TV
David Benedict
“Her most devastating surprise ever.” Thus spake The Guardian, a quote happily slapped across the cover of the first paperback edition of Agatha Christie’s 1967 thriller Endless Night. While I wouldn’t go quite that far – that honour goes to her still startling, genre-busting The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) – it’s a compelling little chiller. Small wonder that ITV wanted it for their franchise. Just one tiny problem: it’s a crime novel without a detective. Step forward screenwriter Kevin Elyot who, like an invisible mender, has satisfyingly woven Julia McKenzie’s Miss Marple into Christie’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They've had Ray Winstone all over Sky this Christmas, gamely plugging this new dramatisation of J Meade Falkner's rumbustious crowd-pleaser, Moonfleet. Ray's theme is that we urgently need more quality drama with broad appeal on TV and shouldn't keep relying on worn-out cliches about drug dealers and murderers. His character in Moonfleet, smuggler and pub landlord Elzevir Block, is from the hard-but-fair school, prepared to fight it out with the men from the Revenue but also capable of unbending loyalty and protective, fatherly feelings towards the orphaned John Trenchard.Winstone is the best Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Queer as Pop (****) was as much about social as musical history, and Nick Vaughan-Smith’s film told its story with a combination of outstanding archive material and some incisive interviewees, the archive taking fractionally more of the weight. Subtitled “From the Gay Scene to the Mainstream”, it started loosely in the Sixties, then jumped back and forth across the Atlantic until the present day as the story demanded.It started from the premise that gay clubs were the places that played the best music, and that it was gay artists who were pushing the stylistic boundaries, which were then duly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
No definitive answers to what was "the best" of 2013 of course, and I daresay opinions will differ wildly. For instance, despite the plaudits showered on it elsewhere, I felt that Broadchurch stretched itself too thin after showing initial promise. An increasingly acute allergy to serial killer dramas meant I couldn't get too involved with Tony Grisoni's Southcliffe, let alone The Fall, with its extended, voyeuristic murder scenes. Being Netflix-free (he confesses sheepishly), I haven't caught up with House of Cards yet, or the conclusion of Breaking Bad, but obviously a profound shift in our Read more ...
Matthew Wright
At the time a mere 90 years old, detective novelist PD James raised literary eyebrows in 2011 with the publication of Death Comes to Pemberley, a crime-based sequel to Pride and Prejudice. Deftly recognising that Jane Austen’s popular romance had, in its country house setting and simmering rivalries, the staple ingredients of classic English detective fiction, James also managed to bring respectability to the sequel genre, which critics had hitherto looked upon, if at all, by squinting severely down the nose.Inevitably, TV came calling, palpitating with gratitude that James had resuscitated Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
So long then, Matt Smith, and thanks for all the fish fingers and custard. I’m sure I wasn’t the only fan left scratching my head as the Eleventh Doctor, clad in smoking jacket and age-enhancing makeup, played out his final scenes - not least because I checked Twitter afterwards, just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I can’t begin to imagine what your family members, tuned in through force of habit as their turkey dinners digested, must have thought.I’m not sure whether last month’s 50th anniversary episode is to blame for setting the bar too high, or perhaps for using up all of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A year ago it was all so different. Lady Mary gave birth and on his way home from the delivery suite Cousin Matthew steered his vintage soft-top into a tree trunk. There's rather less to report from Downton Abbey (***) this Christmas and the Daily Telegraph is free to devote its Boxing Day front page to something else. No actor has asked to be written out of the series, no one got engaged or even kissed, no one ended up in prison or even tears. His Lordship came dressed as Santa Claus, although he claimed to be wearing the uniform of a Lord Lieutenant.The yawning sense that there is nothing Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Among all the frank, hilarious bits that peppered Caitlin Moran’s bestselling book How To Be a Woman, it was the early chapters – the ones that dealt with the author’s unconventional upbringing in the suburbs of Wolverhampton – that seemed most ripe for repackaging for television. Whether Raised by Wolves lives up to its promise as a coming-of-age comedy drama for any teenage misfit that ever had an annoying sibling remains to be seen. So far, only this pilot episode has been produced. But on the strength of this sample Channel 4 could do worse.Although co-penned by Moran and her sister Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Many a series has found that its initial dynamism and brilliance cannot be sustained. From Julia Davis’s smart, brutal sitcom Nighty Night to the wildly-plotted sci-fi of Heroes, the second seasons just couldn’t keep up the standard or the pace. Often this failure is down to a consensus reality being pushed too far, the suspension of disbelief which the creators cleverly, carefully built with the audience being shattered. Fresh Meat, until very recently, never slid into this trap.Channel 4’s sitcom about a house of students in Manchester arrived in 2011, courtesy of Peep Show creators Jesse Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Homeland's coming home? Well not exactly, but the conclusion to this crazy, mixed-up third series did suddenly feel as if the writers had finally managed to express something that they'd been groping towards for the last three months. Namely, if the show was to stay on the road (series four is in the works), Brody had to go.The endgame to Brody's assassination assignment to Tehran was brutal and shocking, but given the stakes being played for it kind of had to be. True, you had to swallow enormous skip-loads of steaming disbelief before you could allow yourself to experience the cathartic Read more ...
theartsdesk
We at The Arts Desk are as fond as the next person of swans-a-swimming, partridges and pear-trees, not to mention gold rings, but be honest: 'tis already the season to be jolly sick and tired of all those knee-jerk compilations of Slade, sleighbells and Celine Dion's "O Holy Night". Without wishing to audition for the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, it’s time to admit that not everything made in the name of Christmas is of the highest artistic merit. But, it turns out, there’s gold in them there hills – snow-capp'd, natch.Tireless champions of excellence that we are, we’ve raided our memory banks Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Coleman never said, "Juantorena opens his legs and shows his class," any more than Queen Victoria said, "We are not amused." The words belonged to Ron Pickering, but Private Eye got it wrong. The chances are that Coleman, who has died at the age of 87, was not amused. A lot of people were, however. Who knows how much damage that one mis-attribution did, how much it contributed to the image crisis that Coleman put up with for so many years?Undeservedly or not, it is the lot of the British sports commentator to suffer the barbs and carping of his or her public. Some of them, and Coleman Read more ...