Screen Babble Podcast 49: Three Little Birds, Love is Blind, Fellow Travellers and Welcome to Wrexham

Screen Babble brings you all you need to know about what's  on television, from the mainstream to the marginal. I'm NationalWorld’s podcast producer and this week I'm joined on the podcast by our resident TV critic Steven Ross and Senior Reporter for Sussex World, Jacob Panons.

As always, we begin by discussing what we’ve been watching recently. For once I get to start this chat because I cannot contain for a minute longer, just how much I am enjoying Three Little Birds so far. It has just started on ITV and is written by Lenny Henry who worked with Russell T Davies on the show.

It is based on the stories Henry was told as a child about what it was like for his mother and the Windrush generation who came from the Caribbean to the UK. It focuses on the lives of three very different women who decided to give life on the other side of the Atlantic a go - soon discovering it's not all it has been cracked up to be!

I laughed and cried in the first episode, as you might expect and I am loving it thus far. The writing is great, the casting is spot on and the mix of computer generated backgrounds somehow works well. Roll on more of this.

I also finished the Channel 4 prison drama Screw this week. It started slow but got better, I would recommend and is teed up for a series 3. I finally got to the end of The Reckoning, the BBC's Jimmy Savile drama and it was a tough watch, not for the faint hearted but a reminder that beyond Savile being a monster that these things should never be allowed to happen by the systems people put their trust in.

Steven has been catching up on Welcome to Wrexham and the team enjoy a conversation about whether the investment and money associated with the TV series is a good thing or a bad thing when it comes to the sport. 

Jacob has been travelling and before he went downloaded a whole series of Big Mouth, the teen comedy animation from the US which he thoroughly enjoyed.

On the 'deep dive' this week Steven tells us all about Fellow Travellers, an historical romance political thriller - genre-spanning and very good by the sounds of things. With a mix of some known and less well-known actors Steven has nothing but praise for this love story set with a backdrop of 1950s America and when McCarthyism was at its height.

Jacob takes us 'back to the future' this week with Love is Blind, a unique reality TV series which seems to have captured the imagination of the viewing public. Jacob gives us the lowdown on the format and advises what series are the best to catch up on. There's been five in total so far which take place in a different location each time. He also has news of a UK version that may be in production.

Join us again next week for episode #50 and plenty more recommendations to keep you entertained as the evenings draw in.

Listen to Screen Babble #49 here:

Where can we watch this week’s shows?

• Love is Blind and Big Mouth are all on Netflix.
• Fellow Travellers is on Paramount+.
• Welcome to Wrexham is on Disney+.
• Three Little Birds is on ITV/ITVX.
• Screw is on Channel 4.
• The Reckoning is available on BBC iPlayer.

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Do you have a TV question you’d like the Screen Babble team to answer on a future episode, or a recommendation of your own? Send it to [email protected] or [email protected]