Gales and lashing waves give this rescue service show added drama: ROLAND WHITE reviews last night’s TV
Saving Lives At Sea
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Picasso: The Beauty And The Beast
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Real-life dramas don’t come much more dramatic than Saving Lives At Sea (BBC2). It has all the go-go-go thrills of the other rescue service shows, with the added bonus of gale-force winds and waves lashing against the camera lens.
This is the eighth series now, and they don’t seem to be struggling for material. Far from it. There was a race against the clock on the Wirral Peninsula, where the in-shore rescue hovercraft launched to save a walker stuck in mudflats.
With the tide coming in fast, would they get there in time? Especially as a high wind was blowing. The hovercraft is ideal for gliding over the mud, but the wind slowed it down from 22 knots to a five-knot crawl.
It was a more conventional lifeboat, from another station, that was first to reach rambler Mark. Another five minutes, estimated one of the crew, and he’d have drowned.
Most of the crews are volunteers, and it can be an emotional business. Crew member Kelley welled up as she remembered bringing a jet-skier back to life.
Saving Lives At Sea (BBC2) has all the go-go-go thrills of the other rescue service shows, with the added bonus of gale-force winds and waves lashing against the camera lens
Most of the crews are volunteers, and it can be an emotional business
Dan hit his head on a jet-ski in the Solent, and was effectively lifeless by the time he was carried to shore. Kelley’s CPR didn’t seem to be working, but as she was standing clear for the defibrillator, Dan began to breathe again.
He was in a coma for three weeks, and now remembers nothing of the accident.
Crew members are remarkably non-judgemental. In Hartlepool, lifeboats helped in the huge search for a canoeist who disappeared in 2002.
The search was called off after 33 hours with no sign of the missing man. That was hardly surprising. It was John Darwin, who had disappeared deliberately and was later jailed for insurance fraud.
‘Despite all that’s happened,’ said one of that Hartlepool search party, ‘we’re just relieved that he was safe.’
Picasso: Beauty And The Beast (BBC2) was a story about women and war. The Nazis and the Spanish Civil War got a mention, but it was mostly women.
It began with the day that the artist met Marie-Therese Walter, his long-term lover. Well, one of them. ‘Mademoiselle,’ he said after spotting her in Paris, ‘you have an interesting face. I feel we will do great things together. I am Picasso.’ A week later, they were lovers.
He was 45 at the time, and married. She was 17.
His wife Olga only discovered she had competition when she began to notice a change in her husband’s work: he obviously had a new model, and she knew what that meant.
He and Olga divorced, and Marie-Therese gave birth to a daughter. But that didn’t stop his wandering eye.
Picasso believed from an early age that he was better than other people, a psychoanalyst explained
His wife Olga only discovered she had competition when she began to notice a change in her husband’s work: he obviously had a new model
He spotted the surrealist photographer Dora Maar at a café in Paris, but their relationship cooled on a holiday with friends in Antibes. Why? Because Picasso took advantage of his friends’ free love philosophy to sleep with one of their wives.
As his grandson Olivier put it with masterly understatement: ‘He was not a faithful man.’
Picasso believed from an early age that he was better than other people, a psychoanalyst explained. He worked hard to maintain that position, but also schemed against other artists.
In 1931 there was a big Matisse exhibition in Paris. Picasso then demanded that he too have an exhibition — but in a bigger gallery.
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