HOLDING a mirror to the times that you live in was given three different creative treatments on television last week. In White Man Walking (BBC4, 27 May), the filmmaker Rob Bliss charts his 1500-mile journey wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt, walking from the Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, Mississippi, to Washington, DC.
Towards the end, near Louisville, Kentucky, where Breonna Taylor was shot by police officers in her apartment in 2020, Bliss encounters a priest in white vestments, who tells him that “penance is pilgrimage.”
Over the course of the film, Bliss is transformed from needy attention-seeker, shouting “Come and say ‘Hey!’” at all and sundry, on a self-appointed mission to put people right — “Steering some southerners away from that way of thinking won’t be easy” — to chastened chronicler of America.
Filmed over 60 days in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, White Man Walking portrays the physical toll of blisters, sunburn, and insect bites, of traversing vast distances on foot, on roads designed for cars, together with the psychological pain of threats and insults. “Either shoot me or go away” is a polite paraphrase of Bliss’s reaction to a man who tells him that his wife has an AK47 trained on him for stepping on their lawn to avoid being run over.
In the urban areas of Ohio and Washington, Bliss reunites with fellow activists, reassured that he is walking for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, who cannot walk any more. Bliss has returned to his home crowd a different man from the one who left.
Since her childhood, the director Ali Naushahi, an imam’s daughter, has seen parallels between her life as a working-class British Pakistani woman and that of the 18th-century rector’s daughter Jane Austen. That immersion shines through in Jane Austen: Rise of a genius (BBC2, first of three episodes, 26 May).
Often, literary documentaries resemble watching tennis, shuttling between talking heads and archive. But Naushahi’s seamless blend of period illustration, dramatic reconstruction, and Austen enthusiasts, including the creator of Bridget Jones, Helen Fielding, was as elegant as Austen’s novels.
The opening episode showed the effect of Austen’s forced move from the family’s Hampshire vicarage, with its beloved library, to homes that grew more insecure. The writer’s exploration of women’s economic precariousness heralded a new literary age: “There’s before Jane Austen, and after.”
Today’s age of social-media saturation is humorously explored in Danielle Vitalis’s Danielle Does Life (BBC3, Thursday). In Vitalis’s sketches, we meet the “multi-hyphenate” entrepreneur “two Ns, one P” Jennipher, who screams “Link’s in the bio!” as she juggles driving instructing, parcel delivery, and online bra-fitting, from inside a very small car.
The podcaster ManKnows95 epitomises the skewed rewards of online fame, as his home studio improves from a phone taped to a stick to a slick cryptocurrency-sponsored production, in lockstep with his output’s increasing misogyny. The sketch ends with ManKnows95 apologising to women, ready to join the mainstream once outrage has made him famous.
