TV
Adam Sweeting
The term "beloved entertainer" might have been coined with Cilla Black in mind. Her career trajectory, from a working-class Irish Catholic background in Liverpool's Scotland Road through pop stardom under the auspices of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, and thence to mainstream TV and nearly 20 years as hostess of LWT's Blind Date and Surprise Surprise, was a classic fable of determined self-betterment. When it came to casting the lead role for ITV's bio-miniseries Cilla last year, it must have taken only seconds to decide that this had to be a job for the almost equally adored Sheridan Smith. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Axed by the BBC at the end of 2013 after its second series, ostensibly because of poor viewing figures, Ripper Street found a new home on Amazon Prime, where the third series began streaming in November last year. With a fourth and fifth series already commissioned by Amazon, the BBC is making up for lost time by airing Series Three. Perhaps the Top Gear bunch will be back on the Beeb yet.Happily, the change of address has done Ripper Street no harm at all, and this powerful opener centred on a train robbery gone wrong in London's East End. Masked hijackers set out to steal a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
London, 1905. For the Stephen siblings, setting up an independent household in Bloomsbury freed them – especially the sisters, Vanessa and Virginia – from Victorian familial conventions. It resulted in a heady mix of creative endeavour and endless conversation, especially about sex. As some wit commented, the Bloomsbury set was to be found living in squares, loving in triangles and talking in circles.Introducing this delicate dramatisation of a complex web of relationships among friends and family we first met the predictably outraged Aunt Mary (Eleanor Bron) who worried about the delicate Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Poirot curls an eyebrow and Miss Marple twinkles, but there haven't been a lot of out-and-out laughs in Agatha Christie’s television career. Partners in Crime comes as a pleasurable surprise. It stars David Walliams and Jessica Raine as Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, a married couple on their uppers who take up detective work almost by accident.The Beresfords had a long career: Christie wrote the first novel to feature them in 1922 and the fourth in 1973. There were also some short stories collected as Partners in Crime, each a spoof of other crime writers including Chesterton, Conan Doyle, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How do you live a good life? Is wealth a good thing? How do you create a just society? The United Kingdom's electorate recently pondered such questions in the polling booth, and made their decision. The Labour Party is agonising over them as it chooses its next leader. And yet while these anxieties may feel very now, they have deep roots. According to the historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes, such questions first crystallised in the minds of three thinkers, born within a century of one another 2,500 years ago, who are the subject of her new series. Across three episodes, Genius of the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There can’t be many American public figures who are welcome on Russian television these days, but Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage is one of them. In Hunted: Gay and Afraid we saw him sitting in on legislative gatherings too, and when the World Congress of Families (WCF) holds its assemblies in Moscow – which it seems to do quite often – the atmosphere is of a meeting of minds between leading Russian politicians and the ideologues of the conservative, Christian-aligned American organisations that, through their emphatic upholding of traditional values, effectively reject Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Shall we blame The Bridge? The Swedish-Danish cop show opened for business with a scenario of outlandish gruesomeness: two halves of two corpses straddling the border between two countries. How to grab the viewer by the lapels, lesson one: hook them with a crazy, wacky, weird murder scene, so bonkers they’ll just have to hang around to find out what’s what.Witnesses is reading the same playbook. We began with three bodies strewn around a show home, and it was swiftly revealed that these bodies had nothing to do with one another and had been dug up from a variety of cemeteries. Precisely how Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Lucy Worsley, historian and TV presenter – or perhaps that should be the other way round, since the BBC seems to give her a new series about every six weeks – is the unrivalled queen of the soundbite. Subtitled as Worsley's "100 Years of the WI", this canter around the stately circumference of the Women's Institute, now 100 years old, was niftily pinned together with sonorous adjectives and cacophonous alliteration.Striding through some strangely pea-green English countryside, Worsley defined the classic image of the WI lady for us: "She's that bossy woman belting out 'Jerusalem'. Or a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may know Javone Prince as Jerwayne – the self-appointed ladies' man from Channel 4's PhoneShop – or from various memorably comic turns in CBBC's Horrible Histories. Now the BBC has given the comedy actor his own four-part variety series, and it got off to a very strong start.Variety, like sketch comedy, is often a curate's egg, but Prince knows enough about the form to surround himself with talent, and is sure enough of his own to be generous with the time he gives others to entertain. The series was recorded in front of an audience at a south London dance hall (the rather wonderful Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Say your last words before you leave this life.” Somewhere in the so-called Islamic State, a woman was accused of adultery. Her father joined her accusers, then, as her shrouded body was lowered into a pit, picked up a rock and hurled it at her. We didn’t have to watch her die, but Moona, an Iraqi activist using the internet to spread the truth about IS, did. It’s remarkable that Moona is still alive. IS gunmen turned up at her flat to confiscate her laptop and threaten her family. She now lives in exile in Turkey.Escape from Isis was profoundly harrowing, geopolitically urgent and, Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When Jim Hacker MP was unexpectedly promoted to the position of PM, the classic sitcom Yes, Minister required just a small tweak in title and it was pretty much business as usual, albeit with a grander sense of potential impact. When the shit hit the fan, there was alarm, followed by quiet restraint and arched eyebrows before predetermined Machiavellian plans were unveiled and the credits rolled over a comforting closure.As Selina Meyer prepared to make her first speech as President to the Joint Session in series four of US sitcom Veep, similarly, everything had changed, yet everything Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If Britain has created a national myth about slavery, it’s surely been centred on the pioneering abolitionists whose actions in the early 19th century led first to the ending of the slave trade across the British Empire in 1807, later to the abolition of the institution in 1834. It’s a record of which, compared to the approach of other nations to the same issue (and the speed of their actions), we may even feel a hint of pride.It’s a myth that BBC Two’s Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners put deservedly to rest, confronting us with harsh facts of history that have been conveniently forgotten. Read more ...