TV
Adam Sweeting
Could you cope with spending three years away from your family and loved ones while you went on the first crewed mission to Mars? This is the question that underpins Away, Netflix’s new space exploration drama.Certainly it’s a daunting ask, but if you were a career astronaut surely it’s something you’d have faced up to long before, even if it was only at some point during the long and arduous training programme that would precede a mission like this. However, for mission commander Emma Green (Hilary Swank) and her four companions, life on board their ship Atlas is full of awkward surprises, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apart from her acting abilities, the qualities which made Sheridan Smith a star were her authenticity and lack of pretension. Both shone brightly from ITV's affecting documentary, in which Smith assessed how her success affected her mental health and how she desperately wants the arrival of her new baby to open a fresh chapter in her life.Perhaps director Tanya Stephan took it for granted that the audience would already know about her longer-than-your-arm list of stage and screen credits (comedy, TV drama, stage musicals and even a bit of Ibsen and Shakespeare), because hardly any of it was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC’s version of James Herriot’s books about his life as a Yorkshire vet became a weekend TV staple, running for seven series and a couple of Christmas specials between the late Seventies and the start of the Nineties. This elegantly-mounted revival is a partnership between Channel 5 and PBS in the States, and judging from this opening episode it has the potential to pick up where its much-loved predecessor left off.It’s 1937, and in dingy, depressed Glasgow, the young James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph) has trained as a vet but is having trouble finding a job. His father, an unemployed Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I’m going to be a Disney princess!” Thirty-five-year-old actress Suzie Pickles (Billie Piper) is screaming with joy at having got the part, and her deaf, seven-year-old son Frank (Matthew Jordan-Caws) looks excited too. Her husband’s reaction? “I thought you were too old.”Hardly surprising, perhaps, that she’s cheated on him, but unfortunate that this comes to light in a celebrity phone hack, with pictures released all over the internet, just as a team of make-up artists, hangers-on and two wolf-hounds arrive at the low-ceilinged Pickles country house for a magazine photoshoot. “We’re going Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stories of the destruction of the natural environment are depressingly common, but Frank Gardner brought a fresh slant to this punchy account of a botanical expedition to Colombia (BBC Two). Best known as the BBC’s security correspondent, Gardner was partially paralysed in a terrorist attack in Riyadh in 2004, but was determined that this wouldn’t stop him. “I traded in my wheelchair for a pack horse,” he declared.It almost didn’t work, because a panicky Gardner, unable to cling on with his legs, was almost flung from his horse while descending a steep mountain track. The local Colombian Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
According to one interviewee here, a young Mancunian woman festooned with eyeliner, tattoos, pumped-up lips and huge hoop earrings, a major motivation for having cosmetic treatments is to make yourself look like Kylie Jenner and the Kardashians. “Big lips, square jaw, tiny waist, big bum, big boobs – now it’s become commercial enough that we can get it,” she explained.This may not be an aspiration shared by everyone – and what happens if the Kardashians switch to a gamine, Twiggy-style new look? – but you might at least expect that the people who provide such easily-available appearance- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of the malignant fantasist Carl Beech is one of the more iniquitous episodes in British legal history, a stomach-turning swamp of lies, gullibility and heinous incompetence. It shook faith in some of our supposedly most robust institutions to the core, and Beech’s lies tainted the reputations of some innocent victims who went to their graves with a shadow still hanging over them.Vanessa Engle’s documentary (BBC Two) told Beech's story with a sardonic eye, though the repeated jokey images of a Pinocchio figure tended to undermine the gravity of the tale. In 2012 Beech had cashed in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Manctopia” sounds like a blissed-out buzzword from the golden years of New Order and Happy Mondays, but in this four-part series (BBC Two) it’s used to describe the explosive redevelopment of Manchester. One of the fastest growing cities in Europe, it has been experiencing a sci-fi-like eruption of skyscrapers and upscale residential properties, and with London prices at astronomical levels, Manchester has been delighting property investors with its lucrative returns. Salford's burgeoning MediaCityUK, now the second home of the BBC, has been a further signifier of the city’s rising prestige. Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
The timing couldn’t be more perfect for a series like Lovecraft Country (Sky Atlantic) in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Here we have a spectacular show in which fantasy, horror and America’s racist legacy collide with remarkable results.Adapted from the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, it depicts the journey of a black family in Jim Crow-era America. Across 10 episodes, they must not only survive encounters with supernatural monsters straight from the work of the father of Cosmic Horror, HP Lovecraft, but also contend with real monsters, like racist cops in sundown towns, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mandy started life in the Comedy Shorts season last year, and has now been given a six-part series. Diane Morgan, who has a solid CV in other writers' work including Philomena Cunk, Motherland and After Life, here writes, directs and stars as the title character, who has a messy beehive, always wears thigh-high boots, has a fag on the go and a face set to permanent grimace.She's a walking disaster, finding that her aim in life – to own doberman pinchers – has many hurdles, and we follow them knowing that Mandy will never prosper. But Morgan, while keeping her creation just this side of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Music awards shows are a strange beast: part window display, part industry conference and part party. Especially if you don’t have Brit Awards or Mercury Prize budget to create a whizz-bang spectacle, the ceremonies can be an interminable pileup of attempts to earnestly celebrate both musicians and behind-the-scenes figures, in front of a room full of increasingly drunk and impatient people.The pandemic, though, requires something different. With the announcements and performances on a live video stream, and extra interviews and video clips on an app, the Association of Independent Music had Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
During World War Two, President Franklin D Roosevelt described the USA as “the arsenal of democracy”. Only a couple of decades later, Fidel Castro was busily turning Cuba, only 100 miles from the US mainland, into the factory of revolution, exporting armed struggle around the world. It made his country a geopolitical player out of all proportion to its size, at the cost of violently antagonising the Americans.Castro’s militant interventions in Algeria, the Congo, Angola and El Salvador were covered in the first part of this documentary (made by factual programming specialists Brook Lapping Read more ...