Douglas Is Cancelled TV review: Karen Gillan steals the show in Steven Moffat's sharp satire of TV news

There’s a lot going on in Paisley-born Steven Moffat’s new comedy-drama – and just how seductively sleekit is Inverness-born Karen Gillan? But we don’t yet know how she’s managed to blow up the internet.

Apologies if that intro seems a bit “Aberdeen man drowns at sea … ” Douglas Is Cancelled is causing me to feel protective about old-school journalism, while simultaneously enjoying the satire on how the news machine works now.

Gillan is Madeline Crow and Hugh Bonneville is Douglas Bellowes, the flirty double-act on a hit TV news programme. Early on the real Kate Garraway interviews them about their on-screen chemistry. Then Crow’s driver asks her: “That chemistry - how do you create it just sitting on a sofa?” Crow, checking her social media feed (2 million followers), quips: “Generally you make the bloke about 20 years older.”

Bellowes is a bit of a dinosaur, depending on Crow to keep him right. He gets drunk at a wedding and cracks a sexist joke which a guest posts on what’s still called Twitter. Crow sends it on and all hell breaks loose.

“Unbelievable” is her one-word accompaniment. Ah, but does this mean she refuses to accept the old fool said it, or is she appalled by him? The uncertainty has to be pointed out to Bellowes by his tabloid-editor wife Sheila (Alex Kingston) who’s sick and tired of Crow with her “shiny hair and b***job lips” and how the co-presenter dominates the conversation at home.

Her: “I might have thought you were having an affair with her if it wasn’t for the saggy t*ts.” Him: Come now, she doesn’t have saggy t*ts.” Her: “I was thinking of yours!”

The four-parter’s script by Moffat, reunited with Gillan from their Doctor Who days together, is almost as sharp as those little scalpels that cub reporters like me used to eye nervously on the sloping desks of caseroom operatives who roamed newspaper offices back in journalism’s Jurassic Age.

At the TV studio, the Live at 6 editor is played by Ben Miles from Moffat’s breakout show Coupling. He’s got a handle on wokery and cancel culture - just. Facing up to a social media tsunami, he says, is like “being Michael Caine in Zulu”. Then he quickly adds: “I wasn’t being racist there. I appreciate Caine was basically the aggressor.”

Bonneville brings a lot of the tics from his previous media send-up, W1A. He was vaguely in control in that; not here. Sheila has to explain how, if he was to make the pages of her redtop, everyone would pick up the headline and run with it: “No one would bother to read the article. They’d be too busy tweeting angry opinions about what conclusion they’d just jumped to.” For the paper, “outrage is exciting, nuance is work”.

As I say, there’s a lot going on. So much so that Patrick Baladi as Sheila’s news editor gets just one line; Joe Wilkinson the same. Madeleine Power is hilariously bratty as Bellowes’ teenage daughter, wondering if she might have to cancel her old man. Meanwhile, what’s Gillan’s game? …

“Aberdeen man drowns at sea … ” was of course the apocryphal Titanic headline. The song of the movie was of course sung by Celine Dion, the power-ballad princess with a voice thunderous enough to create tidal waves. I Am: Celine Dion is a portrait of the Canadian songbird, but a rockumentary like no other.

Early on she shows us round the wardrobe of her career, really a warehouse. She wonders if Liberace amassed more clothes and picks up a gold lame tutu (he probably didn’t have one of those, but then again … ). There’s the footwear section, a mish-mash of sizes from six to ten, all must-haves: “When a girl loves her shoes, she always makes them fit.” But then the tour comes to an abrupt halt, the subject whispering to the director off-camera: “It’s become too painful to walk.”

This might have been the moment others would have killed filming altogether, but Dion wants us to see how she’s been debilitated by stiff body syndrome (SPS), a rare neurological disorder found in only one in a million which attacks the nervous system causing spasms, rigidity, chronic pain - and, cruellest of all for her, messes with the voice.

We’re treated to the voice when it has raised the roof - eg “The Power of Love” - but these clips are historical. SPS first struck 17 years ago, necessitating denials and drug treatment. Once, she could reach “the highest note ever!” But then, a trick of the trade, she had to turn the mic to the crowd. Most shockingly, we see Dion suffer a seizure. A residency must be cancelled and she’s basically trapped in an opulent Las Vegas mansion stuffed with pills. This is a brave film, though at times you might be reminded of Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond. “I think I was very good,” she reflects as tears fall. “I did some stuff.”

Uh-oh, a crime caper. There will be a chase, jaunty soundtrack and bad guys lacking any proper menace. This is what I’m thinking about Land of Women and it might be what the star - and exec producer - Eva Longoria, is thinking, too, so to retain our attention she’s quickly down to her pants and bra and gaffa-taping wads of dollar bills to her body. After 13 minutes there’s another money shot; after 25, a third. I may be logging all of this but I’m not really looking. No, I’m thinking: when oh when are we getting to the lovely Spanish countryside?

Longoria is Gala Scott who must forget all about her glitzy New York lifestyle when gangsters come calling for the $50 million owed them by her no-good husband. With daughter and mum in tow, she escapes to the latter’s one-donkey town in Catalonia. And it is lovely - gracias.

Suranne Jones: Investigating Witch Trials seems like another star vehicle, beginning with an elaborate mic-ing up procedure for no other reason than they’re trendy. Jones stomping the hills in sumptuous woollens is another distraction but the doc settles down and is gripping about how a climate of fear about women supposedly in bed with the Devil was whipped up by climate change. Then from Germany came “one of the most bonkers books ever written” about men having their penises stolen and hidden in nests. The just-invented printing press spread crackpot theories far and wide, much like social media does now.

Douglas Is Cancelled ITV ***

I Am: Celine Dion Prime Video ***

Land Of Women Apple TV+ **

Suranne Jones: Investigating Witch Trials Channel 4 ***