TV
Adam Sweeting
Channel 4 loves to walk the line between the compulsive and the repulsive, and this new dating show, complete with fake-salacious title, is a peerless specimen. The set-up is simple – one woman asks five guys who are “looking for love” to move in with her for a week, during which she chucks them out one by one and ends up with a winner.What’s amazing is how there’s never a shortage of volunteers desperate to make physical and emotional spectacles of themselves as they strip naked (only metaphorically, but that could change) and parade their insecurities. The hostess for this inaugural episode Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Perhaps the most surprising thing is how good natured they all sound. There’s no anger. At least, not much – one can’t help wondering what they say off air. Through a kaleidoscope of vocation, hopes, dreams, inspirations, and worries about stuff that their male counterparts do not have to consider, nine conductors who happen to be female share their stories in this engaging and long-overdue film, with humour, intelligence and an occasional dose of major frustration.Women are increasingly stepping to the fore in the world of orchestral conducting, but my goodness, it has taken a long time. In Read more ...
David Nice
As RuPaul's best squirrel friend Michelle Visage, co-doyenne of the amused and amusing judges, put it, "that was some next-level shit". She was referring to a high point in the contest's weekly lip sync-ing finales, right at the end of the new season's first entertainment (on Netflix), but it's true of the majority of the 13 queens presented over two episodes to compete for the crown. Usually you detect a weak link or two, and they're gone in the first weeks; you never got to know who they were. But this time no-one was sent home, and the quality looked like the best ever - a return to form Read more ...
David Nice
Spectacular success couldn't have happened to a more interesting person, or a better writer. The pithy but imaginative prose in the third and final instalment of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, which as you may just have heard was published this week, flies off the page in readings by Ben Miles, Nathaniel Parker and Lydia Leonard of the RSC's Wolf Hall adaptation and Shiloh Coke (Lady Anne Clifford in Emilia at Shakespeare's Globe). There are commentaries by three men very well acquainted with Mantel's progress - you'd like at least one woman - but the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 2020 Formula 1 season will commence in Melbourne next weekend... unless the race is cancelled because of the mounting coronavirus panic. Everyone will have to self-isolate and watch Netflix instead, so how fortunate that the ‘flix has delivered this second series of Drive to Survive in the nick of time.The first series last year was impressive, but this one seems to have taken a quantum leap upwards. Across the 10 episodes, it picks and probes at all the salient issues of F1, exploiting an amazing degree of backstage access and brilliant high-def action photography to reach back and forth Read more ...
Veronica Lee
ITV's drama department is in overdrive at the moment, with a seemingly endless release of series with high production values and stellar casts, and the latest is The Trouble With Maggie Cole. It's a six-parter based on an idea by Dawn French (who also stars) and is written by Mark Brotherhood.It's set in Thurlbury, a fictional coastal community in the West Country, where everybody knows everybody else. Self-appointed “local historian” Maggie Cole (French), who has a museum cum gift shop at the town's ancient keep, minds everyone's business but her own, and is flattered when a local radio Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In this aptly-titled series (BBC One), four British 20-somethings visit the USA to investigate the inner workings of the beauty industry. Perhaps not surprisingly, they discover that it’s a hotbed of greed and exploitation.Their first stop was the Beautycon exhibition in Los Angeles, a must-see gathering of 30,000 “beauty fans” and (ghastly neologism alert) online “influencers”. The latter included the glittering Kenneth Senegal, who can earn $14,000 by mentioning a cosmetic product in one of his videos. Chloe (a Belfast-based beauty blogger) and Casey (a fastidiously made-up gay man from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan have been taking their bickering TV trips for a decade, beginning in the north of England in 2010 before working their way around Italy, Spain and now Greece (on Sky 1). They say this will be the last time, but believe that at your peril.Coogan has estimated that the characters they play in The Trip are about 30 per cent real and 70 per cent fictionalised, and part of the show’s allure is trying to spot the join between the two. No doubt this was the plan when director Michael Winterbottom (who has helmed all four series) originally sold it to them, perhaps not Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of Liar, one of many thrillers from the fertile keyboards of Jack and Harry Williams, was on ITV back in 2017, so you may have forgotten the somewhat labyrinthine details. In a nutshell, smarmy surgeon and serial rapist Andrew Earlham (Ioan Gruffudd) had been unmasked by the dogged (and sometimes illegal) methods of one of his 19 victims, schoolteacher Laura Nielson (Joanne Froggatt). However, before the police could arrest him, his dead body was found in the marshes on the Kent coast, with its throat cut. End of series one.An early revelation in this new season was that DI Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The rage and bitterness surrounding the Brexit brouhaha have made it immune to comedy and satire, but perhaps change is in the wind. Channel 4’s bogus royal family is back after a two-year gap, charged (as an introductory voice-over explained) by Her Majesty’s government with cheering up the divided nation.The timing is exquisite – or, I suppose, horrific if you’re a member of the real-life royals – since the air is still echoing with the fall-out from Harry and Meghan’s great escape and Prince Andrew’s “interesting” private life. Andrew was played by Tim Wallers like an obnoxious fund Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since Back in Time for Dinner in 2015, this BBC Two social history strand in which families travel into a recreated past to experience ways in which society, leisure and lifestyles have changed has proved a robust perennial. Its latest iteration, Back in Time for The Corner Shop, whisked us away to a Sheffield corner shop in 1897, where the local Ardern family threw themselves into the rigours of late-Victorian retailing with commendable joie de vivre.Sara Cox played presenter and sergeant-major, chivvying the Arderns along in their unfamiliar new roles, and filling in some factual history Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Everybody lies," says property developer Tony to his PA and secret lover Natalie. “Even your mum probably.” And of course he’s not wrong.Sarah Williams’s drama, showing over four consecutive nights on ITV, is an easy-to-digest and deftly-wrought piece of work, using an unspecified accident which has left somebody in hospital – Williams has bent over backwards to avoid revealing the victim’s identity until the final episode – to prise open the secrets and lies of Vivien (Francesca Annis) and her family. Vivien, who's turning 70, has been living on the Sussex coast for the past 40 years, Read more ...