TV
Marina Vaizey
Got Soul! Honeybelles! Mums in Durham! Three shortlisted finalists from the north and Scotland. Along the way we – and Gareth Malone – were sung to by the Mancunian Rhythm of Life, not to mention Too Many Cooks in Inverness, and a septuagenarian all-male group from Malton kept in order by a retired schoolmistress, who had evolved into a disciplined conductor – and had a fit of the giggles when faced with Mr Malone.Hundreds of choirs involving thousands of people applied to be considered by the choirmaster of the nation for the Best in Britain. Our Gareth is subject in the programme to scores Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having served her time as dutiful, self-effacing Anna Bates in Downton Abbey, here's Joanne Froggatt grasping with both hands the role of Mary Ann Cotton, "Britain's first female serial killer". No more wearing herself out desperately trying to save Mr Bates from the gallows. This time she's turning the tables, and making sure useless men aren't going to hold her back any longer. After a short prologue in which our anti-heroine was preparing to meet her maker, we joined her as she returned to her mother and stepfather's pub in Seaham, County Durham in 1857. She had eloped to Cornwall Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Humans is of course not about humans. Or not mainly. But if Channel 4 had called it Synths, which is what/who it is mainly about, maybe fewer would have signed up to watch, presuming it to be an eight-part series about Eighties pop. Synths, if you missed series one, are a species of robotic service provider with a humanoid appearance who perform menial tasks like scrubbing, babysitting and issuing parking fines. Inevitably a few of them got ideas above their station and started thinking like humans. Series two promises the same only more so.The first episode moved the scene on to Berlin where Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Two personable musicians, who win on all fronts: at the pinnacle of their highly competitive and skilled professions, highly articulate, and perhaps unlikely partners in their art. In one corner, ladies and gentlemen, the composer, world-leading jazz trumpeter, teacher, head of Lincoln Center Jazz, the New Orleans-born Wynton Marsalis, 55. In the other, Nicola Benedetti, 29, the Scottish classical violinist, teacher and leading campaigning proselytiser for the importance of music in all spheres.Miss Benedetti played the premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto in D, with a mere 100 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having survived what you might call his boy-band years, Jude Law has emerged as a truly substantial actor, and his role here as Lenny Belardo, the newly-elected Pope Pius XIII, may prove to be a defining moment. Created by a multinational consortium including HBO, Sky Italia and Canal+, The Young Pope confronts the viewer with something of a learning curve, with its mysterious Vatican setting and arcane multi-lingual clerical hierarchy, but by the end of this opening double episode you could sense that this is going to be a weird and wild ride.Director Paolo Sorrentino didn't make it easy on Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the end, what makes a good drama series? It’s probably that you want more of it. This is the end of Cold Feet until a next time which has already been promised, and more is certainly what’s wanted. No one was quite sure if a reincarnation of Cold Feet was a good idea eight episodes ago. Back when the characters were in their 30s the show slowly turned into a bit of a weight round its own neck. Fay Ripley opted out of one season. Helen Baxendale was written out of another. The show began looking under rocks for characters to replace the ones who weren’t there. Eventually it ran out of steam Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Television is not a medium we much associate with any sense of the "sacred". It grapples with "momentous" frequently enough, in snatches of news tragically reported; it rings in, and out, the history that defines our lives. We may debate, equally, whether the small screen is replacing the big one as the bringer of what was once considered cinema art. But for that far most elusive thing, the miraculously elevated experience shared across a nation, and somehow revalidated by that breadth of audience – rarely, so rarely.But I cannot think of any better term than sacred to describe the 60 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The concept is somewhere between single drama and series: to stay in one place while shifting focus from one character to another. Paul Abbott did it in Clocking Off, telling a different story each week about a group of workers in a Manchester textile plant. Jimmy McGovern exported the idea to The Street, where he opened one door at a time to find out what was going on inside. The common denominator of both series was scriptwriter-for-hire Danny Brocklehurst.Brocklehurst took the format and made it his own in Ordinary Lies. The first series was set in a car showroom in Warrington which was Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Could Jeremy Paxman explain the inexplicable, so that viewers could begin to understand the meaning of the astonishing theatre that is the 2016 American presidential election? We can hardly even grasp the plot, let alone the coming denouement and its repercussions.To those of us on this side of the pond, one candidate is a misogynist lying bullying businessman with a red face and badly dyed hair, who seems to have garnered enormous support among the white working class. Here was Republican Donald Trump, aged 70, aka The Donald, known in Scotland for controversial golf courses, in New York for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Freshly minted for ITV's Golden Age of Empire slot on Sunday nights, this new four-parter breezily splices together Edwardian derring-do toffery with a patina of Indiana Jones and (not least in the music) a miasma of Lawrence of Arabia. Our story began in 1905 in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, as archaeologist Howard Carter sought to beat a swarm of international treasure-hunters to the holy grail of an undiscovered Pharaoh's tomb.As played by Max Irons, Carter is rude, irascible, ferociously single-minded and stuffed with more facts about ancient Egypt than a Google server-farm. One of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems morbid, and perhaps even in dubious taste, to create a TV drama franchise focusing on the hideous fate of abducted children and the repercussions this has on their family and friends. Still, ratings are their own reward, and the first series of The Missing (a collaboration between the BBC and the US network Starz) was a critical and commercial success.So welcome to series two, now starring Keeley Hawes and David Morrissey in place of series one's James Nesbitt and Frances O'Connor (they call this an "anthology series"). Our new protagonists are Gemma and Sam Webster. Thanks to Sam's Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Divorce opened on Sarah Jessica Parker inspecting the work of time in the mirror. Goodbye Carrie, hello Frances, upstate New Yorker, mother of two and wife to a man who demands equal time in the bathroom. “I was forced to take a shit in this coffee can in the garage,” hollered Robert through the door before barging in to reveal an abysmal moustache.In Divorce, ubiquitous relationship analyst Sharon Horgan continues her long uninterrupted series of home runs. Like Pulling and Motherland and even Catastrophe, it announces its zone of interest in a one-word title. The difference is that this Read more ...