TV
Jasper Rees
Was The Little Drummer Girl commissioned by algorithm? Those who liked The Night Manager might reasonably have been supposed to enjoy another le Carré adaptation. The two dramas had DNA in common. Both steered away from the Cold War, and told of a rogue spy adopting a role to infiltrate a network and bring it down from within. There the overlap ended. Where The Night Manager exerted a vice-like grip, The Little Drummer Girl has caused much scratching of heads. Twitter's one-word review was “Huh?”So there was much audience depletion. By halfway through the series had haemorrhaged more than 40 Read more ...
Owen Richards
There’s no one right way to grieve. It cuts through everyone differently, whether reverting to childhood traits or out-of-character impulses. The person you lose might mean one thing to you, and something completely different to someone else; it can hit you both differently, and equally hard. In Sky Atlantic’s new import Kidding, Jim Carrey blurs the line between reality and fiction as his character Mr. Pickles deals with bereavement the only way he knows how: through television.Mr. Jeff Pickles is a TV national treasure, a cross between Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street. For 30 years, he and his Read more ...
Jasper Rees
And now for something completely different from The Fall. The nerve-shredding drama from Northern Ireland was written by Allan Cubitt and featured, as its resident psychopathic hottie, Jamie Dornan (pictured below). It seems the two couldn’t get enough of each other because here they are again in Death and Nightingales (BBC Two), adapted from Eugene McCabe’s 2002 novel. The setting is rural County Fermanagh and to blend in Dornan has cultivated some exuberant shrubbery about that chiselled jaw.The year is 1883, when on the occasion of her 23rd birthday young Beth Winters (Ann Skelly) plans to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In which the titular Mrs Wilson is played by her real-life granddaughter Ruth Wilson, in an intriguing tale of subterfuge both personal and professional. The curtain rose over suburban west London in the 1960s, where Alison Wilson was married to Alec (Iain Glen) and was the proud mother of their two sons. Then Alec suffered a sudden fatal heart attack, whereupon Alison found everything she’d taken for granted disintegrating around her.As if the shock of bereavement wasn’t bad enough, her world took a violent sideways lurch when a woman turned up on her doorstep claiming to be her late husband Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Destiny is all. The first two series of The Last Kingdom debuted on BBC Two, but for series three it has been fully embraced by Netflix. Global domination surely looms, since these latest exploits of Uhtred, the warrior who was born a Saxon but raised by Vikings, find the show hitting new peaks of throat-slitting, skull-crushing action and intense personal drama.Mostly penned by lead writer Stephen Butchard from Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories, the action again takes us to a bleak and chilled ninth-century England (it’s shot in Hungary). It’s a land of mud, snow and woodland seemingly in the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This opening episode of My Brilliant Friend was a stunning symphony in grey. For any viewers concerned that HBO’s long-awaited Elena Ferrante adaptation might be tempted to sweeten the visual experience of the writer’s impoverished 1950s Naples world to suit the expectations of an international television audience, the sheer subtlety of colouring here was the first sign that everything was going to be right.Director Saverio Costanzo will be receiving a whole range of plaudits for his work with the wide ensemble cast (including many non-professionals) that surrounds his two remarkable young Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The toughest subject you can imagine: when, and how, would you choose death over life? This riveting film examined that excruciating dilemma within the legal frameworks on offer to some of the terminally ill in the United States. Louis Theroux, narrator and interviewer, met people who wished to take control of their end, and encountered all the moral complexities of the issue along the way. It was an absolutely absorbing, and often very moving experience.Seven states in the US have legalised self-administered lethal medication (with professional safeguards), and such a law is being considered Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Jerusalem! This fact-studded story of 20th century British music told us that the nation's unofficial national anthem, Hubert Parry’s setting of William Blake’s poem, originated in 1916 as a commission from the “Fight for Right” movement. Officials wanted a grand piece of music to boost morale (following the law of unintended consequences, Parry saw to it that Jerusalem became a rallying song for the suffragettes, too). The work of Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams was also enlisted to boost the national spirit. Even bureaucracy recognised the potential of music to uplift, encourage, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Peter Jackson has form when it comes to re-examining cinema history. In 1995 he made Forgotten Silver, a documentary about Colin McKenzie, a New Zealand filmmaker who not only made the first sound recordings but also invented the tracking shot and the close-up, and pioneered colour film, back in the 1910s long before his counterparts in America and France. His impressive oeuvre was lost until Jackson found the abandoned cans of film in a garden shed. In the Jackson documentary, actor Sam Neill paid tribute to McKenzie, Harvey Weinstein gushed, and film historians like Leonard Maltin Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Why should I go out and kill somebody I never knew? There was no reason at all in it in my way of thinking.” Britain’s very last Tommy was Harry Patch, born in 1898, conscripted in 1916 and still alive on his 111th birthday in 2009. He was one of the witnesses in The Last Tommies, BBC Four’s remarkable work of oral history.The centrepiece of the BBC’s centenary commemoration of the Armistice unspooled over three nights, collating interviews made over 30 years. Its impact may be slightly occluded by Peter Jackson’s unmissable They Shall Not Grow Old this coming Sunday 11 November, which takes Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not to be confused with Nineties supernatural sitcom Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Netflix’s new incarnation of the high-schooler with infernal powers is a ghoulish thrill-ride which boldly surfs the dark side, with a pronounced feminist and gay slant. It’s the story of the titular Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka, who played Don and Betty Draper’s daughter Sally in Mad Men) as she struggles to reconcile the half of her which is a human teenager with the supernatural lineage of her warlock father Edward.As her 16th birthday looms, Sabrina prepares for her “dark baptism”, when she must sign Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Mark Kidel has made a beautiful, ethereal film projecting his version of Cary Grant and as such it’s destined to be picked over by the actor’s legions of fans, each of whom will have a different version. But what would the man himself have thought if he’d lived to see Becoming Cary Grant? Notoriously protective and ambivalent about his image, one can only hope that he’d approve of the documentary's sympathetic, melancholic tone.One of the biggest stars in Hollywood’s golden age, Grant appeared in over 70 films before retiring at 62. Kidel makes generous and judicious use of scenes from his Read more ...