BBC One
Veronica Lee
Revenge dramas are such a guilty pleasure - there's a vicarious thrill in watching a baddie being taken down in a way that we might wish to, but never would, in real life. And boy, but did Gemma take down cheating husband Simon in the closing episode of Mike Bartlett's Doctor Foster. Senior GP Gemma and hip property developer Simon's perfect life, with their perfect house and their perfect son was, of course, anything but - and finally it all came crashing down.Waiting for Gemma to exact her revenge on Simon over his relationship with their friends Susie and Chris's daughter, Kate (a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the first of two new TV series this week to feature a female police officer investigating the discovery of long-buried skeletons (the other one is Thursday's Unforgotten on ITV). The two shows are different in tone, but still reminiscent of numerous noir-ish policiers of recent vintage. It makes you wonder whether commissioning editors are trying hard enough. We hear a lot of earnest talk about "diversity", but it doesn't seem to apply to themes and subject matter.Anyway, From Darkness stars Anne-Marie Duff as Claire Church, a former Manchester police officer who became demoralised by Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For the final instalment of its season of 20th-century classics, the BBC left the world of fiction behind and took a Rosie-tinted amble along the leafy byways of Laurie Lee’s youth. The first part of Lee’s autobiographical trilogy is much the most read. Sales of six million means Cider with Rosie has a lot of fans who will have watched this dramatisation anxiously fearing the worst.They can rest easy. This amiable, elegiac adaptation’s commitment to honesty extended to filming in Slad, the Cotswold village where the author grew up – and, in a touching final shot, now rests in a graveyard Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Axed by the BBC at the end of 2013 after its second series, ostensibly because of poor viewing figures, Ripper Street found a new home on Amazon Prime, where the third series began streaming in November last year. With a fourth and fifth series already commissioned by Amazon, the BBC is making up for lost time by airing Series Three. Perhaps the Top Gear bunch will be back on the Beeb yet.Happily, the change of address has done Ripper Street no harm at all, and this powerful opener centred on a train robbery gone wrong in London's East End. Masked hijackers set out to steal a Read more ...
fisun.guner
Feelings. Whoa whoa whoa feeeelings. Just like that Morris Albert hit of the Seventies for star-crossed lovers everywhere, I lost count of the number of times I heard that word in this Alan Yentob meets Jeff Koons love-in. Or, more precisely, “feeling” singular, since Koons, one of the most bankable artists in the world, was talking about the “feeeeling” aroused when you looked at one of his art works. The engendered feeling was, we learned, a cross between sex-lust, consumer-lust and religious transcendence – “transcendence” being another favoured Koons word. And left to his own words, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Interceptor began as it didn’t mean to go on. A young boy of mixed race walked home through an estate and saw two men in a violent altercation. One, who was white, shot the other, who was black, presumably dead. “Dad!” called the boy. The murderer pointed the gun, realised he was aiming at his son, and scarpered.Spool forward a couple of decades. The boy, now an adult, had moved out of a gritty tragedy and into a trigger-happy comedy. Ash (OT Fagbenle) was a customs cop on the hunt for small fry in tandem with his buddy Tommy (Robert Lonsdale). Their first chase across a crowded Waterloo Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Teeth. Who’d have them? This documentary about the state of the nation’s gnashers came along at a timely moment for your reviewer. Earlier in the week I suffered my first ever extraction. Didn’t feel a jot of pain, of course, but by Christ you know all about it when the dentist is fiddling about inside your mouth, attempting with a variety of utensils to pluck out the culprit.I now see I had it easy. Meet Angela, a dog-walker from Cheshire. Her teeth were in a state of rococo disrepair. The camera went in for a snoop and it was like a cross between a motorway pile-up and a binful of rotting Read more ...
Barney Harsent
A third series for Kay Mellor’s rags-to-riches series can herald few real surprises. We know, roughly speaking, what we’ll be getting: a cautionary tale – be careful what you wish for – populated by warm, well-drawn and big-hearted characters who are believably flawed and hiding secrets of the sort that fill the time and mouths of garden fence gossips across the country. That, and the reliable, solid ensemble cast that Mellor’s track record (Band of Gold, Fat Friends, In the Club) can command.What we might not have been expecting (had we managed to avoid the pre-transmission press) was for Read more ...
fisun.guner
If it’s about magic, and features sanitised cobbled streets and dark gothic interiors, then Harry Potter comparisons will no doubt be inevitable.And so it has been with this seven-part adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s hefty 2004 novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, directed by Toby Haynes. The comparison seems fitting, for though this is a mini-series that has the sumptuous look and high production values of a typically lavish BBC costume drama, everything else about it says children’s drama. Surely the BBC schedulers are wrong to put it out after the watershed? Even more than Harry Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is perhaps a clever piece of ironic perversity to have scheduled the first part of a three-part documentary on sharks on polling day, but the subject here is the comings and goings inside the complex world of the predators of the sea. The series is an amazing feat on the part of the BBC Natural History Unit, in tandem with the Discovery Channel.The images from under the ice in the Arctic to the South African ocean and the Great Barrier Reef are in themselves awesomely beautiful and mysterious, as we investigate the natural world in ways that were never possible before the revolutionary Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Peter Kay's first sitcom in 10 years is always something to look forward to, and it achieves another first: the BBC made the six-parter available on iPlayer to watch in its entirety before showing it on a terrestrial channel, and it has broken all viewing records.Despite the title, it isn't a Peter Kay creation, although he does direct and star. It is by Paul Coleman and Tim Reid, but Kay and his co-star, Sian Gibson, are also credited as writers so clearly some of this is improvised; there's the occasional clue of Kay and Gibson looking just about to corpse before the camera cuts away.They Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The past is a foreign country. Celebrities do things differently there. Programmes which put people in time machines and whizz them back to a less centrally heated era have been around for a while. Back in the day they’d pick on ordinary people and make them live as a skivs and drudges in some specifically benighted era before the invention of such new-fangled concepts as electricity or the flush mechanism or gender equality. But that was then. Reality in the jungle has turned us all into schadenfreude addicts, so now we get the same idea but with famous faces. Besmirched famous faces.24 Read more ...