Like the BBC’s documentary series The Yorkshire Ripper Files before it, the French six-part drama Sambre on BBC Four is more than a grim rerun of an extended crime spree. On trial, too, are the forces that allowed the crimes to continue – here, for an incomprehensible 30 years.Sambre is based on the journalist Alice Géraud’s 2023 book about the case. It’s a mature piece, more drama than documentary, that isn’t concerned with standard crime-mystery twists that slowly ratchet up suspense. Here the man charged with raping 56 women in northeastern France between 1988 and 2018 is clearly Read more ...

The notion of prison as a pressure cooker of human behaviour and emotions is hardly a new one, but it can provide formidable fuel for drama. It does so here in this ferociously gripping Danish series, which hails from the same production company as The Killing and The Bridge. It also boasts a forceful roster of acting talent, not least Sofie Gråbøl (aka Sarah Lund from The Killing) and David Dencik (from Chernobyl and McMafia, among other things).Both of them play prison guards at an establishment known as the House ("Huset" in Danish), where they and their fellow-warders are enmeshed in Read more ...

Can you make modern poetry come to life on a TV screen? The BBC has had two stabs recently at answering this question, as part of the centennary celebrations for TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, seen by many as the greatest poem of the 20th century. One programme works significantly better than the other. For her 80-minute documentary TS Eliot: Into The Waste Land (BBC Two, ★★★★), director Susanna White was significantly aided by the “buried treasure” element in the story of this famously elusive poem, long laboured over by critics and students. Sitting like a ticking time bomb in Princeton’s Read more ...

In the middle of a pavement-cracking, railway-melting heatwave, what could be more refreshing than a visit to the bleak but bracing landscapes of the Faroe Islands? This 18-island archipelago midway between Norway and Iceland is where BBC Four’s latest Nordic drama is situated, and its themes of murder, conspiracy and ecological awareness strike a topical note. A Danish-German-Faroese-Icelandic co-production, Trom doesn’t display the schizophrenic (or quadrophrenic) characteristics that might imply, but instead is a methodical thriller deftly played by a cast which is always unflashily Read more ...

It has been a hard coming for this RSC Winter’s Tale. Erica Whyman’s production was cancelled by the virus days before its premiere last spring, with plans to stage it in the autumn frustrated by the second lockdown. This broadcast version, retaining that original cast in full, is the first time that a RSC production has gone first to screen, scheduled as part of the BBC's Lights Up season.Needs must, perhaps, and what a frustrating on-again, off-again process it must have been, but there’s little sign of any resulting radical disruption – in a play that itself revolves around radical Read more ...

If this had to be the end of Spiral, the final episodes of Series 8 (BBC Four) at least ensured that justice was done. We saw evidence that on occasion lawyers may be human after all, and there was even the somewhat disorientating semblance of a happy ending (or at least not the bloodbath that had threatened to erupt).A series of Spiral often takes a few episodes to crank up a full head of steam, as this one did, but once character, situation and plot start to knit together, it has been as tense and addictive as anything on TV. The story of Moroccan teenager Amin, whose murdered body got the Read more ...

The discovery of a grotesque murder is the traditional way to begin a new series of Spiral, and this time around the cadaver belonged to a young Moroccan boy, nicknamed Shkun. He’d been beaten to death with an iron bar and stuffed into a laundromat washing machine. Of course, this was only the end of a piece of string leading Captain Laure Berthaud and her team into a labyrinth of organised crime and drug-smuggling.This is Spiral’s eighth and final series (on BBC Four), which is perhaps why the mood feels even more dour and downbeat than usual. This is not least because it opened with Gilou ( Read more ...

Producing music programmes for TV with live performance during the past few months has not been without its challenges, but somehow doing so right now feels more important than ever – both for the pleasure it brings audiences and as support for the performing arts. As we entered the first national lockdown, we’d just completed filming the Category Finals of BBC Young Musician – the classical edition. Immediately we had to reconfigure our edit schedule to deliver the series remotely. Everyone agreed it was important to broadcast the programmes as planned in the spring. And that’s Read more ...

Documentaries like this one make me sentimental for a time, until about 25 years ago, when classical music was a more or less weekly presence on terrestrial TV. Now fast disappearing from view altogether, on mainstream media and in school curriculums, the genre faced the most uncertain of futures even before COVID-19 wiped it off the face of public life, for those of us still accustomed to darkening the doors of churches, concert halls and opera houses. We should, the argument might run, be grateful for whatever crumbs are thrown our way, even more delighted by any attempt to enlarge our Read more ...

David France’s revelatory film may have been subtitled “The Gay Purge”, but from the start it was clear this wasn’t just another documentary from Russia charting the increasing pressure faced by that country’s queer community. Since “propaganda” of gay relationships was criminalised there in 2013, such anti-LGBTQ initiatives have become an ever-more convenient rallying point for a state seeking to manipulate its people in a socially conservative direction. (Look no further than the national referendum which concluded there yesterday – as well as achieving a two-term extension of Vladimir Read more ...

The nightmarishness of the M25 motorway is well known, especially if you get stuck on the Heathrow section on a wet Sunday night, but as she perambulated around the motorway’s circumference for this idiosyncratic BBC Four documentary, naturalist Helen Macdonald showed us how skilfully nature deals with man-made monstrosities. For instance, an international cast of aerial predators and exotic waterfowl has made itself at home in the rubbish-strewn Rainham marshes, while great tits have modulated their calls upwards to make them audible above the booming traffic.In this languid 90-minute film Read more ...

This morning at 9.00 AM would be when Worthy Farm opened its gates to the hedonistic hordes. The weather is scorchio and Glastonbury 50 would have been such a party. Instead, that will all be Glastonbury 2021. So right now, those who love their annual Pilton pilgrimage need to get inventive: the festival and the BBC have laid on a feast of allsorts. It’s about to kick off. Let’s get amongst it…BBC CoverageThe BBC have devoted a whole new special iPlayer channel to Glastonbury and will be showing old sets from 10.00 AM Thursday morning until after midnight, and doing the same every day, up to Read more ...