in McDonald and Dodds is to flit between key witness and prime suspect. This is the function of just about everyone in the returning crime drama until – gadzooks! – that moment just before the final ad break when Jason Watkins whips off the spectacles on a string (metaphorically anyway), the beige ensemble of jerkin, trousers, shirt and tie falls to the ground (not literally - what a sight that would be), and he becomes Mr Memory, cracking the case with a teensy clue from those long-ago opening minutes, something which is lost to the audience over the leisurely hours of following Watkins’ amble round Bath’s Georgian colonnades in an Ovaltine-fuelled dwam.

Really, I should scoff at this show, the televisual equivalent of a warm poultice, for its lack of edge, cool, sexiness, danger and all the other prerequisites for my viewing pleasure, even on Sunday night, but I can’t. Is it created by AI? No. A robot operating the trusty ITV mincer? Not quite. But it does borrow from other mainstream, unchallenging whodunnits? Yes. Somehow, though, it works.

Watkins as Dodds is a big part of that, the balding, boffiny bumbler who beyond the fish supper fetish has no hinterland so in that sense the programme is quite radical and almost daring. Tala Gouveia’s McDonald is his immediate superior. They are fond of each other but don’t try for chemistry. Possibly Dodds does not recognise the term as it applies to personal interaction.

The first of the new run concerns extortion, drugs, prostitution and human trafficking before it gets round to a double murder and there’s a woman who looks like Pixie Lott – yes, it is the retired pop babe – but Dodds refuses to get excited by any of this. He seems more concerned that his office chair has gone missing, leaving him stuck on one that’s too high like a little beige boy – a sight gag almost as funny as the Stonehenge shop.

Last but not least, ITV has often been a bit of a sitcom graveyard and Saturday night seems like a six-foot-under slot but Piglets is highly promising with police training officer Mark Heap tutoring cadets in the code-names for drugs as revealed by his snitch. Cocaine is “classic rock”, amphetamine “Ninky Nonk” and LSD “fried bedspread”. Heroin? Oh that’s “The One Show”.