Calum Henderson: Top things to watch and listen to right now

Freddy Flintoff's Field of Dreams. Photo / Supplied

Freddy Flintoff’s Field of Dreams (TVNZ+)

When Andrew Flintoff played cricket for England, he was one of a few players who hadn’t come from a private school. And despite the best efforts of fast-paced new formats like “The Hundred”, cricket in England remains well and truly a posh person’s sport. So in the three-part documentary series Freddy Flintoff’s Field of Dreams, the all-rounder returns to his hometown of Preston, Lancashire, to try and build a cricket team out of lads from his old estate. Their total lack of cricket experience is partly due to the sport being prohibitively expensive and out of reach, and partly down to their personal opinion that it’s “slow” and “boring” and “not as good as football”. Despite their negative perception of the gentleman’s game, enough lads are curious enough to show up to the first training session and form a squad. The unlikely XI ranges from 15-year-old troublemaker (who has really just been let down by the school system) Sean to 18-year-old Ben, who is living on his own for the first time and is heartbreakingly lonely. Both of these players’ arcs are hugely moving, and have little to do with their cricket skills. That this is about so much more becomes clearer still with the late arrival of Afghani asylum seeker Adnan, who, 11 months earlier, turned up in Preston in the back of a lorry unable to speak a word of English. This is his first opportunity to play a sport he’s dreamt of being able to play most of his life, and he’s welcomed into the team as by far their best player. Whatever Flintoff might have hoped to achieve when he started this Mighty Ducks-style experiment, it ended up turning into something far greater. Even if you share the Preston lads’ initial disinterest in cricket, you’d go a long way to find a more moving and heartwarming three hours of television than this.

Funny Woman (Neon)

Funny Woman (Neon). Photo / Supplied

The US has Marvellous Mrs Maisel, the UK has Barbara Anderson. Based on the Nick Hornby novel Funny Girl (which was published pre-Maisel, so who’s copying who), Funny Woman is the story of a former Miss Blackpool (Gemma Arterton) who decides to pursue a career in comedy, despite it being the 1960s and her being, you know, a woman. She leaves Blackpool for the bright lights of London, and after the requisite series of setbacks finds herself the star of a new TV sitcom — the ultimate platform to show 1960s England that woman can be, you know, funny.

Dear Edward (Apple TV+)

Statistically speaking not many people know what it’s like to be the sole survivor of a plane crash. That’s what happens to 12-year-old Edward in this grief-soaked drama series based on the 2020 novel by Ann Napolitano. After a traumatic opening episode, the series settles into following some of the many lives upended by the tragedy, with the experience of Edward (Colin O’Brien) at the heart of it all. Is he the luckiest boy in the world because he survived, or the unluckiest because he lost his whole family in a hugely traumatic accident? And is this a profoundly moving tearjerker, or just a cloyingly earnest attempt at one? It all depends how you look at it.

Dear Edward (Apple TV+). Photo / Supplied

Full Swing (Netflix, from Wednesday)

The makers of Drive to Survive are at it again, taking a sports dads are really into and turning it into a reality series so their kids might like it too. It worked phenomenally well for F1 and not particularly well for tennis — so how about golf? Full Swing follows some of the sport’s biggest names — Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy, Ian Poulter — and other, less household names over the course of an especially interesting golf season, with the emergence of the Saudi-backed LIV Tour as a megabucks rival to the PGA Tour. Some pretty big personalities play this seemingly dull sport, so Full Swing could be a surprise hit.

Movie of the Week: Fire of Love (Disney+)

Katia and Maurice Krafft died doing what they loved: getting dangerously close to erupting volcanoes. Before that, though, the daring French volcanologists spent the best part of two decades following the magma across the world, gathering footage that looks like it was filmed specifically for a Wes Anderson movie. Fire of Love combines the best of that footage with narration from Miranda July and interviews from the charismatic couple to create a documentary that works as both a very unusual love story and simply as a collection of some of the most incredible volcano footage ever shot.

From the Vault: The Net (1995) (Netflix)

What was the internet like back in 1995? Don’t look to The Net for answers. Its version of the internet, while sometimes prescient — Sandra Bullock orders a pizza online! — is also totally deranged. Bullock plays a systems analyst who spends her workdays downloading new viruses to floppy discs. Be a shame if one of those floppies were to fall into the wrong hands! Next thing you know, she’s locked in an intense game of cat-and-mouse with a hacker extraordinaire who looks and sounds a bit like Matty Healy from 1975. It’s not the best action movie of the 90s by any stretch, but it is one of the most fun to rewatch.

Podcast of the Week: The Sound: Mystery of Havana Syndrome

The US Embassy in Cuba is an interesting enough place as it is. You could easily spend a podcast series just talking to the diplomats and spies inside about their unusual jobs, but that’s not what this is. The Sound is about a very specific and strange incident that happened there in 2017. The previous December, one of the embassy staff showed up at the medical centre with symptoms that sounded like the results of a bad concussion — headaches, nausea, loss of vision. But they hadn’t suffered a head knock; it came on after they heard a weird sound in the embassy, described as like a loud, robotic cicada chirping. Soon more embassy staff started showing up saying the exact same thing — they heard the weird cicada sound, then soon afterwards came down with this debilitating illness. It became known as “Havana Syndrome”. What was it? That’s what Nicky Woolf, a British journalist whose previous podcasting exploits involve trying to identify who the Q in QAnon is, wants to figure out once and for all. There’s a range of conflicting theories — from a secret sonic device to mass delusion — and The Sound seeks out expert opinions on all of them.