1-7 May 2021 Are you sitting uncomfortably? Miquita and Simon play the hits as Popworld turns 20 10 of the best TV twists, from Lost to Line of Duty 4 Netfl ix & Quill Joel Golby grudgingly glamps with Johnny Vegas 7 Popworld Simon and Miquita on 20 years of larks and snark 8 Black Widow or Jungle Cruise? The race to be summer’s big dumb movie hit 12 Guitar heroes A new wave of bands changing metal for ggood 14 Film 18 Music 22 Stage 24 Art 25 Sound & Vision The best of TV, streaming and podcasts 26 Seven-day TV and radio guide 30 Solved! Which actor’s fi lmography is the fi nest? 58 The Guide Kings Place 90 York Way London N1 9GU Tel: 020 3353 2000 [email protected] Printed at YM Chantry, Brindley Way, Wakefi eld 41, Wakefi eld WF2 0XQ theguardian.com For more great cultural picks, check out the Guide’s newsletter Staying In Sign up at theguardian.com/ email-newsletters LEVENE DAVID COVER: MODERN TOSS. The Guardian 1-7 May 2021 The Guide 3 F THE TV twists Spoiler alert! Line of Duty’s window plummet Jessica Raine’s arrival in the cast of Jed Mercurio’s anti-corruption police drama was at the heart of the publicity leading up to the show’s second series. The opening episode constructed DC Georgia Trotman’s character: dedicated, perhaps overly fond of a drink. And then, oops, a bent copper threw her out of a fi fth-storey hospital window and she was gone. Trotman, we barely knew you … WORLD PRODUCTIONS/BBC ONE/PA; PHOTO 12/ALAMY PHOTO WORLD PRODUCTIONS/BBC ONE/PA; 4 The Guide 1-7 May 2021 The Guardian Inside No 9’s tear-jerking twist Via jarring leaps of context and chronology, the Sheridan Smith- starring season two episode The 12 Days Lost’s plotting gamechanger of Christin e (still on iPlayer) packs a lifetime At the end of season three came a twist of triumph and tragedy that reversed time itself and added another into half an hour. The fi nal twist manages to temporal context in which to view the Lost be both audacious and castaways. It was also the moment when, moving; a sudden sharp depending on your perspective, this desert intake of breath that retrospectively renders island epic either got interesting or ridiculous. the previous 30 minutes Still, an audacious rug-pull that hinted at the unbearably poignant. A glorious unpredictability of what was to come. miniature masterpiece. The Offi ce Christmas Special’s festive treat Plot twists don’t have to be gruesome or shocking – they just usually are. But when Tim’s lost love Dawn reappeared at the Wernham Hogg Christmas party having dumped her irksome fi ance, it sealed The Offi ce’s legacy. This was that rarest of things: a twist that gave the audience exactly what it wanted. Game of Thrones’ EastEnders’ warning shot festive misery It certainly wasn’t Not just one plot twist the show’s most gory but a cavalcade of death. Probably not them: this brutal even in the Top 10, two-hander on in fact. But the Christmas Day 1986 execution of Ned confi rmed EastEnders Stark in season one as a soap willing to did set a standard and spring surprises. act as a warning to First, that Den knew viewers. Don’t get too Angie was lying about attached to anyone, being terminally ill it suggested, because to save her marriage. in Game of Thrones, Then, that he was no one is ever going fi ling for divorce. to be truly safe. Happy Christmas! The Guardian 1-7 May 2021 The Guide 5 10 of the best The Wire’s ‘hero’s death’ Omar Little had been living on borrowed time: hobbling around Baltimore with a serious leg injury while deliberately antagonising a ruthless drug kingpin is not sustainable for long. But even so, his sudden demise in season fi ve – shot while buying cigarettes, by feral juvenile Kenard – was a genuine shock. And the completely arbitrary nature of the killing was the whole point. The Good Place’s hellish reveal The fi nal episode of series one was the moment Michael Schur’s supernatural comedy took fl ight. “Arizona dirtbag” Eleanor Shellstrop is convinced that she has mistakenly arrived in heaven. But, after a whole season of tormented wrangling with three other deceased misfi ts, she has a moment of realisation : they’ve been in hell all along. Holy forking shirtballs! Twin Peaks’ The Sopranos’ scary send-off family fall-out One of the most It wasn’t that unsettling moments Christopher Moltisanti in TV history and one hadn’t become a of the most debated . smacked-out liability. In the fi nal episode