TV
Tom Baily
All is not well in Boston, Lincolnshire. Unemployment, immigration concerns, Brexit frustration, and the highest murder rate in the country. How do you solve the problems of contemporary Britain? Send in an American. And not just that. Bill Hixon (Rob Lowe) is the best: educated to Doctorate level, with the accolade of being America’s top Metropolitan police chief three years running. But Bill is also impatient, and lacks some basic people skills (not to mention he can’t grasp British irony and sarcasm). He’s also brought his teenage daughter Kelsey (Aloreia Spencer) with him. We gather that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Anthony Joshua’s shock defeat by the unfancied Andy Ruiz Jr suggests, heavyweight boxers ain’t what they used to be. Antoine Fuqua’s sprawling HBO documentary (this was the first of two parts) bangs the point home with its vivid examination of Muhammad Ali, the sport’s all-time greatest exponent, a fighter whose influence stretched way beyond sport into politics, religious faith and racial identity.The boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay was born in Louisville, Kentucky in January 1942. He changed his name after he’d defeated world champion Sonny Liston in 1964 and converted to Islam – Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Does every generation suffer its own form of doomsday paranoia? In Stephen Poliakoff’s BBC Two drama Summer of Rockets, it’s the late 1950s and everybody’s convinced they’re about to perish in a nuclear holocaust. In this penultimate episode of Russell T Davies’s Years and Years (BBC One), the near-ish future was being sucked into a hideous vortex of Biblical plagues (power blackouts and 80 days of rain), terrorist bombings and a global wave of fascistic governments.Davies is an ingenious weaver of narrative spells, and as the series peaks he’s escalating the shocks and terrifying revelations Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When the first series of Sky Atlantic's Big Little Lies paraded across our screens in 2017, its shocking but satisfying ending looked like the perfect conclusion to a superb self-contained drama. Doh! Of course it wasn’t – it was just the first season out of who knows how many.The curse of television’s addiction to squeezing the juice out of any successful show, incarcerating the viewer in a perpetual twilight of provisional pseudo-endings, has been discussed elsewhere, but short of passing a law against it or holding a referendum on each individual case, it’s hard to see it going away. But Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Tomorrow, Martin Scorsese delivers, via Netflix, two hours and 22 minutes of screen time devoted to Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, following on from the release last week of the latest Bootleg Series boxed set, 14 CDs covering five full concerts from November and December 1975, as well as rehearsals and sundry soundboard cuts from other shows. Casual fans may be content with the excellent 2 CD Rolling Thunder set issued back in the Noughties; collectors, however, will be clearing shelf room to set it alongside the rest of an increasingly cyclopean Bootleg Series. The rehearsals, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
At the end of the first series, MI6 spy Eve (Sandra Oh) stabs psychopathic assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) in the stomach as they’re together on the bed in Villanelle’s gorgeous Paris flat ("chic as shit" according to Eve). “I really liked you! It hurts!” cries Villanelle. Series two doesn't mess about. It starts 30 seconds later, as Eve rushes down the spiral staircase, gasping, distraught, carrying a bloody knife.“I think I might have killed her,” Eve tells her crisp boss Carolyn (Fiona Shaw), who's on the phone from London. A couple in love, the man with an engagement ring at the ready, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It helps to be of a certain vintage to appreciate the first impact of Tales of the City. Armistead Maupin’s column, begun in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1978 as a frank and joyous portrayal of gay culture, became a series of half a dozen cult novels. These started appearing in the UK from the mid-1980s. It was a British broadcaster, Channel 4, which began the project of adapting them as dramas in 1993, joined for the second series by Showtime who did the third on their own in 2001.The next three novels, which culminated in the departure from San Francisco of its female protagonist Mary Ann Read more ...
Tom Baily
Shane Meadows has said that he always wanted to make a film where people didn’t talk. It’s homage to the European cinema he loves, with its preference for atmosphere over action, ambiguity over resolution, but it is also a way to confront an experience that lay dormant within his own life for too long. That is the trauma of the sexual abuse survivor, who is locked in silence and trapped by what cannot be said. If there were periods in The Virtues (Channel 4) that ambled along too slowly, or were simply too unbearable to watch, Meadows has achieved a redeeming climax in this final episode Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first film in this extraordinary series, Seven Up!, was made for Granada Television’s World in Action in 1964. It picked 14 seven-year-old British children from different social backgrounds, aiming to revisit them every seven years to see how their lives were progressing. Paul Almond directed the first programme, but ever since this has been Michael Apted’s baby.The slow, methodical progress of the series down the decades has meant that it has steadily accumulated a strange power, as these lives of others have in some ways become merged with our own. Those original seven-year-olds are now Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you should happen to be loitering in London’s Knightsbridge at 4am, don’t panic if you find yourself surrounded by the massed horsemen of the Household Cavalry. When they need to rehearse for great occasions like the Queen’s birthday, they can only do it in the middle of the night when there’s no traffic on the roads.This was one of many factoids packed into this new ITV documentary series. Other gems included the news that the regiment’s horses produce 6,000 tons of “royal poo” every year, which the lucky troopers have to shovel down the “dung tunnel”, while the horses have their faces Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Chernobyl (Sky Atlantic) is the most unmissable show on TV. Perhaps it’s because the Soviet nuclear catastrophe in 1986 was so blood-freezingly horrific that the filmmakers didn’t need to fictionalise or exaggerate.This penultimate episode was bad news for animal lovers. It opened with an elderly woman trying to milk a cow, only to be ordered at gunpoint to leave her home right away, because of the morbid threat of radiation. She reeled off a litany of historical famines, wars and invasions that she’d lived through, and concluded that she’d be damned if she was going to leave because of some Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Professor Brian Cox, still looking cheekily boy-band-ish at the age of 51, has made himself a child of the universe. His day job is professor of particle physics at Manchester University, but turn him loose with a camera crew and an unfeasibly large budget and he turns into a starry-eyed cosmic hippy.In his new series for BBC Two, the Prof is taking a survey of Earth and the other seven planets which make up our solar system. His thesis is that each of these – Mercury, Venus, Mars and the rest – experienced a period when they enjoyed conditions in which life could develop, but for various Read more ...