BBC One
Veronica Lee
Oh joy upon joys, as The Apprentice returns. Those of you who watch while playing a drinking game in which you imbibe every time a cliché or preposterous, bombastic or ridiculously inflated statement is uttered will have to check in your livers again sometime soon, but I’m delighted to say that this new series allows another permutation of the game - have a glug every time you can spot the person who has watched every second of the previous six series but Hasn’t Learnt a Damned Thing.And so last night, accountant Edward Hunter weighed straight in as project manager on the first task. PM is Read more ...
fisun.guner
Dr Michael Mosley has been involved in some pretty hair-raising stunts in the course of filming various biology strands for the BBC. So, I imagine he might have felt something like relief filming his new series Inside the Human Body. With neither potholing nor bungee jumping, nor tearing down a steep hill in a giant, transparent ball in the offing, the only terrifying thing the engaging presenter was required to do, at least for this opening episode of a four-parter, was to hold an hour-old baby. This was a lovely, tender moment in a film that told the story of human conception and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a week unfeasibly packed with new drama across the BBC and ITV, the three-part Exile may prove to be the one that lingers longest. It was a thriller and a detective story, but what gave it its formidable grip was the way the central mystery was intricately entwined with the painful personal story of Tom Ronstadt (John Simm) and his father Sam (Jim Broadbent).Simm's character was a burnt-out journalist from the fictional London-based Ransom magazine. Until he got the sack, he had specialised in high-octane sleaze, his dirt-digging zeal cranked to a frenzy by drink and drugs. His Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The flying Twitter fragments said more about The Wedding than the battalions of experts, "palace insiders", historians and friends ever could (couldn't somebody have put a bag over Simon "infinite loop" Schama's head and had him bundled away from the BBC studio in the boot of a car?) Everybody seemed to adore Kate's dress. Some suggested that princesses Eugenie and Beatrice were in drag. "The Royal Family is BACK", tweeted Piers Morgan. "#proudtobeenglish" added former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan. "Harry's thinking, how did I not end up in a carriage with Pippa Middleton?" Read more ...
theartsdesk
Comedy writer John Sullivan has died aged 64, writes Adam Sweeting, after spending six weeks in intensive care battling viral pneumonia. The creator of several hit comedy series for the BBC, Sullivan is guaranteed immortality for his masterpiece, Only Fools and Horses, which ran from 1981 to 2002. Featuring the escapades of the wide-boy south-London brothers, Rodney and Del Boy Trotter (Nicholas Lyndhurst and David Jason), it became one of the best-loved British comedies ever screened, and also gained a substantial international following. A 2004 poll named Only Fools... as the best Read more ...
David Nice
Trouble? What trouble? There may be the odd reader who doesn't get past the Austerlitz sequence of War and Peace, and many who don't brave the master's last big novel questioning church and state, Resurrection, but that's their problem, not Tolstoy's. He is indeed - as Professor Anthony Briggs, the other star of this two-part documentary, states - the God of the novel. As a man, he was troubled to his dying day, and eventually a trouble to the state. Yet while "what is life for?" is not a phrase I like to hear fall from Alan Yentob's lips, I can't fault this beautifully filmed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
theartsdesk readers were aghast and appalled when BBC One supremo Danny Cohen cancelled detective series Zen after a paltry three episodes. However, he has made amends of a sort by commissioning a second series of Peter Moffat's legal drama Silk, after series one ended last night.And why not? Its characters and plots proved compelling, and the show's viewing figures over its six-part run have averaged around 5.9 million, when catch-up viewing on services such as BBC iPlayer and Sky Plus are taken into account.
"Maxine Peake has excelled in Silk and we're delighted to be bringing this high- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Will Silk make it to series two, or will it feel the wrath of BBC One's mad axeman, Danny Cohen? The former, we fervently hope. Despite some implausible incidents and occasionally silly plotlines, Peter Moffat's battling-barristers drama reached the end of its first series looking stronger than when it started.Much credit for this must go to Maxine Peake's superb portrayal of Martha Costello, the pugnacious girl from the north country pitted against Rupert Penry-Jones's smooth and superior Clive Reader, as both of them strive for that coveted elevation to QC. It was difficult not to feel Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
By the trail of dead shall ye know Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd, who bounces back irascibly for a ninth and final series of Waking the Dead. For once, British TV has the edge over its American counterpart. While Jerry Bruckheimer's US series, Cold Case, always feels dragged backwards by its clunking reconstructions of ancient crimes (especially the device of using young actors to impersonate now-elderly perps in their prime), Waking the Dead manages to catapult its back-catalogue felonies vividly into the present.The unsolved mystery in this first two-part episode, Harbinger, dated Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Horror and dismay have greeted BBC One controller Danny Cohen’s decision to axe detective drama series Zen, after the network aired a solitary three-part series in January which pulled a very respectable 5.7m viewers per episode. Shot amid succulent Italian locations in Rome and the surrounding countryside, Zen won plaudits for Rufus Sewell’s performance in the title role (and it appeared that Sewell in a range of stylish Italian suits exerted an aphrodisiac effect on a sizeable number of viewers), while his leading lady and former Bond girl Caterina Murino lent an aura of Italian Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a moment in last night’s Silk when a young solicitor turned up late for a trial. He was also an actor, he explained to his client’s counsel, and had to attend an audition. For a Head & Shoulders ad. The USP of Peter Moffat’s courtroom dramas is that, more than any writer since John Mortimer, he knows whereof he speaks. Having once been a barrister himself, the serpentine ins and outs of chambers, the politicking and skulduggery etc etc are his area of expertise. So you take it on trust that the events dramatised here are the truth and nothing but.Thus a barrister Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You can see why the BBC's drama gurus wanted to have a go at remaking South Riding, which last came around in 1974's hit version from Yorkshire Television. It has drama, romance, social conflict, lofty ideals and looks a bit like a parable for our cash-strapped times. Processed through the screenwriting circuitry of Andrew Davies, TV's novel-adapter par excellence, it has emerged as a superior soap tailored with mercenary expertise for that demographic sweet spot that is 9pm on a Sunday night.Winifred Holtby's 1936 novel, which was published the year after its author's death, is a story of Read more ...