It was just that Tony of the original series, Soprano had known when Agent Dale that for years and put Cooper entered the up with it. But during Black Lodge to rescue the fi nal series of this his beloved Annie, mafi a masterpiece, a did he sacrifi ce his car crash gives Tony a soul? Certainly, his chance to rid himself of transformation from a long-term problem. squeaky clean to As Tony brutally took demonic came as a that chance, the extent jolting shock – and was of his paranoia became all the more jarring frighteningly clear. for its ambiguity. Phil Harrison RON BATZDORFF/NBC 6 The Guide 1-7 May 2021 The Guardian Netflix & Quill Joel Golby channel-hops through the week’s TV Y ou’ve got to hand it to Channel 4: no other channel has quite perfected the feeling of ‘Johnny Vegas woozy, comedown TV like it has. This obviously comes from the exemplar of the form, which is a reality- is Sunday Brunch: even watching it sober and after a full night’s sleep, the strange anti-banter adverse romantic, Yand quiet-then-loud-laughter-then-quiet- again audio landscape is reminiscent of a huge, easily distracted horrible hours-long sesh; the kind you wake up from on someone else’s sofa, no charge left and allergic to in your phone, while someone in the kitchen makes a full fry-up. “Where am I?” you manage responsibility’ to croak, and a guy in a vest who doesn’t blink much just yells : “WOOD GREEN, BRO!” That is what watching Sunday Brunch feels like. That is the point of Sunday Brunch. Johnny Vegas: Carry on Glamping (Wednesday, 10pm, Channel 4) is not Sunday Brunch, but it evokes the same itchy feeling of when no one feel he wants to convey – an art school graduate can fi nd a remote so you all just watch whatever rediscovering his aesthete roots by brushing channel is on in stunned silence, until someone his fi ngertips lovingly along the chrome of a can get it together enough to go to the shop for six Maltese island bus; a panel show punchline “really cold” bottles of Lucozade . Johnny Vegas who fi nally wants to be taken seriously – but wants to start a glamping business. His dream is to then he does something just really calamitously make his glamping structures out of refurbished stupid such as getting drunk and buying a bus buses. “There’s a voice inside going : ‘ Do it, because online without checking whether it’s in Europe if you don’t somebody else will,’ ” Vegas explains, or not , and it’s back to square one. Following and it does rather feel like that voice is wrong. If Vegas as he attempts to live out his glamping someone’s getting up, can you get me some water fantasy is incredibly frustrating: he’s a reality- please? I feel like my head is going to explode. adverse romantic, easily distracted and allergic The jokey-jokey documentary format doesn’t to responsibility. It doesn’t bode well for quite fi t here. You get glimpses of the Vegas you project management. Around him are a swarm of people who treat Vegas with the gentle support you might give a disruptive eight-year-old. We are introduced to Busman’s holiday: his “long-suff ering assistant, Bev”, whom you Johnny Vegas and Bev might recognise from Vegas’s appearances on Gogglebox. Clearly Channel 4 producers fi nd their on-screen patter more charming than I do, seeing as it’s like watching two strangers make small talk in the queue for a semi-embarrassing prescription collection . “I’m really looking forward to proving every one of them wrong,” Vegas says early on in the show after his grand glamping concept is met with underwhelm by his family and friends, and you feel like that’s when the camera people should have stopped rolling, pulled him to one side, and quietly asked whether spending the next two years buying buses and dragging them to Wales was really going to solve any of his problems. Still, they didn’t, and now we have these four episodes to show for it. Maybe you’ll half-enjoy the repeat of it on a hangover in 2025. JOHN MANKTELOW/CHANNEL 4 JOHN MANKTELOW/CHANNEL The Guardian 1-7 May 2021 The Guide 7 ‘I never thought we’d be this old’ As ego-pricking teen TV show Popworld turns 20, Miquita 8 The Guide 1-7 May 2021 The Guardian ‘What, you thought we’d just die?!’ Oliver and Simon Amstell look back with Hadley Freeman The Guardian 1-7 May 2021 The Guide 9 Oh God, this whole thing is like what we used to take the piss out of on the show!” groans Simon Amstell, horrifi ed by my question.