House of Cards, Netflix
House of Cards prides itself on being current, so there was no surprise that one of President Underwood’s first actions in Series 5 was to issue a visa ban on countries with support for Islamic terrorists.
He was dealing with a beheading on US soil, but more importantly he was in the middle of an election campaign and a red terror was a nice distraction from an effort in Congress to begin an impeachment process.
The real US president, Donald Trump had of course only just been elected when he attempted to issue a visa ban on mainly Muslim countries. It got knocked down by judges and only briefly came into force but the connection with actual politics was made.
The real difficulty for House of Cards, however, is that the wrong president won.
And that’s not just because Trump is as popular in Hollywood as illegal downloading sites.
No, the difficulty is that despite House of Cards being a remake of a British political drama, it is widely viewed as being based on the Clintons.
And Hillary Clinton (as embodied by Claire Underwood) should now be president.
Rather the uber-successful series is left with a real US president who is way wilder than any scriptwriter’s imagination.
Ok, so Frank (or ‘Francis’ as Claire prefers to call him) killed a couple of people along the way but his manner is calculating and devious.
Trump is more likely to tweet whatever comes into his mind at 3am
Frank and Claire do nothing by chance. They are a professional political couple who will do anything to reverse his dwindling popularity as the election looms.
“We need to ramp up the terror,” says Claire in one of their private meetings.
This results in Claire travelling to the aftermath of an explosion at a shop, which may have been linked to ICO (the odd Netflix name for ISIS).
Maybe it was a gas explosion, but the Underwoods are happy to dangle the possibility that ICO are responsible for another attack on the US.
Series 5 opens with an over-dramatic scene of President Underwood bursting into the Congress and tricking his way to the podium.
Through pandemonium in the chamber and a chair demanding that the leave the rostrum, Underwood demands that the Congress “declare war” on ICO.
It was all a bit unconvincing, but House of Cards lost its way before and returned to the heights.
In many ways it created the whole idea of binge watching TV series, but now it faces its biggest test yet - surviving in Trump’s America.
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May v Corbyn Live: The Battle for No 10, Channel 4 and Sky News, Monday at 8.30pm
Theresa May had assumed she’d be on the way to a landslide at this stage in the election campaign, so there was no way she was going to risk debating with Jeremy Corbyn.
The broadcasters should have taken ‘no’ for an answer because this was a disaster of a programme.
The 90 minute format they came up had 20 minutes of audience questions. It was moderated by Faisal Islam, although there didn’t seem to be a need as follow-up questions or even reactions seemed to be banned.
Then there was a 20-minute interview for each candidate with Jeremy Paxman, once of Newsnight, now of an age-old interviewing technique.
Paxman, who was clearly determined to be the real story of the night, spoke to the candidates like naughty schoolchildren.
Although I suspect that by the time Theresa May’s turn came the audience had gone to bed.
