TV
Veronica Lee
Everyone knows a Nan – whether their own grandmother, someone else's, or maybe an elderly woman you see on the bus rudely (but rightly) telling youngsters they shouldn't be sitting when she has to stand. My grandmothers were nothing like the foul-mouthed curmudgeon that Catherine Tate has so vividly created, but the version of her I knew was a childhood neighbour; like Tate's character, dear old Mrs J would be perfectly nice to someone's face but when they left the room she would spit out: “Never liked him/her.”That Nan taps into some personal connection for many of us is a large part of her Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There are around 800 pages in a Dickensian doorstopper and it has been said around 800 times that if Dickens were working today he would be a show runner on a soap. Finally it has come to pass. Andrew Davies attempted something similar with his Bleak House, diced up into half-hour gobbets. But Dickensian is nothing less – or maybe that should be nothing more – than EastEnders in top hats and mobcaps.Its 20 episodes have been scheduled over that time of year which Dickens wishes could happen all the year round, two episodes a day. Its scriptwriter Tony Jordan, formerly of EastEnders, had Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
On Monday ITV showed BAFTA Celebrates Downton Abbey, in which a massed gathering of cast and crew plus a few celebrity guests toasted Downton's five-year stampede to global acclaim. Its creator Julian Fellowes waddled onstage and told an anecdote about how he'd been accosted by a Downton fan while browsing in a Barnes & Noble bookshop in New York. "Just let Edith be happy!" she wailed at him.As it turned out in this double-length finale, he did, exercising the God-like authority the Emmy, Golden Globe and BAFTA-scooping show has bestowed on him. In fact it all went a bit Richard Curtis as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The sclerotic culture of dithering that afflicts the higher-ups at the BBC has been mercilessly exposed in W1A. It turns out that fear of failure was always a managerial thing at the corporation. How else did Dad’s Army have such a bumpy ride to birth? As told in We’re Doomed! The Dad’s Army Story, one of the most enduring sitcoms ever made was very nearly never made.Stephen Russell’s script took the facts of the story and wove them into a comedy drama that touched and tickled in equal measure. At the heart of it was the partnership of David Croft and Jimmy Perry, one a producer barely Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It stands to reason that the contents of a prequel can never be entirely surprising. Some details have to be constants, some plot twists left unturned. As soon as it became clear that the second series of Noah Hawley’s Fargo predated the events of the first by some 25 years, we knew that state trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) would be left standing at the end of it. But of all the things to have as a constant, Wilson’s sympathetic portrayal of the steadfast cop was as secure a tether as they come.The universe of Fargo is one in which anything can happen, and frequently does – we’re Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Was it just my bewilderment, or were there even more criss-crossing narratives than usual in this third series of The Bridge? As in, unusually expanded levels of human traffic, in various forms of distress, flowing under said structure.The Bridge, along with other Nordic noir that we’ve come to love, has long adopted the position that the best way to get from a to d is via x, y and z. It’s gripping in its ability to interconnect stories, but occasionally everyting gets a bit much. Somewhere early in episode nine we had Saga (whom we should really call Séga?) and new partner Hendrik (much more Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“Bohemian Rhapsody” is, depending on who you listen to, either a work of unparalleled theatrical daring and creative genius or an unlistenable descent into ludicrously self-indulgent toss. Of course, these are not necessarily contradictory positions... Me? Well, I’m revisiting Queen now that I have an eight-year-old fan living in my house, and it’s been quite the eye-opener, as was BBC Four’s documentary. Queen: From Rags to Rhapsody, along with Days of Our Lives and Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender, completed a trilogy of documentaries. It used the band’s sonic triptych as a reframing Read more ...
Matthew Wright
ITV’s Manchester crime series Prey has, like a Premiership football club bought by a billionaire, returned for a new season with the same name but different faces. But these aren’t the shiny young faces of virtue that populate the footballing aristocracy. Prey focuses on compromised officers of the law: righteous protagonists gone to the bad, who lend the plot intriguing shades of grey that match its moral tone with the weather and scenery.Last series it was John Simm’s DC Marcus Farrow, implicated in his wife’s murder; this time prison officer David Murdoch (Philip Glenister) became both Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some things never change. Once more, we join DCI John Luther – though only for a two-part special – as he glues himself to the trail of a serial killer. And once again Luther is played by Idris Elba, a man who can freeze time or make villains throw down their weapons merely by gazing into the camera with an expression of quizzical world-weariness.This time, writer Neil Cross opened by taking us to a clifftop near Beachy Head, where Luther gazed moodily out across the English Channel, evidently in the grip of an existential crisis, perhaps a hangover from the death of DS Ripley in series three Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The second instalment of this three-part series on the history of Spain (from the BBC in collaboration with the Open University) told a tale that is probably still relatively unfamiliar in the Anglophone world. That’s despite the fact that one of its star turns was the financing by that fervently religious 15th century Iberian power couple, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, of the legendary voyage of Christopher Columbus. Their own relationship was dramatic, too: the young, ambitious and highly intelligent teenage Isabella had turned down no fewer than seven aristocratic aspirants Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The caption on Victoria Derbyshire’s morning programme said it all: "Tim Peake Blast Off". Tuesday morning is usually a quiet backwater of daytime TV, but today it hosted the most frenzied focus on space travel in the UK since Helen Sharman flew to the Mir space station in 1991. Nearly a quarter of a century on, British interest has peaked once again as Major Tim Peake became the first Briton to blast off for the international space station.In the Science Museum, Professor Brian Cox and the host of Mock the Week walked through the final 45-minute countdown in a hyperactive atmosphere supplied Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though Alfred the Great was renowned for educational and social reforms as much as for whupping the Danes on the battlefield, I'd never pictured him the way David Dawson has been playing him in The Last Kingdom. Pallid and sickly-looking, and plagued by all-too-human frailties, this Alfred looked more like a weedy consumptive poet than the midfield dynamo of embattled Ninth Century England.Yet it paid off in the end, as Alfred summoned all the strength he could find to drag himself and his entourage out of the soggy Somerset marshes (where, last week, he burnt the cakes in finest 1066 and All Read more ...