BBC One
Tom Birchenough
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’s War and Peace. To say that Norton’s central role in McMafia, the new eight-parter created by Hossein Amini and James Watkins (who directs the full series), comes with rather more moral ambiguity would be an understatement.If Tolstoy measured human probity in living right by God (and settling your gambling debts), the denizens of this particular “ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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 enjoy sugar, spice, and all things nice. The money went on surface things, on finery and furniture. The splendid look of a conflicted culture was beautifully reproduced in BBC One’s adaptation.The miniaturist of the title supplies the newly married Nella Oortman with delicately realised figurines and ornaments to decorate a cabinet-sized copy of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
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 – a simulacrum of Concord, Massachusetts, where Alcott lived with her three sisters, in circumstances of genteel poverty that she lightly fictionalised in her best-selling novel.An American classic since its publication, and never out of print, Little Women has already made it into half a dozen films, several television adaptations, a piece of Read more ...
Owen Richards
And so, with one last speech on the importance of kindness, Peter Capaldi and Steven Moffat bid farewell to the TARDIS. In their final Doctor Who episode, Twice Upon a Time subverted expectations with a small, sweet adventure which valued character above plot.We picked up from the end of Series 10, with the Twelfth Doctor meeting his first incarnation (brought back to life by David Bradley). Both refused to regenerate, causing a paradox which disrupted space/time, and brought with it a WWI Captain (Mark Gatiss, pictured below) and a glass creature. All three were abducted by the creature, who Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What joy that Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders were persuaded by the BBC to celebrate their 30 (ish) years as a comedy duo with this programme – and that this sweet confection was shown on Christmas Day. It was a pleasing mix of old clips and new material, and a reminder that when F&S are good, they are very, very good.Among the new sketches we returned to Prickly Pear Farm, where Dot and May are now running a hilariously inadequate natural burial site, and visited the Poldark set, where they played two irritating extras (pictured below with Poldark's Eleanor Tomlinson and Jack Farthing Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
“I am going to find out how much my trees live, breath, and even communicate. I am Judi Dench, and I have been an actor for 60 years – but I have had another passion ever since I was a little girl: I have adored trees. My six acres are a secret woodland, and my trees are part of my extended life.”What a lovely introduction! In My Passion for Trees, we spent a year, condensed into an hour, with Dench in her Six-Acre Wood in Surrey. A national treasure speaking of national treasures, she was wide-eyed at the wonder of trees. Indeed, there are more trees on our planet than stars in our galaxy. Read more ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Matt Wolf
Can it really be a quarter-century since that finest of all Merchant-Ivory film adaptations, Howards End, was first released? So it is, astonishingly, which surely means the time is ripe for a fresh celluloid take on EM Forster's enduring 1910 novel about morality, love and loss in Edwardian-era England. The current outing grants the creators of this collaboration between the BBC and the American channel Starz four Sunday nights to capture what the glorious Anthony Hopkins/Emma Thompson film conveyed in half that time. The verdict so far: compelling stuff that doesn't as yet fully Read more ...
Saskia Baron
At its weakest The A Word is just Emmerdale with a twist of autism, especially when the drama swivels away from the little boy to focus on adult infidelities, a grumpy patriarch, sibling rivalries and comedy Poles wisecracking in subtitles. But at its best it captures accurately, if depressingly, the difficult feelings some parents go through when they’re coming to terms with the knowledge that their child is not standard issue.With huge viewing figures (seven million in the UK on BBC One for the first series) and mainly excellent reviews, The A Word is bound to be enormously influential on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Much is being made of the fact that Kit Harington is not only playing the Gunpowder Plot mastermind Robert Catesby, but is genuinely descended from him (and his middle name is Catesby). However, despite its factual underpinnings and screenwriter Ronan Bennett’s flowery 17th-century dialogue, Gunpowder is drama in a historical vein, rather than nailed-down fact.This first of three episodes (on BBC One, but all are now available on iPlayer) was broody, dark and menacing, history recycled into a Gothicky netherworld. Westminster, 1603 style, was portrayed as a stygian pile on the bank of the Read more ...