BBC One
Marina Vaizey
Classical dancers conventionally have the briefest of all performing careers in the arts, knowing from the very beginning that they'll be lucky to have 20 years of performing at the top of their abilities, after at least 10 years training from childhood onwards. But Dame Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991) was a phenomenon, dancing into her sixties, for reasons that this painful and affectionate programme tactfully explored.Darcey Bussell comes across as someone who in spite of the usual dancer's injuries has remained optimistic and even upbeat on her own trajectory to the top, into retirement from Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What is light entertainment for? It won’t save the world or heal the sick or bring warring factions to the negotiating table. It’s teeth and smiles and bread and circuses on a Saturday night and it shouldn’t have to bear any greater weight. The Generation Game was never required to offer vital balm during the Three-Day Week. Barrymore didn’t nurse us all through Black Wednesday and Britain’s exit from the ERM. And yet there have been times this autumn when the last line of defence between civilisation and the abyss has been a fat failed politician called Balls making a glorious tit of himself Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Cities, the fastest growing habitats in the history of the world, provided the subject for the sixth and final programme in Planet Earth II, the series that came a decade after the original Planet Earth programmes set new standards for television coverage of wildlife and nature.The follow-up confirmed that they are still being set, even though we have become accustomed to intrepid cameramen getting close to subjects never seen before, and tight narrative editing that gives us both visible and verbal comprehensible sequences, all anchored by the comforting familiarity of David Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Anyone hoping for a few laughs and a nice bit of catharsis after enduring the eight unstintingly miserable episodes of The Missing would have got none of the former and hardly any of the latter. Writers Jack and Harry Williams had sprung most of their biggest surprises in earlier episodes, such as the revelation that the real Alice Webster was still alive and being held captive in Adam Gettrick's Swiss Alpine cottage, and indeed that Gettrick was the abductor of the girls around whom the story has revolved.Some loose ends were at least tied up. We saw how Gettrick (Derek Riddell) had killed Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The sketch format goes in and out of favour. It was huge in the 1970s, crawled under a rock when alternative comedians found other means of expression, and was reinvigorated 20 years ago by genuinely inventive shows like Big Train and The Fast Show. Since then, easily the biggest kid on the block has been Little Britain, which married mainstream appeal with a flair for subversion.After cashing in with a live tour, its stars didn’t really have anywhere to go with the format. They had a crack at ribbing the docusoap genre in the underrated Come Fly With Me, and then went their separate ways. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This new wartime drama launched on Remembrance Sunday is a curio. The setting of My Mother and Other Strangers is rural Northern Ireland in 1943, where it’s green and wet and a long way from the conflict. Into the midst of the fictional Moybeg on the shore of a lough a squadron of bombers from the USAF has been introduced. Their planes careen across the cloudy skies of a farming community where previously the loudest noises would have been the mooing of heifers in labour, while their pilots swarm into the pub and the fleapit. So they’re the strangers of the title.The mother is Mrs Rose Coyne Read more ...
Jasper Rees
So, a rough tally. We’ve had a trial, a near suicide, a punch-up, death by drowning, a near bankruptcy, a tin rush, another punch-up, a baby, a probable rape, a riot, another baby, and another one on the way, possibly a product of that probable rape. And more. Poldark (★★★), in the delivery of incident upon full-blooded incident, could be accused of many things, but it will not die wondering.After another 10 episodes, we are where we are. Cap’n Ross is not off to the wars after all, but the milksop doctor Dwight is, having sailed after an off-screen night of torrid smooching with the blue- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The concept is somewhere between single drama and series: to stay in one place while shifting focus from one character to another. Paul Abbott did it in Clocking Off, telling a different story each week about a group of workers in a Manchester textile plant. Jimmy McGovern exported the idea to The Street, where he opened one door at a time to find out what was going on inside. The common denominator of both series was scriptwriter-for-hire Danny Brocklehurst.Brocklehurst took the format and made it his own in Ordinary Lies. The first series was set in a car showroom in Warrington which was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems morbid, and perhaps even in dubious taste, to create a TV drama franchise focusing on the hideous fate of abducted children and the repercussions this has on their family and friends. Still, ratings are their own reward, and the first series of The Missing (a collaboration between the BBC and the US network Starz) was a critical and commercial success.So welcome to series two, now starring Keeley Hawes and David Morrissey in place of series one's James Nesbitt and Frances O'Connor (they call this an "anthology series"). Our new protagonists are Gemma and Sam Webster. Thanks to Sam's Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
“One of us is crying/ One of us is lying/ In her lonely bed/ Staring at the ceiling/ Wishing she was somewhere else instead…” Poor Juliet Stevenson must have wondered how she’d ended up like the girl in the Abba song – waiting for a call from her agent to apologise for getting her into this mess. It’s not Juliet’s fault. It’s the silly script.One of Us began last week on a dark and stormy night when a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds (but on recreational drugs) butchered a pair of newly-weds before car-jacking a Lexus and driving to a lonely Scottish glen where both sets of in-laws lived. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If Ashley Pharoah's superior chiller began with its 19th century protagonist, Nathan Appleby, trying to apply science and reason to seemingly irrational events, by the end of this sixth and final episode he had strayed way beyond the outer limits. Not only had the murky past of the Somerset village of Shepzoy reared up in numerous terrifying manifestations, but Nathan and his wife Charlotte were also receiving vivid and disturbing flashes into the future.To a soundtrack of eerie old English balladry, we've already had a parade of demonic possession, hauntings and murder. Last week, Shepzoy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on an abortive real-life attempt to blow up the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in 1894, Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent has sometimes been held up as a harbinger of the kind of terrorist attacks the world has been subjected to by the likes of Baader-Meinhof, Al Qaeda and Isis. Doubtless this was part of the BBC's motivation for making this new three-part dramatisation.However, any real-world resonances weren't assisted by the sluggish pace and melodramatic air of the piece, and Tony Marchant's screenplay didn't give a high-quality cast much to chew on. In the leading role of Read more ...