BBC One
Saskia Baron
Films, TV and books about autism often send me down memory lane; my older brother Timothy was one of the first children in the UK to be diagnosed with autism in the early 1960s, and I’ve kept a wary eye on how autism is portrayed ever since I can remember. But I wasn’t expecting the new BBC One drama, The A Word, to inspire a wave of nostalgia for Peter Perrett and The Only Ones, last seen at some grungy punk venue back in the late Seventies.The first episode of The A Word opens with a wonderful shot of a little boy (Max Vento, pictured below) stolidly marching along a hilly country road Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
John le Carré's 1993 novel The Night Manager was his first post-Cold War effort, and the fortuitous setting of its early scenes in a hotel in Cairo has allowed TV dramatiser David Farr to move the action forward from the post-Thatcher fallout to the 2011 "Arab Spring". Here we encountered the fastidiously tailored Jonathan Pine, the titular night manager of the Nefertiti hotel, a man who keeps his head while all around him is panic, gunfire and explosions.Pine's journey is going to be the mainspring of this six-part series, and judging by the opener, the casting of Tom Hiddleston is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“It’s routine, it’s procedure.” “It’s wank, it’s toss.” As you can tell, Happy Valley is back. If Sally Wainwright made bespoke ironmongery or dry stone walls or exceedingly good cakes, her work would come by royal appointment. Instead you can tell she’s good because she accumulates awards, including most recently a couple of BAFTAs for series one, and attracts actors from the farthest-flung corners of northern drama such as Cucumber and Downton’s downstairs, all gagging to speak her pearly dialogue.The BBC iPlayer has been running a five-minute recap of where we’re up to pending this second Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tracey Ullman is, I suspect, virtually unknown to anybody who either wasn’t around in the 1980s or isn’t a student of that decade’s comedy. For those in either camp, she was a very big name in British television before she left the UK to live and work in the United States – where, incidentally, she became part The Simpsons story (its creators worked on one of the shows she did in America).Now she’s back on British TV, and with a bang. Last night’s opener didn’t just have some of her pitch-perfect impressions, but also her keen-eyed observations of British life today. Clearly her long sojourn Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
So, Andrew Davies has bitten off the big one. It may have come as a surprise to some that the master of adapting the British classics for television hadn’t read Tolstoy’s classic-to-end-all-classics until the BBC mooted the idea of a new screen version, but this first episode (of six) boded very well all the same.It was Davies adeptly laying out the domestic ground (battlefields, too), and introducing the characters. For anyone intimidated by the length of the original novel – not to mention the heavy accretions of philosophy and history that Tolstoy loaded onto it – the surprise may have Read more ...
David Nice
None, or two? Only the tiniest whiff of spoiler is involved in pointing out that while the stage version, or at least the one I saw with an actor friend playing an early victim, settled for a semi-happy ending, this magnificently brooding adaptation in three parts – just the right length, surely – dooms us to ultimate discomfort, as an especially merciless Agatha Christie intended. The bare essentials of what may well be her masterpiece, with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Endless Night close contenders, were all professionally bolted in place, and the embroideries in a faithful 1939 setting Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Everyone knows a Nan – whether their own grandmother, someone else's, or maybe an elderly woman you see on the bus rudely (but rightly) telling youngsters they shouldn't be sitting when she has to stand. My grandmothers were nothing like the foul-mouthed curmudgeon that Catherine Tate has so vividly created, but the version of her I knew was a childhood neighbour; like Tate's character, dear old Mrs J would be perfectly nice to someone's face but when they left the room she would spit out: “Never liked him/her.”That Nan taps into some personal connection for many of us is a large part of her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some things never change. Once more, we join DCI John Luther – though only for a two-part special – as he glues himself to the trail of a serial killer. And once again Luther is played by Idris Elba, a man who can freeze time or make villains throw down their weapons merely by gazing into the camera with an expression of quizzical world-weariness.This time, writer Neil Cross opened by taking us to a clifftop near Beachy Head, where Luther gazed moodily out across the English Channel, evidently in the grip of an existential crisis, perhaps a hangover from the death of DS Ripley in series three Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If the title wasn’t already occupied, television-wise, the BBC might have titled Capital “The Street”. It’s got the high soar-aways over urban geography that recall the soaps, but here they spread wider, taking in a metropolis. It’s “capital” as in London, and we may wonder just who’s been padding around the premises before John Lanchester’s 2012 novel, from which Peter Bowker’s three-part drama is adapted. As a big-blend city story, comparisons to Dickens have been plentiful. But throw in the other meaning of the title – foundations of capitalism, the movement of money and all that, in a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As you all know by now, Friday is D-Day for Adele's new album 25, and part of the all-media Adelathon is Friday night's show on BBC One, Adele at the BBC. It's a mix of live performances and taped sequences linked together by chunks of interview with Graham Norton, and makes the perfect relaunch package for the reclusive superstar. It opens, aptly enough, with her performing "Rolling in the Deep".It probably won't surprise you to learn that a visibly excited Norton is not at his most critical. There aren't any questions about Adele's ill-starred songwriting collaborations with Damon Albarn Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nearly 20 years ago the West End was in a lather of excitement about a show called Voyeurz. A "musical revue" set in a nightclub on Manhattan, it was all about a young girl venturing into the uncharted caverns of her own sexuality, and it was opportunistically crammed with hot sapphic action. It tanked. Its producer and co-director was Michael White, known to his legion of chums as Chalky.Voyeurz was a last throw of the dice for White. An impresario always on the lookout for the unexpected artistic gamble, he coughed up the money for Oh! Calcutta! and The Rocky Horror Show, for Dame Edna Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Crime drama is a bit like the wheel. There’s only so much scope for reinvention. People try to come up with novelties all the time, then you turn on the telly and realise everyone else has had the same idea. Rumpled cops in macs, ex-cops haunted by the past, cops with overbearing bosses descended from Jane Tennison – they’re all out there, all the time. Even the casting department is running on empty. It’s been precisely five days since Unforgotten unveiled a chirpy detective played by Nicola Walker. Now here comes River, featuring a chirpy detective played by Nicola Walker.River is written Read more ...