TV
Kieron Tyler
Watching the whole of the first series of Boardwalk Empire is like being at a fun fair, where there’s always one ride, one attraction that’s the big draw. No matter how they sparkle, no matter how loud the barkers shout, it’s the massive Ferris Wheel or the scariest ride that overshadows everything else. In Boardwalk Empire, Steve Buscemi is the bright light, the loudest voice, the scariest thrill.The series probably wasn’t meant to centre on Buscemi. Writer Terence Winter created a peerless ensemble with The Sopranos. As executive producer and Boardwalk Empire‘s sculptor, Martin Scorsese Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Since Prime Suspect introduced television viewers to the writing of Lynda La Plante, the concept of event television has lost a little of its lustre. Such was the remarkable heft of La Plante’s storyline about a serial killer and Helen Mirren’s performance as DI Jane Tennison that schedulers have ever since been sending out their pedigree crime dramas in great big lumpy chunks. Twenty years on, La Plante doesn’t quite kick down the door the way she used to. Above Suspicion is back for a fourth formulaic turn around the block and it’s going out not on three consecutive drop-everything evenings Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Wanted: classic novel, preferably 19th-century but 18th will do, or early 20th. Anything reeking of period before television acceptable, though preferably not too working class. English if poss. Barnaby Rudge need not apply.Is there a crisis in the adaptation industry? Is inspiration running dry? This Christmas a new adaptation of Great Expectations became the fifth – yes, the fifth – version of the work put out by the BBC. In a nanosecond or two the movie will follow with Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham and Mike Newell (Four Weddings, Harry Potter 4) at the helm. No matter that Dickens Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Knitwear fetishists won’t be as thrilled with Borgen as they were with The Killing, but based on the first two episodes of the Danish political drama, Birgitte Nyborg Christensen is a match for Sarah Lund. She’s as likely to stray from what she ought to be doing as Lund and just as adept as spotting what no else can see.On live TV, days before the parliamentary election, party leader Nyborg horrifies her spin doctor by reacting to a clip of a coalition partner’s new position on asylum seekers by instantly saying she can’t work with him. Following her convictions and being honest is what she’s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Since the departure of Friends and Frasier from our screens, fans of the genre have been waiting for the next generation of mates-based US sitcoms. A few - including Two and A Half Men and The Big Bang Theory - have crossed the Atlantic and found a niche on British television, but this latest offering comes with instant audience and critical acclaim. New Girl, which began in the States in September, gained more than 10 million viewers (making it Fox’s highest-rated autumn sitcom debut in a decade), its run was doubled after two episodes and it has been nominated for a couple of Golden Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I had been planning to speculate about what might happen in the finale of Public Enemies, but its three-night run was shifted back a day to accommmodate a Panorama special about the Stephen Lawrence case. Thus we only have the opener to go on, in which convicted murderer Eddie Mottram (Daniel Mays, pictured below) was released after serving 10 years in jail, and was assigned to the probationary care of Paula Radnor (Anna Friel).It frequently looked as if Friel had been condemned to a repeat of her recent role in ITV1's Without You, where she moped about neurotically and became convinced her Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Diehard Morsians have been harbouring murderous thoughts ever since it was announced. No doubt they communicate these to one another in fiendish acrostics and cryptic clues. It was one thing giving Lewis his own spin-off, quite another to bring Morse back to life in the form of a prequel. The heretical suggestion of Endeavour is that the grumpy old sleuth did not in fact spring fully formed into the world in the shape of John Thaw, with that slow world-weary lope and a withering glare lurking in those iridescent peepers.Well, at least the eyes have it. Shaun Evans is in most respects a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Robert Louis Stevenson's classic swashbuckler has been made into countless films and TV series in several languages, and has survived Muppet Treasure Island as well as an interstellar Disney animation called Treasure Planet. Pleasingly, Sky1's new version made a fine addition to the lineage, combining a shrewdly picked cast with lush production values while retaining much of the darkness and menace of Stevenson's novel.The opening scenes established an appropriate atmosphere of near-supernatural dread, as the crazed Billy Bones (David Harewood, pictured right) arrived at the Admiral Benbow Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
We laughed. We cried. We cursed. We gulped. Not at fiction. But at fact. At the real world. The year's best theatre? Murdoch vs Watson. Thriller? The hunt for Osama. Horror? The Japan tsunami. Finest comedy? The Beeb's year long genuflection. Best opera/installation? The funeral of Kim Jong-Il. This was the year that reality trounced art.News channels thrived as their bulletins played out these teeth-janglers. Some were short explosive little numbers; others seemed determined to become five acters. Narratives were complex, characters unforgettable, visuals motley. The world mostly huddled Read more ...
graeme.thomson
My, but it’s been a bumper few months for the Baker Street Boy. There’s been Anthony Horowitz’s superior new Holmes novel, The House of Silk, Guy Ritchie’s second instalment of his steampunk take on Sherlock as karate-kicking action hero, and now the return of the BBC’s stylish reboot of Holmes as a new millennium net 'tec. And what a lot of fun it was. There may be helicopters, webcams and Wi-Fi, and Dr Watson may be blogging rather than scratching away at the old pen and ink, but still the essence of what makes Holmes such an enduringly compelling fictional figure was evident in spades.The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot’s own version of Golgotha, a traffic island hard by Parc Hollywood. The culmination of a three-day epic, The Passion of Port Talbot was street storytelling at its most transformative. The cast of thousands, including local am drammers and the Manic Street Preachers, were dragooned by WildWorks, National Theatre Wales and, above all, Sheen, whose year this was.His sectioned Hamlet at the Young Vic underlined what Read more ...
mark.kidel
In a year of mounting turmoil and uncertainty, it was easy to fall back on safe bets and comfort-zone reassurance. Addictive TV series offered a welcome haven from the angst of financial meltdown: Sarah Lund’s melancholy airs in The Killing offered a homeopathic cure for the gloom of double-dip recession. Breaking Bad, the saga of the cancer-struck physics teacher who takes to a life of crime was dark, funny and endlessly surprising. Downton Abbey, by way of a contrast, was well made and watchable, in a warmly soporific kind of way.TV continued to thrive on the cult of celebrity, spewing out Read more ...