BBC One
Three Girls, BBC One review - drama as shattering public enquiryFriday, 19 May 2017
Television dramas about catastrophic events in broken Britain are meant to be cathartic. They knead the collated facts into the shape of drama for millions to absorb and understand. Then we all somehow move on, sadder but slightly wiser. The Murder... Read more... |
Kat and Alfie: Redwater, BBC One review – 'EastEnders' spinoff suffers from no fixed identityFriday, 19 May 2017
EastEnders habituees will be familiar with the colourful past of Alfie and (especially) Kat Moon, who have both been AWOL from the mothership since early last year. But they’ve used the time wisely, preparing busily for this new spin-off drama in... Read more... |
Babs review - Barbara Windsor's playful screen therapyMonday, 08 May 2017
Barbara Windsor’s laugh belongs in the National Sound Archive. It’s a birdlike chuckle that wavers between innocence and dirt. We all know Babs’s laugh. But what about her tears? There have been plenty of those too according to Babs, BBC One’s... Read more... |
Line of Duty, Series 4 finale review - 'great acting, great writing'Monday, 01 May 2017
Cop a load of that, then. Hana Reznikova is serving time for triple murder. Ted Hastings is on permanent gardening leave. The Huntleys have renewed their wedding vows on a family trip to Disneyworld. Just kidding. This is a Reg 15 alert to advise... Read more... |
Decline and Fall review - 'a riotously successful adaptation'Saturday, 01 April 2017
Like many first novels, Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall has a strong whiff of autobiography. It is a revenge comedy in which Waugh – like Kingsley Amis after him in Lucky Jim – transmutes his miserable experiences of teaching in Wales into savage... Read more... |
Line of Duty, Series 4 review – 'the tension rocketed to brain-jangling red alert'Monday, 27 March 2017
Now promoted to the exhilarating landscapes of BBC One as a reward for previous good behaviour, Line of Duty set off at a scorching pace into the murky shadowland where crime, punishment, ambition and corruption mingle treacherously. Stretching back... Read more... |
SS–GB, Series Finale, BBC OneMonday, 20 March 2017
In the end, SS-GB promised more than it could deliver, but it still left us with some memorable images (not least in the cleverly-crafted opening titles) and several excellent performances. The ending even dangled the faintest hint of a sequel,... Read more... |
Back in the Line of DutyMonday, 13 March 2017
At the end of last year’s third series of Line of Duty, we saw the back of the reprehensible Dot “The Caddy” Cottan, and with the much-abused Keeley Hawes consigned to the show’s morgue of deceased leading characters it felt as though important... Read more... |
The Replacement, BBC OneWednesday, 01 March 2017
Can women have it all? (Stop me if you’ve already heard this one). This is the premise of Joe Ahearne’s new three-part drama, set in the offices of a successful firm of architects in Glasgow. But he’s a bloke, what would he know about it? Anyway,... Read more... |
SS–GB, BBC OneMonday, 20 February 2017
“What if the Germans had won the war?” has been a recurring theme in fiction, from Noel Coward’s Peace in Our Time to Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Robert Harris’s Fatherland. There was even a predictive pre-war “future history”... Read more... |
Apple Tree Yard, Series Finale, BBC OneTuesday, 07 February 2017
Guilty or not guilty? Dum dum, dum dum. No, it was not just in your imagination. As the axe hovered over the neck of Yvonne Carmichael at the climax of Apple Tree Yard, and the madam forewoman waited to deliver the jury’s verdict, there was an... Read more... |
Who Do You Think You Are? - Ian McKellen, BBC OneThursday, 26 January 2017
Science has yet to determine whether thespians are the product of genetic predetermination. We all know about the Foxes and Redgraves, myriad self-spawning dynasties of actors bred of actors wed to actors, while there are plenty of others who go... Read more... |
