BBC One
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 ...
Adam Sweeting
This new series by Ashley Pharoah is dramatically different from his previous efforts in Ashes to Ashes and Life on Mars, though he still likes travelling though time. His method here was to saw off chunks of Far From the Madding Crowd, stir in some shavings from Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and then, having donned protective clothing, to squirt in a distillation of The Exorcist. All that remained was to stand clear and watch the concoction explode.The story so far: it's 1894, and Nathan Appleby (Colin Morgan), a man at the cutting edge of the new-fangled science of psychology, has Read more ...
Barney Harsent
And so we come to the end of the most spiteful, divisive and downright deceitful political campaign in living memory. And while we’re on the Ds, I’ll have disingenuous too, thanks. The remain camp was captained by a mildly Eurosceptic prime minister, who called the referendum in an attempt to secure an election victory, while Brexit has been spearheaded by a shambolic, and mildly Europhile, thatched homunculus, who simply wants the other guy’s job. We are, essentially, collateral damage in a spectacularly damaging career move.But with the shouting is over, it’s time for the really important Read more ...