It’s a revelation when you find out that a person you know is actually two people. Like my neighbour who I had smiled at with a 50 percent smile-back ratio for two years: one day both of them were on the stairs together. Or the actors Michael Cera (Juno) and Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network), or Sienna Guillory and Sienna Miller. And in my case, it also happened with two of Britain’s best-known photographers. I grew up thinking that East End barrow-boy David Bailey married a princess and became Lord Snowdon, not an old Etonian called Antony Armstrong-Jones. If only they’d made We’ll Take Manhattan back then and I would have known the Bailey back-story.
The drama focuses on the iconic Vogue photo shoot he did with Jean Shrimpton in New York in 1962. “No-one expected to be famous who was not born rich or titled,” reads the caption in the opening minute. “And there was no such thing as youth culture.”
The Guardian lamented why all those “terribly posh people” had to be “unremittingly creshing snobs”. But the Daily Telegraph enjoyed the “interclass friction” and applauded the performance of Helen McCrory (Cherie Blair in The Queen) as a “splendidly jittery” aristo.
But if you don’t think Bailey moved the goalposts, then maybe you’ll prefer How Sherlock Holmes Changed the World (DR3, Sun 20:05), an exploration of the sleuth’s influence, which is followed by an episode of Sherlock, ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’ (DR3, Sun 21:00).
Do fans confuse Matthew Perry with Chandler? Well imagine Monica is dead and he’s enrolled in group therapy sessions – Courteney Cox even makes a cameo in one of the episodes of Go On (TV3, Sat 19:00). Meanwhile another new US sitcom, The New Normal (TV3, Sat 18:00), concerns a woman who fleas small-town America for LA to become a surrogate for a gay couple.
Elsewhere, if you think the dating game’s hard, try watching The Undateables (DR3, Tue 17:10 & Wed 20:00), which follows people with disabilities looking for love; join Talking Movies (BBC World, Sat 14:30 or 21:30) in Cannes; and relive Justin Bieber getting booed at the Billboard Music Awards (TV2 Zulu, Fri 22:40).
