TV
Adam Sweeting
If you were expecting Rowan Atkinson to say "bibble" or make those Mr Bean gurgling noises, you came to the wrong classic detective drama. To play George Simenon's timeless French detective in a story subtitled "Maigret Sets a Trap", a melancholy, interiorised Atkinson spent most of his time sitting and thinking. Despite the mumsy ministrations of Mme Maigret (alias Lucy Cohu), he relied mostly on his pipe for company as he struggled to unmask a serial killer of women in Montmartre.It was a determined effort by the star to set aside all his familiar comic tricks and tics, and this was a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The trio of Sixties television documentaries assembled here are prototypical examples of Ken Russell’s oeuvre: hyper-real, and often frenzied, depictions of the lives of their subjects. Each not-quite or more-than documentary was made for the BBC in an era when boundaries were pushed and the corporation allowed directors to follow their artistic sensibilities. Although there is little immediate link with the Ken Loach of 1966’s Cathy Come Home, both he and Russell thrived in the fertile environment of a BBC which took chances.The Great Passions collects Always on Sunday (1965), a portrayal of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So at a stroke, The Night Manager has proved that appointment-to-view television is not yet dead in the age of Netflix, and that the BBC can do itself a favour in battling against the best American dramas if it can find a US production partner (AMC in this case). Perhaps its most vital lesson was that if you want to put bums on seats, pay whatever it takes to get Tom Hiddleston's up on the screen.High fives for director Susanne Bier, who ensured that this sixth and final episode comfortably sustained the tension so successfully spun across the preceding five, and powered thrillingly to a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Blue Eyes, the latest imported Swedish drama, has a lot of hype to live up to. After Borgen, Wallander, The Killing and the rest, Scandi noir is scarcely a novelty in itself. Yet Blue Eyes brings the ultra-topical subject of the far right and the immigration debate to the more familiar territory of murders in sun-starved pinescapes. More dramatic still, it depicts the rise of an anti-immigration political party in the country that has been, until recently at least, Europe’s beacon of tolerance and openness. As such, it should be both a sharply contemporary political drama and a moody Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Two years after its brilliant second series, which put Keeley Hawes's DI Lindsay Denton through the wringer with harrowing intensity, Jed Mercurio's bent-coppers drama is back. This time it's Daniel Mays, as Sgt Danny Waldron, sitting in the crosshairs of Ted Hastings and his AC12 anti-corruption team.This was only episode one, but already it had you gasping for breath while you waited for your head to stop spinning. One thing we already know – this isn't going to be a whodunnit, because we saw Waldron's transgressions in full-scale, unambiguous close-up. The opening sequence followed Waldron Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s surprising how few dramas there are about the autistic spectrum. Dustin Hoffman’s turn in Rain Man (1988) misleadingly suggested that all sufferers are also geniuses. On British television Kid in the Corner (2001) was inspired by Tony Marchant’s experience as the parent of a child with Asperger’s (although the boy in the drama had ADHD).There hasn’t been much since then that specifically alludes to the A word, despite the rise in diagnoses and the word’s slide into general – often ignorant and pejorative – usage. Writing on theartsdesk, Saskia Baron was by no means the only arts Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Films, TV and books about autism often send me down memory lane; my older brother Timothy was one of the first children in the UK to be diagnosed with autism in the early 1960s, and I’ve kept a wary eye on how autism is portrayed ever since I can remember. But I wasn’t expecting the new BBC One drama, The A Word, to inspire a wave of nostalgia for Peter Perrett and The Only Ones, last seen at some grungy punk venue back in the late Seventies.The first episode of The A Word opens with a wonderful shot of a little boy (Max Vento, pictured below) stolidly marching along a hilly country road Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s another military centenary, and another conundrum for broadcasters – how to tell a sombre story in an engaging way. The 1916 Dublin Easter Rising is an iconic event, but if we’re honest, not one many viewers will know in detail. The televisual warhorses for this kind of reminiscence – black-and-white portrait photos, sombre brass bands, and many talking heads atop camphor-scented tweed – are respectful but just a little bit dull. But to spice it up by choosing a paunchy, cross-dressing comedian in a curly wig to present? Dangerously flippant, surely? Comedian Brendan O’Carroll is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was an eye-popping moment of high-risk bravura at the climax of Happy Valley. Murderous detective John Wadsworth (Kevin Doyle) had finally been cornered on a railway bridge and was all for leaping off. Sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire), wheezing hard from the chase, tried to talk him away from the edge but hadn’t done the relevant training. Wadsworth had, however, with a 100 percent success rate to prove it. So she asked him what she ought to be saying, and he told her.No one but Sally Wainwright would dream of switching to comedy at such a juncture, and really it ought to Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Through the snowy wastes we crunched. The winter scenery was overwhelmingly beautiful and almost devoid of any human habitation: gorgeous mountains in the distance, the black waters of the fjords gleaming, the winter sun shining through the pale blue sky. And lo, here was Andrew Graham-Dixon, in woollen hat and furred windbreaker, to introduce us to centuries of Norwegian art.The first episode of this three-part history focused exclusively on Norway, and was subtitled "The Dark Night of the Soul". What was exceedingly odd about the programme was its melodramatic pessimism, the narration Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Halfway through its 10-week run, The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story appears to be running in real time as it slowly, painstakingly tells the story of how one of the US's biggest sports stars was accused of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman in 1994. But moving at what is – by modern television drama standards, at least – a glacial pace allows the creators to burrow deep into the American psyche and, more pertinently, examine the deep-rooted racism lurking in parts of US society.Writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski have set out their stall Read more ...
Fran Robertson
Situated next to the beautiful Welsh Harp reservoir in North London, the West Hendon council estate was built in the 1960s to provide 680 homes to low income families. I first went there in November 2014. I had been following various housing stories around London and had heard about an estate where residents were fighting a multi-million pound regeneration which was forcing them out of their homes and where land valued at £12 million had been sold to developers for just £3.The day I went to the estate, representatives of the private developers, the architects and the council had set up a mini Read more ...