Sheridan (ITV) made for uneasy viewing, despite its light format - review
Given the lightness of its format, Sheridan (ITV) made for uneasy viewing. It comprised an hour of songs sung by Sheridan Smith, covers and show tunes, interspersed with the gentlest of interviews by Alexander Armstrong, like a hybrid of Stars in their Eyes and Life Stories. Ostensibly to promote an album she's recorded, it had the sense of being a relaunch, and in this it was not wholly successful.
At her best Smith is an actor with fine comic timing, seemingly incapable of caricature, able to convey hinterlands of vulnerability with a glance or half-smile. In The Royle Family, Gavin & Stacey and Two Pints of Lager & a Packet of Crisps, she played women you laughed along with but also liked and believed in. Her Cilla Black in the biopic Cilla was a triumph, and showed us she could sing. On the West End stage she confirmed it, in the musicals of Legally Blonde and Funny Girl. At only 36 she has an MBE and shelves full of awards.
Yet by her own admission the past couple of years have been difficult. Last year her performances in Funny Girl grew erratic, and she was accused of drunkenness. Her father died of cancer. She lashed out at the press and checked herself into rehab. There was the usual spectacle of the press hastening to tear down someone they had built up, all the grimmer for its whiff of snobbery. A woman from Yorkshire who didn't go to drama school had come up to London and overreached. At times in this programme, with her hair back-combed and eyes smudged dark with mascara, Smith projected a kind of manic energy.
The rush to set Smith in aspic as a National Treasure risks depriving us of a great talent. This kind of programme should be for stars at the end of their career, not those in their prime. Sheridan should be looking forward. There are plenty of singers better than her, but far fewer actors.
