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Review: Brian Cox gets back to his roots on How The Other Half Live "
...a documentary where the real-life actor behind Logan Roy reveals he’s a pure-bred socialist with a conscience, investigating how the 1% of society is ripping everyone else off, well that’s kind of hard to grip..."
PAT FITZPATRICK
In case you don’t know, Brian Cox is a superstar actor now, after four seasons of playing Logan Roy on Succession.
Logan Roy is a billionaire media mogul not so loosely based on Rupert Murdoch, and has come to represent the excesses of the super-rich. So a documentary where the real-life actor reveals he’s a pure-bred socialist with a conscience, investigating how the 1% of society is ripping everyone else off, well that’s kind of hard to grip.
It doesn’t help that he gets angry on a visit to a community food bank in his native Dundee, asking the director if their motives are really pure, in the kind of interrogation mode that Logan Roy uses to put his kids under pressure. Is Cox for real?
Is this just a cobbled-together documentary, rushed out to make us stare at the irony of Cox as being on the side of the little guy?
It doesn’t help that we hear him asking the cameraman which path to take when they are filming high over Dundee.
I didn’t like the way we were shown him talking to the director after filming a piece to camera. And then I warmed to it.
There is a messy authenticity here as he first meets a 20-million-dollars-a-year estate agent to the super-rich just south of Miami, followed by a chat with a single mother in the city who has a month to get out of her place because her building is being sold to build luxury apartments.
Next, we’re in Dundee, where Cox relives his tough childhood before escaping to 60s London.
Then he meets a guy who made a fortune working in finance in the City of London, and now makes a podcast explaining how the super-rich are ripping us all off.
My favourite bit is where they are filming in Mayfair and Chris Eubank says hello from a passing Bentley. There isn’t any point to this encounter – it’s just Chris Eubank in a Bentley.
And that’s why I like the show. It isn’t slick, but then neither is the dialogue in Succession. It’s halting and fractured and real.
In fairness, How the Other Half Live With Brian Cox wouldn’t work if it wasn’t presented by the guy who plays Logan Roy. The information in here isn’t new and billionaires with awful taste juxtaposed with people struggling to make a living has been on our screens before.
But Cox makes it more watchable. Yes, he’s overly keen to let us know that he’s ‘comfortable’ rather than super-rich, but we’ll forgive him that because he brings his prowling menace to the right side of history.
It just does look more compelling when Cox asks a billionaire why his wealth shouldn’t be taxed, while they’re sitting in London mansion which looks like it was designed by Liberace’s ghost. Money can’t buy you everything.