If you came to this expecting to be reminded of such ghosts of Scrooges past as Alastair Sim or Bill Murray, you will have been reaching either for the brandy or the defibrillator. In the hands of screenwriter Steven Peaky Blinders Knight and director Nick Murphy (from BBC One in partnership with the American FX network ), Dickens’s perennial tale of seasonal repentance has been transformed into a gruelling journey of cathartic horror.Having said that, it was frustrating that the opening episode (with the final two following on consecutive nights) is the least compelling of the three. It took Read more ...

Heston Blumenthal, of triple-cooked chips fame, is a mad food scientist. Well, that’s how we’re introduced to him in Heston’s Marvellous Menu. Tonight’s BBC Two programme had a rather theatrical premise: a chef recreating the complete dining experience (menu, team, decor, diners) from a pivotal year in their restaurant’s history. What’s unclear is if this show was intended as a one-off documentary or the first episode of a series. What’s certain? It was a wacky time capsule.The programme opened with Blumenthal and Giles Coren, The Times’ restaurant critic, choosing a year to recreate. The Read more ...

All the TV networks like to big up their news journalists as major players, but are they as important as they like to think? Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, is a dogged reporter who rarely seems to sleep, and here we watched as she tracked Boris Johnson from his election as Conservative leader through his struggle to “get Brexit done” by 31 October, in the teeth of countless Parliamentary obstacles. But despite plenty of behind-the-scenes footage, there were few dramatic revelations, just familiar stuff seen from a different angle with added commentary by Kuenssberg. After the Read more ...

This three-part series by historian Lisa Hilton is a follow-up to her previous effort from last July, Charles I: Downfall of a King (BBC Four). That examined his disastrous fall from power, and this first new programme opened just before Christmas 1648, with the melancholy monarch incarcerated in Windsor Castle, separated from his wife and children and with only his dogs for company.In his previous confinement at Carisbrooke, he’d been permitted to engage the services of a mistress, but now the mirthless Puritan grip had tightened around both the king and the nation. Meanwhile in London, Read more ...

Christmas and Agatha Christie are a very good fit – how better to spend time with your loved ones than sitting down to watch some murder and intrigue together? So Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar was an early festive treat, another enjoyable melding of fact and fiction (mostly fiction, it should be said) from husband-and-wife producer team Tom and Emily Dalton, whose Agatha and the Truth of Murder was a hit for Channel 5 last year.We were in Ur, southern Iraq in 1928 where a team of British archaeologists led by Leonard Woolley (Jack Deam) and his assistants Max (Jonah Hauer-King) and Pearl ( Read more ...

Alibi is usually your one-stop shop for re-runs of Father Brown or Death in Paradise, so well done them for commissioning this new murder mystery. It comes with a glittering pedigree, having been created by actor-turned-writer Amelia Bullmore (Scott & Bailey etc) and bestselling crime novelist Val McDermid, but despite a cracking cast it struggles to pass the credibility test.Emma Hedges (Molly Windsor) is an aspiring young lab technician who’s landed herself a prestigious job with the Scottish Institute for Forensic Science and Anatomy (SIFA) in Dundee, where she works under the auspices Read more ...

The appalling fate of the allegedly unsinkable liner Titanic in 1912 has fuelled endless feature films and documentaries, not to mention a dismal drama series by Julian Fellowes (there was also a proposed Titanic II vessel which would have been built in China, but which remains mysteriously un-launched). However, it’s difficult to see why this film has appeared 107 and a half years after she sank.Part of an intermittent series called Great British Ships, it was presented by Rob Bell (pictured below), who ends every sentence with at least three imaginary exclamation marks. I lost count of how Read more ...

In films, as in life, unreliable narrators are not hard to find. But there is something remarkable about the unreliable narrator of Elizabeth is Missing, BBC One’s newest feature-length drama. Its protagonist, Maud (Glenda Jackson), is unreliable in the extreme – confused, forgetful and emotionally wounded. Yet unlike most unreliable narrators, we never fear that Maud is trying to sell us a false story. She is so clearly fighting to understand the truth.Here’s the thing: Maud has advancing dementia. She’s a strong-willed 80-something, trying to remain independent as the disease wreaks havoc Read more ...

Happily, Joe Barton’s tinglingly original thriller (BBC Two) finished as smartly as it began, not by any humdrum tying-up of loose ends but by giving free rein to the story’s ambiguities and impossible choices. If indeed they really were choices. Earlier in the series, Kelly Macdonald’s Sarah delivered a philosophical manifesto which suggested that we exist in an infinite time-loop – “Everything is controlled by a mad conductor… everything we do is an echo of what we’ve done before.”The question might be, if we keep doing it, do we do it better? One of Giri/Haji’s underlying themes was the Read more ...

“Restorative Justice Practitioner” sounds like a euphemism for a Mad Max-style lone avenger, but in director Anna Hall's devastating film for Channel 4, it was a woman called Kate whose job was to bring together conflicting parties and help find a resolution. Cameras and microphones eavesdropped with pitiless intimacy as Kate brokered a meeting between 30-something Kath and the man who’d raped and abused her when she was seven. The worst of it was that he was her older brother, Robert.Kath had guarded her secret from the rest of her family ever since, as it mercilessly eroded her sense of Read more ...

Who can explain the mystery of the solitary wolf who has taken up residence on an archipelago off Vancouver Island – the Discovery and Chatham Islands to be precise – and has developed his own unique hunting methods while patrolling his self-contained personal turf? His behaviour runs totally contrary to the close family bonding typical of wolves, but if anybody can shed some light it’s wildlife photographer and environmentalist Cheryl Alexander, who (as we saw in this BBC Four film) has been carefully studying Takaya (it means “wolf” in the language of the indigenous Songhees people) for the Read more ...

Boris Pahor is the oldest known survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. In this program, the 106-year-old recounts his experiences as a political refugee and prisoner to the Nazis during their rule in his native Slovenia. As a study of one individual, The Man Who Saw Too Much is a graceful attempt to itemise the totality of the Holocaust by viewing it through an especially enlightening lens.Pahor was captive at the Natzweiler camp, which was a comparatively small concentration camp located in the Vosges mountains in Alsace. Its site was chosen because of its proximity to a granite quarry Read more ...