TV
David Nice
Anyone expecting, as I was, a reverend and slightly earnest miniseries about Sigmund Freud's early professional years will be in for a surprise, and mostly in a good way. This, in short, is horror-schlock directed by Austrian specialist in the genre Martin Kren, made superior by acting and cinematography on a level with that to be found in the rather closer-to-history Babylon Berlin, a literate script by Stefan Brunner and Benjamin Hessler that's done its homework on the fledgling psychoanalyst's work in 1890s Vienna and above all a visceral quality which makes all the blood and grotesquerie Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Das Boot made an impressive debut early last year with its entwined narratives of war by land and sea. This second instalment (Sky Atlantic) looks set to be better still, exploring the strata of life under Nazi occupation in the German-run port of La Rochelle while also developing the American connection which we saw glimpses of last time around.It opened with a bang, or a series of bangs, as we joined Johannes von Reinhartz (Clemens Schick), skippering his submarine U-822 in an attack on a merchant ship on a dark and turbulent Atlantic. As the ship sank, von Reinhartz was horrified to see Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Andrew Marr’s art show is a lot of fun, although engulfed in almost overwhelming banality and cliché. Our enthusiastic presenter is a self-confessed addict of art. As a pillar of television presentation, he is a natural for this series looking at individual paintings, 10 in all starting with Leonardo's Mona Lisa.The “greatest” in the title is misleading, as this handful of the world’s best-known paintings are not necessarily the best. Aesthetically, the jury has long been out as to the quality of this early 16th century portrait. Her enigmatic smile fascinates, but she only leapt into mega- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This engaging sitcom created by comedian Holly Walsh has had a long gestation: this, the pilot episode, was first broadcast back in 2017 but Walsh's pregnancy meant that the six-part series commissioned at the time was filmed last year.The show was prompted by a chance remark a friend made to Walsh about a man whose double life was discovered only when he died, and the pilot begins with Colin Walcott's family gathering in a crematorium for his funeral after his death from a heart attack when his double life was exposed. It's not his bigamy that Walsh and co-writer Pippa Brown focus on, but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Reese Witherspoon has evolved into a growth industry on the new frontier of Big Television. Her production company Hello Sunshine has a heap of projects on the go with a range of networks, and following her success with Big Little Lies (for HBO), Little Fires Everywhere comes to you courtesy of Hulu (in the US) and Amazon Prime.Varied as her plans may be, Reese the performer knows exactly who she is. It’s not too difficult to trace her character in Little Fires Everywhere, Elena Richardson, back to the ferociously focused and determined Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, while Elena could be a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s impossible to tell whether this reality-doc series (C4) came to praise Best Western hotels or kill it off entirely. Some viewers have been weeping with laughter at the David Brent-style antics of the company’s Aussie CEO Rob Paterson and his motivational slogans (Smash It!, Give a *** etc), while others have hailed it as a red-flag warning about how not to run a business. With the pandemic crisis, there might not even be a business left to run.This final instalment threw caution to the winds and charged ever deeper into fantasy-land, not least with the company’s promotional Christmas Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s too early for a definitive account of the Covid-19 pandemic, and this was very much a Sky News version of what we’ve been through so far. Although it seems the virus has peaked and we’re entering a tentative stage of partial de-lockdown, the message was relentlessly grim.The government’s catalogue of blunders was rehearsed once again, from the catastrophic decision to send hospital patients to care homes without being tested for the virus to the serial failures to establish comprehensive testing and tracing. As Sky’s reliably morbid political editor Beth Rigby outlined, the Johnson Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Great idea to use a symphony orchestra as the basis for a TV drama, because all of human life is there. Not to mention death, since this entertaining, though melodramatic, new French import (Channel 4) began with the dramatic collapse on the podium of veteran conductor George Delvaux just as he was launching into the finale of the New World symphony. He was pronounced dead at the scene.After Delvaux’s demise, the plot orbits around the return to Paris of ace French conductor Hélène Barizet, played with flair and tremendous dress sense by Marie-Sophie Ferdane. Though strangely, she carries a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Since Donald Trump's election as US President in 2016, I imagine satirists have slowly lost the will to live – as nothing they can write can outdo his buffoonery. But when Greg Daniels (creator of the American version of The Office) and Steve Carell (its star) announced they were inspired to write Space Force from one of his ideas, it augured well.Trump never appears in Space Force, but his presence is felt in odd nods to the tweeting president, or his command to get “boots on the Moon by 2024”, or “boobs on the Moon", as the fictional president here tweets (but it could have been Trump Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Larry Kramer, who has died at the age of 84, was the Solzhenitsyn of AIDS who indomitably reported from the gay gulags of Manhattan’s quarantined wards and revolving-door hospices. “I felt very much like a journalist who realises that he has been given the story of his life,” he told me when I met him. “I don’t consider myself a writer. I don’t bring the question of art into it at all like most writers do. I’m a messenger. As with activism, you figure out your target and the best way of reaching that target.”His most celebrated work, The Normal Heart, was a polemic about the early years of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This short series of new dramas (on BBC Four) by a group of leading playwrights was commissioned by Headlong and Century Films, a week before the virus lockdown was announced on 23 March, and represents an artistic first response to a situation nobody can fully comprehend. As the introductory caption said, “it changed our society in a way that is… Unprecedented.”Three separate pieces had been squeezed into this opening half-hour slot, each finding its own angle on the crisis and each featuring actors delivering their performances via the pandemic lifeline of video conferencing. James Graham’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
David Olusoga’s A House Through Time concept (BBC Two) has proved a popular hit, using a specific property as a keyhole through which to observe historical and social changes. After previously picking sites in Liverpool and Newcastle, this time he’s chosen Bristol, the city where he has lived for over 20 years.Among Olusoga’s particular interests as a historian are the British empire, race and slavery, so it was no great surprise to find him homing on on Bristol’s links with the slave trade. His chosen house was built in 1718 by Captain Edmund Saunders, who trafficked slaves from Guinea on Read more ...