Soccer, sex, Singapore, Saul – our top binge-watching picks for self-isolation will see you through coronavirus
- Glued to the sofa? Here’s the best of what’s on television right now
- From soccer fans in Sunderland ’til I Die to Hong Kong West Side Stories, with Better Call Saul and some Hayao Miyazaki thrown in for good measure, time will fly
Sunderland ’Til I Die (Netflix)
Sunderland Association Football Club might seem an unlikely saviour for fans pining for the beautiful game during lockdown, but documentary Sunderland ’Til I Die’s eight instalments are just the tonic as they pick unflinchingly through the hope and despair – mostly despair – of fans fed a decades-long diet of financial blunders, bad signings, embarrassing defeats and the ultimate ignominy: exile from the promised land of the English Premier League.
At curtain-up, it’s all hands on deck for a tilt at promotion back into the sport’s top echelon, which soon goes belly-up after a preseason infamously punctuated by midfielder Darron Gibson’s misjudged, drunken and gleefully publicised tirade against his teammates.
The show’s visceral, no-narrator (and therefore no filter) style follows the tribulations of a still-proud club through its ups and mostly downs, but it’s the fans you have to feel for, ever disappointed yet ever hopeful supporters of a forlorn club that remains the heartbeat of another economically fading British city.
Invisible Stories (HBO Go)
All of human life can be found in this archetypal Singapore housing estate, according to Invisible Stories , HBO Asia’s ambitious six-part drama series in English, Mandarin, Hokkien and beyond, and with a regional cast representing Taiwan, Thailand, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia as well as the “home team” Singaporeans.
One of these self-contained slices of Housing & Development Board life depicts three prostitutes operating a brothel; in another flat, in another story, a taxi driver is being driven insane by his night “job” as a spirit medium.
Elsewhere, an autistic teenager descends into violent attacks on his single-parent mother; a social media “influencer” begins to confuse reality with pixels on a screen; migrant workers embark on an obstacle-ridden relationship; and a financial-sector employee is led by his secret self down a path that threatens his career and family.
Invisible Stories is saying the affluent, shimmering Singapore is not the full picture: many multicultural strata also make up the place but, for want of looking, remain unseen.