TV
Katherine Waters
The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter on the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico decomposes, brine and methane are produced, and where these saline pockets collect, nothing grows. Dead creatures drop into it; live creatures that linger in it die. In this lifeless zone their bodies float preserved, a rich and dangerous larder for scavengers such as the giant mussels fringing its edges and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Beneath the creamy overlay of gowns, crystal chandeliers, palaces, uniformed flunkies and a sumptuous (albeit CGI-enhanced) Royal Yacht, a steely pulse of realpolitik fuels The Crown, returning to Netflix for its much-anticipated second series. Vaulting straight back on the horse, creator Peter Morgan pitches us into a royal marriage heading for the rocks, a weak and wobbly Prime Minister getting sucked into a disastrous escapade in the Middle East, and the story of the Queen’s troubled younger sister trying to a find a place in the world away from the flotsam of European royalty offered up Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How good was Howards End (BBC One)? Practically flawless. Even if it broke into a bit of an action-packed sprint towards the dénouement, it’s been a triumphant reaffirmation of EM Forster, a canonical favourite back in the 1980s courtesy of Merchant Ivory and David Lean who has since fallen out of favour with dramatists.It began with the casting. As the capable, questing Schlegel sisters Hayley Atwell and Philippa Coulthard (pictured below) rejoiced in a physical similarity which made it extraordinarily easy to believe in their mutual loyalty and intellectual compatibility – though of course Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Eureka! A programme about a woman artist that doesn’t define her as a wife and mother first and an artist second. In fact, Rachel Whiteread’s husband and two sons were mentioned only briefly in this excellent documentary that followed her career from 1988, when she began making plaster casts of furniture, through to the monumental public sculptures that have attracted so much controversy over the years. The beginning was horribly predictably, though. First we saw footage of the Turner Prize ceremony in 1993, when Whiteread became the first woman to win the £20,000 award. Earlier that Read more ...
Owen Richards
Long before Barack Obama spoke about the audacity of hope, the Voyager mission left the Earth driven by something else: the audacity of curiosity. What do the outer planets look like? What are they comprised of? And what’s beyond that?Storyville: The Farthest - Voyager’s Interstellar Journey is an immersive study of NASA’s most audacious mission. Condensed by BBC Four by 30 minutes from a cinematic release, this incredible documentary looks at the infinite and infinitesimal questions that Voyager dared to answer. It makes you proud to be human, and embarrassed to still use your fingers when Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Woman in White insists on being told and retold. Wilkie Collins’s much loved thriller is perhaps the most widely and frequently adapted of all the great Victorian novels. In Marian Halcombe it has a resourceful heroine whose appeal doesn't rest remotely in her looks, and in Count Fosco with his menagerie of sinister pets it has an impeccably flavoursome villain. No wonder the BBC is unleashing yet another television version, while the Charing Cross Theatre has revived Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 2004 musical in a newly stripped-down version.A first theatrical version found its way onto the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A thankless task, perhaps, to find oneself following in the footsteps of the berserk Spanish melodrama I Know Who You Are (theartsdesk passim). However, BBC Four’s new Saturday night import, whose first series was shown on Channel 4 a couple of years ago, is a French cop show which knows what it’s talking about and does the simple stuff right.Eschewing the bright lights of Paris or the sumptuous sleaze of the Côte d'Azur, Witnesses – or Les Témoins, if you will – is set in northern France, where the skies tend to be grey and the air is cool and damp. There were sweeping shots Read more ...
Owen Richards
Laid Bare – it has a lurid implication which is all too suitable for Joe Orton’s work. During a time where the straight-laced British struggled to ease into sexual liberation, Orton stretched acceptability to its very limits. Salacious acts had been going on behind closed doors long before the Sixties, but everyone hid behind a modest front. In his brief career, Orton’s plays challenged this hypocrisy with razor wit and poetic eloquence.Despite the title, Joe Orton Laid Bare was not as scandalous nor revolutionary as his writing; indeed, it was a rather traditional piece of programming. Read more ...
Owen Richards
There’s a storm heading to La Belle, the small forgotten town in the heart of the American West. As black clouds flash above the prairie, the injured body of Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell) falls at the door of widowed rancher Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery). After adding one more wound to his collection, she takes in the stranger and helps him heal. Alice isn’t the only widow; everyone in town carries the weight of loss. Sheriff McNue is one of the only men not killed in a mining accident, but he passes like a ghost through the town, mourning his wife and failing sight. With news that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
So, if you’re reading this you probably trudged all the weary way to the very end of I Know Who You Are. Or you didn’t but still want to find out what the hell happened. After 20-plus hours of twisting, turning, overblown drama, long-service medals are in order for all who flopped over the line. We are probably all feeling as drained and battered as half the cast: black-and-blue Santi Mur, anaemic Ana, slapped-up Pol, smashed-to-smithereens Heredia.The bloated brace of concluding episodes took up three and a quarter hours of BBC Four’s Saturday night schedule. There was so much crime-solving Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Love, Lies & Records (BBC One) is one of those bathetic titles that are very Yorkshire. See also Last Tango in Halifax, which didn’t do badly. Sleepless in Settle is surely in development. This is the new drama from Kay Mellor, who set Band of Gold in a sorority of sex workers and Fat Friends among people mustering at Weightwatchers. With her long-established nose for a good yarn, she now moves in on that boiling cauldron of drama, Leeds city hall.It’s quite a shrewd concept. All human life is here: birth, marriage and alas death, all of them neatly packaged up into the opening episode's Read more ...
Owen Richards
BBC Two’s flagship crime drama Peaky Blinders returns for another guilty dose of slo-mo walking, flying sparks and anachronistic soundtracks. In the opening episode “The Noose”, we’re served a familiar course of family disputes, sinister threats and violent outbursts – but when the delivery is this exciting, who cares if it’s not anything new?We pick up where the last series left off: the Shelby clan imprisoned and facing the rope. Of course, family patriarch Tommy always finds a last-minute reprieve, but that close call has taken its toll and there’s only one man to blame. A year later Read more ...