TV
Jasper Rees
Trust Me made an eponymous plea to the audience. Its implausible premise – that a nurse might steal a doctor’s identity and land a job in A&E – called for your credulity. Around the broadcast of the drama's first episode on BBC One, sundry articles sprang up in the media offering supportive evidence that just such scenarios often come to pass for real.And yet in this medical case there was a kicker. Most impostors are motivated by some form of psychological flaw: grandiosity, narcissism, deep denial. Trust Me took a different tack: its fake doctor (played by Jodie Whittaker) was so Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a new ‘tec in town. Cormoran Strike may look like one of life’s losers – he’s on the edge of bankruptcy, sleeps in the office, and what passes for a personal life is a right mess – but in Tom Burke’s portrayal I suspect he’s going to be winning audiences in a big way. He’s the creation, of course, of JK Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith – the author’s chosen anonymity lasted barely three months – and her debut in crime writing is now a satisfyingly stylish BBC adaptation. Following on directly from these three episodes of The Cuckoo’s Calling come two based on its sequel, The Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Journalist Mark Austin is no stranger to conflict, having reported from war-torn landscapes including Rwanda, Iraq and even the ITN newsdesk. However, when the battle lines were drawn closer to home and involved an enemy he couldn’t see, the veteran journalist found himself in unfamiliar territory and without any kind of roadmap. When his teenage daughter, Maddy, was suffering from anorexia, Austin, by his own admission, was found wanting, not knowing what to do and struggling with a situation he didn’t understand and could do little to influence. This Channel 4 documentary seemed Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a burning question of western civilisation: what persuades young people brought up among us to walk out on their lives and join the cult of murderous fanatics who call themselves Islamic State? If any dramatist could attempt a coherent answer it’s Peter Kosminsky, who for more than three decades has been telling minutely researched stories – in documentary, drama and a fusion of both – about the big moments of modern British social and political history. His last three films in particular - The Government Inspector, Britz and The Promise – have all had some bearing on Britain’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was only at the dawn of the Blair age that Peter Kosminsky truly emerged as a basilisk-eyed observer of the nation’s moral health. By the time New Labour came to power in 1997, Kosminsky had been working for several years on a film which was eventually broadcast in 1999. Warriors, an award-winning account of the traumatic fallout of peacekeeping in Bosnia, served as a prequel to a trilogy of films in which he tracked the ethical degradation of the Blair decade.In The Project (2002) he dramatised the curdling of idealism occasioned by Millbank’s win-at-all-costs skullduggery. The Government Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Whether it’s the £400,000 that separates Mishal Husain from John Humphrys, or the 74 million miles between the metaphorical markers of Venus and Mars, there is a gulf between the genders. Despite legislation to enforce equality, the reality is that, right from the start, boys and girls are treated differently. Boys like trains, right? Girls like dolls… Before you know it, female students are massively under-represented in the sciences, and worrying numbers of young men think it’s OK to shout sexual threats to women on the street in the name of banter. Boys will be boys after all… but Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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 shots. The difference with Peter Kosminsky (b 1956) is, although it’s the title he takes in the credits, he's not really just a director. In the last 25 years he has researched, storyboarded and painstakingly cajoled into existence a body of work which, for sheer linearity of purpose, stands comparison with, say, Anthony Powell’s 12-volume portrait Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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 some sort of terminus. With only a few minutes still to run, who wasn’t thinking, crikey, still quite a tick list of bows to tie up? Was Juan Elías, whom we now know is a killer (only not of Ana Saura), going to be shopped by Alicia, and would she secure immunity from prosecution beforehand? Or would Eva Durán get there first? Would someone spring Read more ...
Nick Hasted
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 since the Vikings took their gods with them to America, what happened when the worshippers assimilated, and forgot?This first season of Bryan Fuller and Michael Green’s Gaiman-overseen adaptation answers with an increasingly discursive road-trip taken by Mr Wednesday (Ian McShane as a genial but ruthless con-man, the twinkle in his eyes sometimes Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
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 dissected and ruined them in the mid-Fifties, but her grass-roots activism saved those higgledy-piggledy streets. This film has some great archival footage that brings those days to life, though it could have done with fewer talking heads and more detailed interpretation.Vanity Fair writer and director Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary Citizen Jane: Battle for Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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 ready: spot the difference between a woman who passes herself as a doctor and a woman who passes herself off as a Doctor.Trust Me, among other things, is a timely shop window for Whittaker’s abilities. The plot requires her to play her own private game of doctors and nurses. At the start she’s Cath Hardacre, a ballsy ward sister who makes the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
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 best of all possible worlds.It may never have been achieved in reality, but in the first of a three-part documentary Utopia: In Search of the Dream (BBC Four) Professor Richard Clay, an art historian and Newcastle’s first professor of digital humanities (sic), led us through a memorable discussion of the ideas and ideals of utopias and importance of Read more ...