BBC One
Stephen: The Murder That Changed A Nation, BBC One review - ‘He was a cool guy and everybody loved him’Wednesday, 18 April 2018
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... Read more... |
Ordeal by Innocence, BBC One, review - Agatha Christie goes nuclearMonday, 02 April 2018
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... Read more... |
Come Home, BBC One review - a drama of family disintegration, divided loyaltiesWednesday, 28 March 2018
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 (... Read more... |
Hold the Sunset, BBC One, review - this is an ex-sitcomMonday, 19 February 2018
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... Read more... |
Troy: Fall of a City, BBC One review - soapification of the Trojan WarSunday, 18 February 2018
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... Read more... |
McMafia, Series finale, BBC One review - the last bite is the cruellestMonday, 12 February 2018
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 (... Read more... |
Requiem, BBC One review – everything but the scaresSaturday, 03 February 2018
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... Read more... |
Big Cats, BBC One review - how cats conquered the worldFriday, 12 January 2018
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... Read more... |
Hard Sun, BBC One review - cops versus the end of the worldSunday, 07 January 2018
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... Read more... |
McMafia, BBC One review - James Norton looks promising in a murky le Carré worldTuesday, 02 January 2018
It’s not the first time that James Norton has kicked off BBC One’s New Year primetime celebrations in Russian style. Two years ago, he was costumed up as the courageous Prince Andrei, in illustrious ensemble company for Andrew Davies and Tom Harper’... Read more... |
The Miniaturist, BBC One review - a lovely supernatural soapThursday, 28 December 2017
Simon Schama called the Netherlands’ century of success an "embarrassment of riches". The thrust of Jessie Burton’s lavishly hyped debut novel The Miniaturist is that the Dutch felt guilty about their good fortune, and denied themselves the right to... Read more... |
Little Women, BBC One review - life during wartime with the March sistersThursday, 28 December 2017
One of the much-hyped jewels in the crown of the family-friendly BBC holiday season is this new three-episode adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's much loved novel by Heidi Thomas, the writer of Call the Midwife. We started in the New England winter –... Read more... |
