TV
Adam Sweeting
This new legal comedy is based on a well-received book by Alex McBride, but the transition from print to the BBC Two screen hasn’t been an unalloyed success. It stars Will Sharpe as trainee barrister Will Packham, who’s only been on the job for three months and faces cut-throat competition from three eager rivals for a post at a plush London law firm. He’s learning the law under the tutelage of Caroline, played with acidic cynicism by ever-reliable Katherine Parkinson (pictured below).Written for TV by Kieron Quirke, Defending the Guilty is an A-Z of the chaos and pitfalls of the law, where Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you’re a farmer who works round the clock to feed sheep, milk cows and so forth, how on earth do you make time to find a partner and reap a harvest of marital bliss? Well you could ask Sara Cox if you can join in her dating game for “lonely rural romantics”, back for its second series on BBC Two, but success cannot be guaranteed.Still, Cox, who grew up on a Lancashire beef farm, makes a cheery and plain-speaking host as she drags together suitors and suit-ees. This week’s contestants were Grace (23), who’s about to take over running the family farm in the Welsh borders when her father Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At first, the opening episode of Sky 1’s enticing new drama Temple looked like it was going to be mostly concerned with a heist gone wrong. A gang of bandits were busily stealing an enormous mountain of money when they were inadvertently locked inside the building they were robbing by their half-witted getaway driver. The sound of approaching police sirens indicated the way events were heading.This had been intercut with shots of Dr Daniel Milton (Mark Strong) making a furtive-looking late night visit to a hospital, ostensibly to retrieve his missing diary. In fact he was nicking a bag-full Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
September 10 is World Suicide Prevention Day, and Channel 5 marked the occasion with this sobering documentary. Focusing on male suicide – incredibly, now the UK’s biggest killer of men under 45 – it studied six patients at the Riverside Mental Health Centre in Hillingdon, west London. The results were both harrowing and heartbreaking.Director Rachel Harvie stood back and let her interviewees tell their stories, which served as both therapy and confessional. Charlie, a sad, mild-mannered boy of 18 covered in self-inflicted scars, has been diagnosed with ADHD, depression, social anxiety and “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“The Troubles” is a polite euphemism for the ferocious storm of sectarian violence and political chaos which convulsed Northern Ireland for 30 years, before being brought to a close by 1998’s Good Friday Agreement. Irish journalist Darragh MacIntyre fronts this seven-part history of those fearful days, and the first instalment of Spotlight on The Troubles: A Secret History (BBC Four) took us from the first stirrings of Catholic versus Protestant conflict in the mid-Sixties to the full-blown horrors of murders, bombings, mass internment and the British Army’s increasingly bloody involvement.It Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ben Chanan's The Capture (BBC One), which he wrote and directed, is a bang-up-to-the-minute dystopian thriller about the increasingly surveilled society we live in. In last night’s opening episode of six, he set out his stall from the first frame, where the bored staff in a CCTV control room were doing routine scans of the neighbourhood, until one of them saw a violent crime taking place in which a soldier attacked a woman in the street.Then we flashed back several hours to see the soldier, Shaun Emery (Callum Turner), winning his appeal against his conviction for murdering an insurgent in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This was the first of a two-part investigation into... well, I don't know what. The voiceover of High Society: Cannabis Café said it was an experiment “to test the alleged benefits of weed” and the people featured all had “a personal motivation for getting stoned” as they visited an Amsterdam coffee shop, where dope is sold legally.The jaunty music and lack of scientific context suggested that it was essentially a voyeuristic exercise where we watched normally uptight Brits getting giggly, having the munchies and (a few) telling someone they loved them.There were occasional funny moments Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Is there any challenge that television producers haven't filmed celebrities doing? They won't be happy until they've followed a bunch of them snowboarding down an Alp while baking a cake, conducting an orchestra and researching their family history. And if it involves a little sob followed by a group hug, bonus!But I can't be cynical about Sink or Swim (Channel 4) because it's in aid of the charity Strand Up to Cancer. The programme's USP is that 11 celebrities – using the term loosely – who are all weak or non-swimmers are being trained to do a sponsored relay swim across the Channel next Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There was a time when a new series of The Affair (Sky Atlantic) would cause the heart to quicken; now, not so much. Actually that sounds like the course of most extramarital affairs – an initial rush to spend time with the object of your affection, only for the desire to dwindle over time. Yet the opening episode (of 11) of the fifth and final series promised that this would be an interesting hook-up as there's an intriguing new thread with the introduction of the adult version of a character we last saw as a child in a previous series.In the opening episode things were in a state of flux in Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It may sound perverse to say it, but Albert was the perfect twenty-first century prince. Thrust into the heart of the British monarchy he was simultaneously an oppressed outsider who – despite his reputation as the most handsome prince in Europe (not least when wearing white cashmere pantaloons) – struggled to make his voice and intelligence heard. This curiously female aspect of his plight certainly adds a frisson to a story that would be remarkable by any standards. Thank goodness for historians that it is: for two hundred years after both he and Victoria were born we are being Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is how Steven Knight pictured Peaky Blinders when he first set about creating it. “I was very keen not to do a traditional British period drama, especially where it comes to depictions of working class people. Where the impulse is to say ‘it’s a shame, it’s a pity, isn’t it awful, wasn’t everything terrible for women’.“The Shelbys are a family that completely controlled their own destiny, and also coming from that background myself I wasn’t surrounded by people walking around saying ‘poor me, isn’t it terrible’. They were enjoying life and making the most of it, glamourising it, and that Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The Bauhaus school and its subsequent influence make an extraordinary story, and this film by Mat Whitecross, which has assembled a whole range of different voices and perspectives and woven them together, told it well.As a school, the Bauhaus lasted just 14 years from beginning to end. It opened in 1919 when Walter Gropius was finally able to accept an invitation to merge the art schools of Weimar and to be the principal of the “Staatliches Bauhaus”. The roll call of star teachers which Gropius attracted to Weimar was impressive right from the early years: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Read more ...