The girl goes to Ipanema

As the world gets breathless with excitement over the upcoming extended PE session in Brazil (also known as the 2016 Summer Olympics), the delightful Katie Derham flies to Rio de Janeiro to understand the song that sums up everything we love about the country. The Girl From Ipanema: Brazil, Bossa Nova And The Beach (Monday 1 August, BBC Four, 9pm) is far more than a shameless exercise in exotic escapism. Derham has a personal connection to the story through her father, who was born in Rio, and with impassioned erudition she details how the 1960s song represents a crucial cultural moment in the nation’s history. Slinking along a beachside road in her shades and straw hat, Derham channels the spirit of the girl from Ipanema – a real woman, Helo Pinheiro, who still cuts a stunning figure more than half a century since she inspired Antônio Carlos Jobim to create his immortal song. There is another girl from Ipanema: Astrud Gilberto, the bossa nova singer who with her poised, cool delivery seemed to embody the lyrics as she hit the charts around the world. Not that the international version is quite the same as the original Portuguese, which instead of beginning ‘Tall and tan and young and lovely…’ starts rather more poetically ‘Behold, such a sight, so beautiful…’ For the English language lines we have to thank one Norman Gimbel, who also gave us the words to Happy Days. You can’t help but wonder how the Fonz would have fared let loose in Gilberto’s beach reverie.

Meanwhile, what about the girl from Grantham? Margaret Thatcher certainly has her place at the centre of the storm in The 80s With Dominic Sandbrook (Thursday 4 August, BBC Two, 9pm), and there’s a wonderful glimpse of the Tory leader serving up a breakfast of poached eggs on toast to the family before a hard day’s battle at Westminster. Cue one ordinary young lady of the era explaining why she voted for Mrs Thatcher to be prime minister: ‘She was a housewife. She knows what it’s like to run a household on a budget. It appealed to me – I thought, well, a woman…!’ But Sandbrook is blessed with both a refreshingly commonsensical approach and an outright antipathy to the lazily unquestioned received version of the past. While others will tell us that the 1980s was simply the decade of Thatcherism, the TV historian suggests that the prime minister ‘wasn’t driving the change – she was responding to it’. Instead, he holds up another woman who habitually lectured the nation in well-spoken tones as being the pivotal icon of the time. For it was Delia Smith, according to Sandbrook, who presided over a revolution that centred on the new aspirations of the kitchen. So 1979 was a historic year not only for ushering the Tories into power, but also for the launch of that singular contribution to civilisation – the M&S Chicken Kiev For One. Many of us won’t agree with much that Sandbrook says, and thank goodness for that: his three-part series is the very opposite of a snooze-fest.

---

NOT TO BE MISSED

Amazing Spaces Shed Of The Year, Fri 29 July, C4, 8pm
Tiny spaces but big aspirations: wholesome George Clarke is the presenter as the search begins for this year’s winner.