TV
Owen Richards
Despite horror’s omnipresence in cinema, British television has been somewhat deprived of jump scares. Every couple of years there’s an anomaly, such as Sky’s The Enfield Haunting or ITV’s Marchlands, but nothing has caught the public’s imagination – not since the innovative but controversial one-off Ghostwatch. Enter the BBC and Netflix with their new six-part series Requiem, promising to be the most terrifying show ever broadcast on the Beeb.Either the worst is yet to come, or the terror bar has been set very low; episode one brought little innovation and even less tension. There were the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
No doubt McMafia has its strengths, but it’s like a mug of Horlicks compared to the grappa-with-aviation-fuel blast of Gomorrah (Sky Atlantic). The Naples-set organised crime drama takes no prisoners. It gives no quarter, and expects none.As a latecomer to Gomorrah, I needed to do a bit of homework before I began to get the hang of what’s going in series three. However, if you’re au fait with the first two seasons, you’ll know that the piece hinges on the tumultuous history of the Savastano dynasty, a powerful Camorra family accustomed to lording it over the unlovely streets of Naples’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After a mysterious mid-season break which seemed to catch everyone by surprise, Strike Back’s sixth season belatedly bounces noisily back. So far the story has ricocheted around the Middle East before detouring to Hungary, where our indestructible Section 20 operatives just managed to save “Mac” McAllister (Warren Brown) from being hanged by the fanatical Magyar Ultra extremist group.Now, though, they’re in Belarus, still on the trail of Warrington’s jihadi queen Jane Lowry (Katherine Kelly), who looks as though she’d be more at home managing a branch of Morrisons than plotting to wreak Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The “insider’s guide to the music business” tag attached to Hits, Hype and Hustle: An Insider's Guide to the Music Business (BBC Four) dangles the carrot of all kinds of clandestine scams being exposed, such as extortionate recording contracts, systematic chart-rigging or Mafia rackets involving cut-out records. Instead, this episode was merely a meander through the history of live performances in rock music.Our host was John Giddings, a veteran agent and promoter who has worked with almost everyone you can think of, from the Stones and U2 to Genesis, Bowie and Madonna, and currently runs the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Talk about laughter in the dark. With every successive episode, the fourth series of Inside No 9 (BBC Two) has perceptibly turned a shade blacker. "Zanzibar" was a festive farce mashing up half the plots of Shakespeare from Macbeth to A Comedy of Errors. "Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room" was a mournful reunion with a twist featuring a failed comedy double act. "Once Removed", told in reverse like Pinter’s Betrayal, featured a murder hit gone hilariously wrong. The fourth episode, "To Have and to Hold", featured no clever-clever tricks and actorly flourishes. Instead it worked its way Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Michael Portillo has barely been off a train since leaving politics, taking journeys blending scenery and history: it must be a relief receiving plaudits for edutainment instead of the abuse habitually heaped on politicians.Herewith the third American series, around the East Coast, its history perhaps intentionally a subtle rebuke to Trumpian values. Ten hours of film divided into 20 programmes detail an 1,100 mile journey from Boston to Toronto. Long-distance American railroad journeys in the 21st century are an odd enterprise: once a country where great fortunes were made by the railway Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sara Lund and Saga Norén have a lot to answer for. Their adventures in the murk of murder as they grapple with their own dysfunctional psychology entranced audiences who don’t speak a scrap of Danish or Swedish. The search has since gone on for other gripping instances of Nordic noir. How long can it be before we accept that The Killing and The Bridge both had ingredients that aren’t easily reassembled?The "Walter Presents" strand has coughed up all sorts of potential replacements, while BBC Four continues to pan for gold on Saturday nights. There’s already been one Swedish drama premiering Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What did the Romans do for us? On the evidence of new drama Britannia, they pillaged, murdered and tortured, but also found themselves mesmerised by the psychedelic Druid magic that hovered over our ancient land like fairy dust.Creator Jez Butterworth dug into a resonant, folklorish notion of British history and identity in Jerusalem, and took something of the same idea across the Irish sea for The Ferryman. Here, in cahoots with his writer-brother Tom (who co-wrote Sky Atlantic's Tin Star), he lets himself get a bit more fanciful in his treatment of first-century history. The coast upon Read more ...
Owen Richards
The new import is the latest procedural from Scandinavia, this time focusing on Stockholm’s biker gangs. The first episode aired Tuesday night, with the rest of the series available on All4 now. In the age of the boxset binge, this availability is usually a gift - but Before We Die’s forgettable first episode might struggle to convince viewers to log on and continue.We first met killjoy cop Hanna Svensson on a drugs bust – more specifically, arresting her own son Christian for dealing at a house party. After a rather low-key confrontation, he was taken away and she was left crying in the car Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Henry VIII had a troubled marital history and Charles I lost his head, but both have also gone down in history as original, innovative and obsessive collectors of art, founders in different ways of what is now one of the world’s greatest accumulations in all media. The tale of this particular royal occupation is being brought up to date in four weekly episodes led by the enthusiastic Andrew Graham-Dixon, our go-to serial art presenter. Episode one was subtitled Dangerous Magic. And in this iteration, Graham-Dixon’s own script is loaded down with exclamatory clichés. What is it about even long Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Accepted wisdom seemed to be that in the animal world rats and cockroaches were the most adaptable and the most widely geographically distributed, followed by those pesky humans. But think again: the premise in this new three-part series is that the big cats have also done a terrific job of spreading worldwide, each a different species within the genus.Cue a ravishing film, jammed with marvellous images and fascinating information. We were treated to a terrific variety of these extraordinary predators, the top of the food chain: from the fastest to the strongest, the smallest to the biggest. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I’m black – I need to find out how black people live.” So reasoned Kiri, sitting in the back seat of the car driven by her social services case worker. She was on the way from her prospective adopters, a white middle-class couple who already had a teenage son, to pay a first unsupervised visit to her Nigerian-born grandparents. Kiri (Felicia Mukasa, pictured below) was mature beyond her years, open-minded and well-spoken, while her case worker Miriam (Sarah Lancashire) brimmed with mumsy good cheer and sensible advice. The mood was Pollyannishly optimistic – the only dark cloud was the Read more ...