TV
Adam Sweeting
This is the first of two new TV series this week to feature a female police officer investigating the discovery of long-buried skeletons (the other one is Thursday's Unforgotten on ITV). The two shows are different in tone, but still reminiscent of numerous noir-ish policiers of recent vintage. It makes you wonder whether commissioning editors are trying hard enough. We hear a lot of earnest talk about "diversity", but it doesn't seem to apply to themes and subject matter.Anyway, From Darkness stars Anne-Marie Duff as Claire Church, a former Manchester police officer who became demoralised by Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Managing the boundaries of closeness in documentary filmmaking can be a complicated issue. Does the documentarist figure only as a fly-on-the-wall observer – or become involved, caught up in the story of his or her subject? Is it possible to maintain a distinction? When, and what is going too far?All these questions, and more, were in play in Sean McAllister’s outstanding A Syrian Love Story, which has already won the Grand Jury prize at the Sheffield documentary festival and looks set to reap more such honours at other events around the world. His story of a family in discord is bruising Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For the final instalment of its season of 20th-century classics, the BBC left the world of fiction behind and took a Rosie-tinted amble along the leafy byways of Laurie Lee’s youth. The first part of Lee’s autobiographical trilogy is much the most read. Sales of six million means Cider with Rosie has a lot of fans who will have watched this dramatisation anxiously fearing the worst.They can rest easy. This amiable, elegiac adaptation’s commitment to honesty extended to filming in Slad, the Cotswold village where the author grew up – and, in a touching final shot, now rests in a graveyard Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The British, it is said, are victims of reserve – eschewing anger, open affection and hurt for crossface winkyface sadface. While an over-simplified (not to mention shockingly solipsistic) take on a far from unique tendency, there is a kernel of truth here. A difficulty, perhaps, in conveying emotions accurately. A mistrust of heightened states – a tendency to misconstrue and get caught up in guilt, blame and shame.This could go some way to explaining why, when John Lydon, the russet-topped frontman of the Sex Pistols accosted the nation with his thousand-yard stare and combination of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
TV series about the clergy are usually farcical, self-deprecating or just plain wet, so it's a pleasant surprise to find one that's prepared to slug it out with issues of good and evil. Compared to Rev, a wistful tragi-comedy about managing the terminal decline of the C of E, Midwinter of the Spirit wants to mount up and ride into battle against the Ungodly.Based on Phil Rickman's novel, it centres on Merrily Watkins (Anna Maxwell Martin), a vicar in a rural Herefordshire parish who's training to be an exorcist, under the beady eye of Huw Owen (David Threlfall), a grey-bearded veteran of Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s nearly 10 years since Gareth Malone’s series The Choir first brought amateur choral singing to an improbably appreciative television audience. Like baking, amateur choral singing is quintessentially British – most other cultures leave them to professionals – and their affectionate place in the national psyche has created successful viewing brands.Yet this time Malone has introduced that serpentine cliché of contemporary programming, the reality competition, into the innocent enthusiasm that so inspired reluctant singers of his previous series, from shy teens to military wives. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hot on the heels of Lady Chatterley's Lover, the Beeb has made another foray into literary depictions of English class warfare and scandalous sexuality with this new version of LP Hartley's novel (published in 1953 but set in 1900). To ease the didactic burden, the Corporation has discovered yet another phwoarr-factor leading man who obligingly gets his kit off at strategic moments.He's Ben Batt, playing rustic Norfolk farmer Ted Burgess who's embroiled in a steamy affair with posh Marian Maudsley from the Big House down the road. Going between them and carrying their billets-doux back Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It began with the sinking of the Titanic all those series ago. However many holes Julian Fellowes has seen fit to build in to the design, his own ocean-going liner has valiantly refused to go down with all hands on deck. But by Christmas we will have seen the last of Lord Grantham and his household, until such time as they all get resurrected for a big-screen reunion, even the Dowager Countess Maggie. For some, the bereavement will be too much and they'll rewind to the start of the first boxset. For others it'll be like the end of a long prison sentence.As for the inhabitants of the Abbey, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Starring Daniel Radcliffe as Sam Houser, who's portrayed as the dominant creative mastermind behind Rockstar Games and its phenomenally successful Grand Theft Auto series, The Gamechangers (**) sought to depict legal battles over GTA's violent and sexually explicit content as landmarks in the history of artistic freedom. Rockstar Games didn't approve the film and, having filed a lawsuit against the BBC for trademark infringement, denounced the finished product as "random, made-up bollocks".They do have a point, since the film visibly staggers under its own contradictions. A skimpy budget Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s been worth the wait. There’s something about the affection Shane Meadows feels for his characters; the street action that doesn’t often (in this opener especially, though that may well change) tip into overt drama; the family elements that could, but don’t quite veer towards the soaps in style (if anything there’s a hint of parody?); and the sense of a period of time lovingly given its special details and intonations, that makes this latest instalment of This Is England feel almost like a reunion with old friends (plus a few sidekicks we haven’t quite got to know yet).The delay in the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Someone more unlike Louis XIV than David Bintley is hard to imagine. The latter comes across on TV as the most pleasant, unthreatening, mild-mannered of Everymen; unthinkable that he would order the massacre of Protestants or proclaim, “l’État, c’est moi.” Yet the quiet poise with which he glides down the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles at the beginning of The King Who Invented Ballet reveals what Bintley has in common with the legendary absolute monarch: he’s a classically trained ballet dancer.As Director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, Bintley has created a new short piece inspired by the Sun Read more ...
Barney Harsent
So Gogglebox, a programme that allows voyeurs to watch viewers, has made it to series six. Rarely has telly been more knowingly “meta”. I can only think of Game for a Laugh’s catchprase, “Watching you, watching us, watching you, watching us,” but that was: a) nowhere near a true representation of how the show actually worked; b) creepy and weird.In any case, a nation (or at least a sizeable portion of it, with figures regularly breaking four million) settled down to welcome back old friends with what would have been open arms had they not had their hands glued to their phones, lest the Read more ...