TV
Adam Sweeting
Take a spoonful of paranoia thriller Arlington Road and shake'n'bake it with a dollop of Homeland and you'd have the bare skeleton of The Americans, tonight's new night import from the American FX channel on ITV. It's 1981, and in the midst of Washington DC suburbia, where the lawns are manicured and dad washes the car on Sundays, lurks an unseen threat. It's married-with-kids couple Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, who are sleeper agents of the KGB.Opening with a speedy extended chase sequence, eccentrically soundtracked by the percussive yomp of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk", this pilot episode Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Unfortunate title aside, Psychobitches is a wonderfully original idea - what if famous women through the centuries were alive today and seeking treatment from a psychotherapist? In a quasi-sketch format using the talents of 10 credited writers, it's a neat construct that allows writers' imaginations free rein, unconstrained by time, place or actual facts, and gives a roll call of talented actresses (and the occasional bloke) a chance to do their very best impersonations.Last night's opener of a five-part series (expertly directed by The League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson) started with Rosa Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Did they get the president? That’s the benchmark question viewers will ask of any new film from documentary house par excellence Brook Lapping and producer Norma Percy ever since they secured an interview with Slobodan Milosevic for their landmark The Death of Yugoslavia. Their strike rate has rather dropped off lately. Even though – or because? – he was the subject of the outfit’s recent Putin, Russia and the West, that wasn't enough to convince the current master of the Kremlin to participate.Brook Lapping's new three-parter, The Iraq War, has a similar dearth of the number-one men: George Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
They say that the most important part of any drama is the journey that it takes its leading characters on. Whatever events have taken place - and after 139 episodes and nearly a decade, this show has had a lot of them - you can expect them to have shaped the characters, who will likely have learned valuable life lessons and evolved. Despite this, it is no great surprise to see Shameless patriarch Frank Gallagher (David Threlfall) begin the show’s final episode from jail - where he has spent three months for benefit fraud.Shameless has experienced diminishing critical returns as the years have Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In an average lifetime a human being sits in front of the television for around 29,035 hours. Why? Because it’s there. OK, so the precise statistic is a guess. The figure, like the answer, is more correctly associated with the great outdoors. George Mallory, explaining why he wanted to conquer a mountain nowadays measuring at 29,035 feet, responded with pithy insouciance. If you happened to be parked in front of the gogglebox as his story was told in Words of Everest, this was one hour not wasted.It’s a simple idea to take historic testimony written by the intrepid men of yesteryear, lob in a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Picking five creatively significant years was quite a smart way of tackling the huge career of David Bowie, though you could argue forever about whether producer/director Francis Whately had chosen the right ones. What about 1969 and the Space Oddity album, or 1970 and The Man Who Sold the World? How about a really bad year like 1987, which gave us Never Let Me Down and the egregious Glass Spider tour?But the film is what it is rather than what it isn't, and most of what we got was fascinating, and often terrific. In an opening collage of quotes from Bowie, Whately banged home the point that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is the BBC taking dictation from the Gradgrindian brain of Michael Gove? According to the education secretary’s latest wacky diktat, what the nation’s children want is facts facts facts. Plus, in the teaching of history, lots of stuff about England/Britain giving Johnny Foreigner a bloody conk. So let’s give it up one more time for the Tudors, who are essentially our very own Nazis. This is less for the dodgy human rights record than their permanent status as a small-screen visitor attraction.As the old rhyming mnemonic might put it, Harrys twain and Ned the Lad, Mary, Bessie: modern fad Read more ...
Veronica Lee
He's back - and he's even moodier than before. Jackson Brodie, the private dick for whom the word “brooding” was invented, hasn't been seen on BBC One since 2011, and now there are three 90-minute films to feast on, based on Kate Atkinson's novels and relocated to Edinburgh. Last night's was Started Early, Took My Dog.The story started in Munich, where Brodie (Jason Isaacs) was involved in a child snatch that he was doing solely for the money, as he had just spent two months visiting his daughter Marlee, who now lives with her mother in New Zealand, and that costs. It all went wrong as his Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You can only marvel at the family intrigues that virtually closed down the legacy of photographer Erwin Blumenfeld in the years following his death in 1969. "Destroy, destruct, separate, divide,” was the emphatic double-phrased imperative with which one of his granddaughters described the “family legacy” in The Man Who Shot Beautiful Women, the BBC Four documentary that’s itself the work of another descendant, grandson Remy Blumenfeld, who wrote and produced this film by Nick Watson.It’s astonishing that it’s the first such screen tribute to a figure of Blumenfeld’s stature: the efforts of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
From being “a strange facsimile of the original” to generating the “first British record made by people who are 100 per cent convinced that they are doing the right thing”, Rock ‘n’ Roll Britannia breezily mapped the protracted birth of a British rock scene which could take America on at its own game. As Cliff Richard put it, what was created was “different enough to become European. Or other-worldly.” It took The Beatles to crack America, but they would not have done so without being rookies in Britain’s Fifties’ musical boot camp.That the programme tackled this familiar story with a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Introductions, eh? When you make someone's acquaintance for the first time, you can never really tell if they’re going to grow on you. They worry about this a lot when knocking up drama serials. So meet Frankie, district nurse, the new resident at nine on Tuesday nights on BBC One. Living with a copper but married to the job. Gap between her teeth, which is always a good sign. Wigs out to music in the car. On the minus side, she treats the voice of Ken Bruce as some kind of life coach. Fancy spending the next few weeks if not years in her company? Because that's very much the plan.Lucy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You have to wonder if there any alternative themes permitted in TV drama apart from murder (preferably multiple, committed by a serial killer) or paedophilia. New five-parter The Fall plonks itself down squarely in category A, with its story of DS Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) from the Metropolitan Police arriving in Belfast to shake up a stalled murder inquiry.This one won't be a whodunnit but rather a howtheycatchim, since we were introduced to the perp only moments after we'd caught our first glimpse of Anderson, who was cleaning a murky-looking skin care product off her face in the Read more ...