TV
Matthew Wright
It’s an improbable fact worthy of five minutes’ ironic banter that there are so many panel shows presenting five minutes’ ironic banter on a series of improbable facts. Lee Mack, presenter of Sky 1’s new take on the genre, Duck Quacks Don’t Echo, has been a team captain on BBC One’s Would I Lie to You? for the past six years, so has had the time to get his head round the most improbably amusing facts. If your mind craves even more improbable facts, there’s always Radio 4’s The Unbelievable Truth, chaired by David Mitchell, Mack’s opposing captain on Would I Lie to You? Mack and Mitchell could Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since Nashville and country music are one giant soap opera, it's amazing nobody turned Tennessee's Music City into a TV series before. No matter. Here we are with series two, and it's as deliriously cheesy and melodramatic as ever.The first series ended with veteran country star Rayna James (Connie Britton) and her alcoholic guitarist/former lover Deacon Claybourne hurtling into a cataclysmic car crash. Series two opened amid the wreckage and the squeaking of tortured metal, with flashbacks to when Deacon and Rayna were young and in lurve (bravo for a splendid decades-rewinding job by the Read more ...
Andy Plaice
“I like it when you’re a bastard,” George Gently growled at his sidekick, halfway into the first episode of this sixth series set in 1960s Northumberland, reassuring us that the partnership is very much back on when all appeared to be lost the last time around. And what a terrific opener it proved to be.The cliffhanger for series five left the inspector (Martin Shaw) and his Detective Sergeant John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby) at the hands of a gunman in Durham Cathedral. Both were shot – in Bacchus’s case emotionally shot too – and we picked them up a year later trying to resurrect their working Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The League of Gentlemen – performers Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, and co-writer Jeremy Dyson – have been rather busy since they left Royston Vasey behind (temporarily we're told, as the foursome may set up shop for local people again next year). Dyson has recently been script-editing The Wrong Mans, while Gatiss has been busy appearing in Sherlock and Coriolanus, among other things. Now Reece and Shearsmith follow up their wonderful Psychoville with Inside No 9.Inside No 9 is very much in the vein of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected (1979-88), being an anthology of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
World War One overkill - if you'll pardon the expression - is a clear and present danger as the centenary commemorations gather pace, but this investigation of the roles of the interlinked royal families of Europe in the onrush of hostilities was as good a chunk of TV history as I can remember. Informative and detailed but always keeping an eye on the bigger picture, it made me, at any rate, start to think about the road to 1914 in a different light.The pivotal figure was Queen Victoria, whose influence we could see reaching far beyond the immense era named after her and onwards into the Read more ...
terry.friel
Three years ago this month, the first protests against the brutal dictatorship of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi broke out. On October 20 2011, the tyrant was finally caught, and mobile phone footage of his bloody and abused last minutes went viral. His regime, in power since 1969, was no more. For a while, the streets of Tripoli were filled with optimism and hope. All thought peace and change had come.Those were heady days, which already seem remote: Libya has again fallen into a new, different kind of despair. Christopher Olgiati’s remarkable Storyville film, Mad Dog: Gaddafi’s Secret World, made Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Saga saga is over. An eco-terrorist plot to kill off the top tier of Europe’s environment ministers has been foiled, with nails bitten to the quick. Various Nordic marriages are in tatters, like a boxed set of Strindberg. Justice has been done but the smiles on faces in the Malmö police station at the end of episode nine had been wiped an hour later. We can’t talk about why or the spoiler police will stick us in prison and pay us periodic visits with gifts of designer coffee. Let’s just say it wasn’t a good night for Danish law enforcement.But what an ending. If you didn’t feel quite the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The programme blurb says: “Dan Snow looks back at 90 years of the Winter Olympics and shows how the political upheaval of the 20th and 21st centuries has impacted on the Games". Instead we got a mish-mash of archive clips, a potted history of the Games, a nod to some of the politics surrounding them, and a tale of how one chap's derring-do impacted on them.The programme went all over the place – as did Snow, who travelled to several countries, most of them unnecessarily, to tell his story. The rugged historian, an amenable presenter, was, as ever, keen to show his action-man credentials by Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The annual reappearance of The Good Wife is always a cause for celebration. Why they persistently park it in the twilight zone of More4 remains one of the enduring mysteries of our era, since it's one of the best shows on TV, but the only question that need concern us is: will season five be as good as the ones that came before? On the evidence of this opener, yes indeed, so much so that American critics have been hailing it as the best ever,Change is in the air at Chicago's upmarket law firm Lockhart Gardner. Not only does Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) have to be mindful of her new Read more ...
Matthew Wright
As the Brockman family returns for a fifth and final series of Outnumbered, some viewers will find their hackles standing to attention at the family's extraordinary distillation of middle-class characterstics. There’s the enviable middle-class London home they live in, absurdly beyond the means of a family that seems to subsist on a single teacher’s income. There’s the tameness of their problems, this week's revolving around angst-ridden secondary school choice and the horror provoked by the eldest child Jake's (Tyger Drew-Honey) tattoo. And there's the mother’s relentless anxiety about Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Harry Patch may have finally answered the summons of the last bugle, but there are still those whose memories run all the way back to the war to end all wars. Violet Muers, 106, was in the firing line when the German navy crept up on the east coast of England and unleashed hell on Hartlepool. A century on, she lucidly recalled the bangs going off in the night. “Me older sister said, ‘I think somebody’s beatin’ the carpets.’” Jeremy Paxman sat in her front room, enthralled by the bonny voice of another England.The most recent attack on these islands was recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry. The Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“If I didn’t want to have a life, I’d move to LA,” was one of the (many) funny lines in the new HBO series Looking, and brought home that, along with the show’s three appealing gay male leads (main picture), it’s the city of San Francisco itself that plays a central role here.Looking has drawn comparisons variously with the likes of Queer as Folk, Sex in the City, and fellow HBO show Girls, but there’s surely another spectre looming over it, in the very best possible sense: Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. The adaptation of the first of Maupin’s books reached television two decades ago, Read more ...