wed 28/05/2025

TV

theartsdesk Q&A: Director Peter Kosminsky, Part 1

The name will never trip off the public tongue. Millions watch his work - most recently his superb realisation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. But there is no hall of fame for television directors. It’s only on the big screen that they get to be big...

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I Know Who You Are, series finale, BBC Four review - gripping, but no one to root for

The first thing to say is that this wasn’t the actual end. BBC Four scheduled I Know Who You Are to run two episodes a night over five Saturdays. The innocent punter might have assumed that after 10 x 70 minutes of the Spanish import, we’d arrive at...

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DVD/Blu-ray: American Gods

Neil Gaiman understood the country where he’d landed as an immigrant in the Nineties by writing American Gods. His first substantial novel after his crowning comics achievement, The Sandman, mined an idea of infinite plenitude: if every immigrant...

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Citizen Jane review - portrait of a New York toughie

When you’re next strolling through Washington Square Park, or SoHo, or the West Village, you can thank Jane Jacobs that those New York neighbourhoods have survived (though she'd blanch at the price of real estate). Four-lane highways almost...

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Trust Me, BBC One review - Jodie Whittaker's tense medical check-up

Even the canniest scheduler at BBC One couldn’t have arranged things so propitiously. Jodie Whittaker was already filming the medical drama Trust Me when she was cast as you know Who. Trolls unhappy at a female i/c the Tardis will have their quips...

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Utopia: In Search of the Dream, BBC Four review - the best of all possible documentaries?

Only man is vile, goes the hymn, and yet humankind has always imagined ideal societies where people care for one another, everyone has access to anything necessary physical and emotional well-being, and all is for the best – without irony – in the...

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Fargo, Series 3 Finale, Channel 4 review - the best drama of the year?

“This is a true story. This is a story…” The self-referential nature of Noah Hawley’s baroque narrative arc was one of the great joys of the third season of Fargo. Over the past 10 weeks its constant invention, cinematic tricks and award-worthy...

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Man in an Orange Shirt, BBC Two review - soft-focus view of 1940s gay love affair

As chat-up lines go, “I can’t do my fly up single-handed” is pretty full on – even if it is true. Thomas March (James McArdle) is speaking to James Berryman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who not only went to the same public school but has also just saved...

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The Handmaid's Tale, Series 1 finale, Channel 4 review - exquisite to look at but glacially slow

Come awards time, it’s inevitable that Elisabeth Moss will be collecting a few for her portrayal of Offred, the endlessly-suffering lead character in The Handmaid’s Tale (her real name is June). But I reckon the real stars of the show are...

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Queer as Art, BBC Two review - showbusiness and the gay revolution

Part of the BBC's Gay Britannia season, here was a programme fulfilling what it said on the tin: prominent LGBTQ (when will all these expanding acronyms cease to confuse us all) figures narrating, examining, discussing, analysing, letting it...

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Top of the Lake: China Girl, BBC Two review - thrillingly murky

In the riveting first series of Top of the Lake, it was personal for Down Under detective Robin Griffin. She headed to a hilly corner of New Zealand to be around for the death of her mother while looking into the disappearance of a young girl. There...

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Against the Law, BBC Two review - uplifting and deeply moving

The thing almost no one remembers about the great Nora Ephron/Rob Reiner 1989 romcom When Harry Met Sally is that the love story is intercut with real couples talking to camera about the mechanics and longevity of their true-life loves. It shouldn’t...

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