BBC One
Jasper Rees
A few years ago Abi Morgan was everywhere. For the cinema she scripted Shame, The Iron Lady, The Invisible Woman and Suffragette. On television she adapted Birdsong and created The Hour and, most recently, River. But she’s mainly been quiet for a couple of years. Her silence is broken, loudly, by The Split (BBC One).The setting is a pair of London law firms specialising in divorce. Defoe’s, presumably named in honour of the much married Moll Flanders, is a boutique family outfit occupying a stuffy old-school set of chambers controlled ruthlessly by Ruth (Deborah Findlay, pictured below). Her Read more ...
Katherine Waters
The BBC excels at a very particular kind of drama, namely one where production values overawe dramatic content. Its version of The Woman in White (BBC One) proves no exception. Our hero is Walter, a bemused sappy painter played by ex-Eastender Ben Hardy. Not much recommends his character except his ornately Italian friend Pesca who sets up an apparently cushy job for him in the rural retreat of Limmeridge (“When you make it to the top, remember you friend Pesca at the bottom!” he exclaims, only partly in jest). The role consists of restoring some ageing prints while tutoring the daughters of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Home From Home, written by newcomers Chris Fewtrell and Simon Crowther, first saw life as a pilot in the BBC’s Landmark Sitcom Season in 2016, the channel's search for new and original content for its schedules. Well, new it may be, but original it ain’t – yet don’t let that put you off. It’s a decent enough run-through of several sitcom tropes, with Johnny Vegas as its everyman hero.The set-up is that underachiever but hard-working northerner Neil Hackett (Vegas), the manager of a newsagent at a motorway services (“northbound and southbound”), has scrimped and saved with wife Fiona (Niky Read more ...
Katherine Waters
When doctors told Doreen Lawrence her son had died she thought, "That’s not true." Spending time with his body in the hospital, aside from a cut on his cheek, it seemed to her he was sleeping. The death of a child will always be strange, and in the aftermath Neville, his father and her husband, even wondered if he might have been struck by the Biblical curse of the loss of his first-born.Quarter of a century after Stephen Lawrence was killed in an unprovoked racist attack on Well Hall Road in Eltham, a pall of unreality still hangs over his murder. Doreen and Neville’s pain remains raw and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ordeal by Innocence belongs to a new and, you hope, short-lived sub-genre. The only other stablemate is All the Money in the World. Both were in the can and good to go when very serious sexual allegations were made against a member of the cast. For the latter, Ridley Scott reshot every scene which featured Kevin Spacey, subbing in Christopher Plummer. For BBC One’s now annual serving of an Agatha Christie drama, everyone came back to redo the bits which previously contained Ed Westwick and now have Christian Cooke (pictured below). Fortunately most of these seem to be interiors, as the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A woman walks out on her husband and their three kids – two teens, one five-year-old - after 19 years of marriage. She doesn’t want custody. What could be so wrong with the man that she’s driven to such drastic action? Eleven months later, Greg (Christopher Eccleston, anguished but plucky, with a shaky Northern Irish accent) doesn’t seem to have the answer.This doesn’t help matters on his sticky first go at internet dating, where his opening gambit is to enthuse about Jon Ronson’s book The Psychopath Test and the conversation, before the question of the whereabouts of his wife comes up, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You need to be of a certain vintage to have any memory of the traditional suburban family sitcom. Like the Raleigh Chopper and the Betamax video, like amateur athletics and glamrock and key parties, it is an extinct cultural artefact. What did for it? The internet, mainly, and the kids not watching scheduled telly any more, and maybe the rise of stand-up. After one episode of Hold the Sunset (BBC One), the suburban family sitcom is still dead. It’s as dead as a well-known parrot whose demise was pronounced by John Cleese. Mystifyingly, Cleese has chosen this moment to return to sitcom for the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The plan to bring drama back to Saturday nights on BBC One enjoyed mixed success with Hard Sun, but now threatens to slide over a cliff with this trip back to the Homeric era. In the era of Game of Thrones and now Britannia, you can see why somebody fancied having a go at the swords-sandals-and-sorcery of the Trojan War. The question is, how?A dash of instant lustre has been added in the shape of screenwriter David Farr, who also wrote the much-admired adaptation of The Night Manager. However, early enthusiasm is liable to fade in the face of the beige-ish characterisations and mundane Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
McMafia has taught us to recognise one thing – you might call it the “Norton stride”. As the charismatic Alex Godman, James Norton has been advancing, confidently at screen centre, towards one challenge after another, and they have been coming (mildly put) from all sorts of unexpected quarters. He’s dealt with everything by pressing onwards, ignoring advice from all and sundry.Quite who he was propelling ahead to meet at the end of this final episode of Hossein Amini and James Watkins’s series was left a mystery. But if Vladimir Putin himself had slipped into shot, smiling lopsidedly, arm out Read more ...
Owen Richards
Despite horror’s omnipresence in cinema, British television has been somewhat deprived of jump scares. Every couple of years there’s an anomaly, such as Sky’s The Enfield Haunting or ITV’s Marchlands, but nothing has caught the public’s imagination – not since the innovative but controversial one-off Ghostwatch. Enter the BBC and Netflix with their new six-part series Requiem, promising to be the most terrifying show ever broadcast on the Beeb.Either the worst is yet to come, or the terror bar has been set very low; episode one brought little innovation and even less tension. There were the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Accepted wisdom seemed to be that in the animal world rats and cockroaches were the most adaptable and the most widely geographically distributed, followed by those pesky humans. But think again: the premise in this new three-part series is that the big cats have also done a terrific job of spreading worldwide, each a different species within the genus.Cue a ravishing film, jammed with marvellous images and fascinating information. We were treated to a terrific variety of these extraordinary predators, the top of the food chain: from the fastest to the strongest, the smallest to the biggest. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fans of Luther will be familiar with writer Neil Cross’s fondness for hideous violence, shocking plot-twists and macabre humour, as well as characterful London locations, and happily they’re all present and correct in this new sci-fi thriller. Cross’s madly escalating timetable of terror goes like this: take two mismatched detectives, set them off on a murder investigation, then start the clock ticking on the annihilation of the entire planet.The shockathon commenced right from the opening sequence. For an hors d’oeuvre, we saw the spook-ish Grace Morrigan (Nikki Amuka-Bird, another Luther Read more ...