TV
Jasper Rees
The last time the whippersnapper Morse was on our screens he was getting (a) orphaned and (b) shot. This double dose of pain seemed a bit punitive, but then when sorrows come they come not single spies. The second series of Endeavour seems determined to stack up yet more agonies. So far Morse has been knocked out cold, sustained an unsightly gash on the bridge of his nose, and cowers every time he hears a loud bang. You could swear he’s walked in off the pages of the Bash Street Kids.The idea, presumably, is to carve out a separate identity for the prequel to a franchise which has already had Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It won’t have escaped the attention of anyone with an ear for poetry that Dylan Thomas turns 100 this year. He was born in a suburban house on a hill overlooking Swansea Bay a few months after the outbreak of war, and by his early 20s had been hailed a significant poetic voice by TS Eliot. By 39 he was dead, hastened to his grave by a lethal combination of alcohol, pneumonia and New York doctors.The roaring boy who lived hard and died young has been iconised on the cover of Sgt Pepper, and gave his name to a scrawny-voiced crooner from Minnesota (although this is sometimes disputed by Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Well, that was a bit of a brain workout for the first episode - I confess for much of the opening instalment (five more to follow) I didn't have a clue what was going on, who anybody was or how all the characters and a multitude of story strands were connected. Actually, I'm not sure I did entirely understand by the end, but by then the Norwegian thriller set in the nebulous area where politics, finance and journalism collide had drawn me in sufficiently to tune in next week.For fans of the Scandi/Nordic noir genre (or indeed those suffering withdrawal symptoms after Line of Duty and Homeland Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As pedigrees go, beat this - Believe [***] is the brainchild of Alfonso Cuarón, director of the Oscar-plundering Gravity, and JJ Abrams, mastermind of Lost, Fringe and the made-over Star Trek. This debut episode didn't live up to expectations, but it would be rash to write it off too soon.At least it got off to a hair-raising start, as the car carrying 10-year-old Bo Adams and her adoptive parents was barged off the road by a black SUV. Then mom and pop were brutally terminated by a hitwoman called Moore (Sienna Guillory), who has a macabre fondness for snapping necks, but Bo was rescued in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps the BBC didn't need to make W1A, its new self-satirising sitcom. In the clerical comedy Rev, the Church of England could be considered a very serviceable metaphor for the Corporation, with its unfathomable layers of bureaucracy, well-meaning but slightly pitiable niceness, a self-image that belongs to a forgotten century, and self-flagellation before other cultures. Though the BBC does have rather more money to spend.In this series three opener, the Rev Adam Smallbone (Tom Hollander) became a new father, after his wife Alex (Olivia Colman) had very nearly given birth in the back of Read more ...
Andy Plaice
It was something of a relief when the police were finally alerted to the sinister motives of Malcolm Webster in last night’s second episode of The Widower. ITV’s three-part dramatisation of the killer’s exploits (he was convicted in 2011 of murdering his first wife and trying to kill his second) raises interesting questions not only concerning how we tell stories about crimes from real-life, but whether we actually tell them at all.Part One had ended with Webster's first wife dead following the staging of a car crash. Malcolm had miraculously survived as the vehicle started to burn, but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the same week that ITV was rounding up Britain's dangerous dogs, the Beeb aired Louis Theroux's report [****] on the unwanted canines roaming the streets of gang-infested South Los Angeles. LA has six dog pounds (we learned), through which 35,000 ownerless dogs pass annually. A lot of them, even healthy ones, end up being euthanised because it's impossible to find homes for them all.However, Theroux's film suggested that this wasn't for lack of trying on the part of the city's dog-lovers, who appeared in many colourful guises. Louis spent some time riding around the sullen, menacing Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The miscellany, a varied collection of works on different topics, was originally a Renaissance concept, an opportunity to bulk up a single volume with a diverse assortment of topics. The concept kept coming back to me, watching this peculiar programme, in places coherent and persuasive, in others curiously perverse, as if form and content had been devised by different people. The concept of a miniseries about the arrival of the Renaissance in Britain and its effect on our damp archipelago is most worthwhile, and presenter Dr James Fox, a young Cambridge don who already has a BAFTA nomination Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“You can never embarrass politicians by giving them publicity.” Michael Heseltine’s verdict on Spitting Image – he claimed, of course, he never watched it – was surely one of the truer things said in last night's Arena memorial Whatever Happened to Spitting Image?, marking the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the satirical puppet show. It certainly seemed balanced when set alongside an apoplectic Ted Heath, who accused those behind it of being, basically, a bunch of jealous, irresponsible losers.Antony Wall’s film did achieve a nice sense of balance about a programme that went from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If nothing else, this second series of Jed Mercurio's brutalist police thriller has done wonders for Keeley Hawes. Not that she was in much need of a career pick-me-up, but the way her haunted portrayal of the much-abused DI Lindsay Denton has brooded over the story like a funeral shroud deserves to land her a few gongs and is doubtless already bringing in heaps of job offers. Arriving as it has in the midst of continuing revelations about the murky innards of real-world British policing, LoD2's depiction of murder, corruption and conspiracy within the force has gained additional Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If anybody is daft enough to argue that the television licence fee isn't worth it, then just usher them before this superb mockumentary, brought to you by the team behind Twenty Twelve.Now that the Olympics are but a pleasant memory, London 2012 head of deliverance Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville, again mastering the art of suppressed exasperation) has been appointed as head of values at the BBC. It's a job - as David Tennant's languid commentary informs us – that was created in the wake of “recent learning opportunities at the Corporation” (a beautifully subtle reference to the Jimmy Savile Read more ...
mark.kidel
On Sunday night, you can hear Martin Amis sound off about Englishness. An advance selection of extracts from the interview were published in the Radio Times on Tuesday. The reaction from the press was instantaneous: Amis is always good copy. The writer’s reflections – out of the context of the film, which none of the journalists appeared to have seen – excited a series of predictable responses, constrained by the ideological straightjacket of both right and left – and, no doubt, the patriotic sensitivities of this island nation. The surprising thing is that, although the film will be Read more ...