BBC One
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 ...
Adam Sweeting
The legal drama has become a staple of stage and screen, for a variety of excellent reasons. All of human life really is there, from love and hate to good and evil, crammed into the claustrophobic cockpit of the courtroom. Adding an extra squirt of kerosene to an already explosive mix is the fact that, as Dr Gregory House likes to say, “Everybody lies.”The latest cab on the telly-lawyer rank is Silk, BBC One’s sizzling new six-parter from Peter Moffat. A former barrister himself, Moffat has carved out a prestigious legally orientated screenwriting career, which has taken him from Kavanagh Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There is little danger of our nation wasting away for the lack of culinary-themed televisual roughage: hairy bikers, domestic goddesses, campaigning wide boys, chicken-liberating poshos, alpha-male bully boys, Michelin-starred French fusspots. Channel hopping some nights feels more like flicking through the world's least coherent cook book.But it’s Masterchef – and its inevitable D-list-led Celebrity offshoot – that has become the firm favourite of the armchair gourmand. It's not fine dining by any stretch of the imagination but it's reliable and terribly moreish. Part contrived reality telly Read more ...
howard.male
I only needed to see the trailer of this new eight-part science-fiction series for the words “Battlestar” and “Galactica” to spring depressingly to mind: the neutral colourlessness of everything, the characters looking meaningfully into the middle distance, the scrubby Earth-like landscape of Carpathia (rather than its almost anagrammatic Caprica from Battlestar), and the fact that this was another bunch of disenfranchised humans trying to settle on a new planet. But then to top it all, one of the leads from that cult American series (British actor James Bamber) also appeared in the opening Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A film apparently in support of British servicemen on BBC One? The Daily Mail will never believe this. Whatever, this was a bleak, unsparing investigation of the way veterans of our nation's various pointless and endless wars are dumped back into civilian life with scant regard for their mental health or physical wellbeing.It was a particularly forceful 60 minutes because it was fronted by Colonel Tim Collins, the former Commanding Officer of the Royal Irish who made that celebrated eve-of-battle speech before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It was also Collins who was infuriated by Jimmy McGovern Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Few would dispute the supremacy of Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford among the BBC’s current fleet of costume dramas. Measured, domestic and infinitely gentle, there are no Machiavellian footmen or illicit trysts here, just wholesome country adventures championing those unfashionable values of honesty, neighbourliness and hard work. The lamentable histrionics of the recent Upstairs Downstairs could have done well to note these successes, adapting material free from obvious drama (and in the case of Flora Thompson’s autobiographical trilogy, almost entirely without plot) and fashioning from Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was always going to come a time when Little Britain had to stop. For a couple of years the heavily milked franchise seemed to be on a tape loop on BBC Three. Its international expansion - to the Greek islands one Christmas, to America for an entire series – suggested that its stars were getting itchy feet. That hankering to grow wings has manifested itself in the form of Come Fly With Me, a spoof docusoap in which Matt Lucas and David Walliams present an entirely new set of grotesques. In last night’s third episode, the gallery was still growing.It’s a risky strategy. When Harry Enfield Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There must be good reasons why the fine crime novels of Michael Dibdin have been absent from screens large and small. They're probably to do with Dibdin's deadpan satirical tone and the anti-heroic nature of his protagonist, the Venetian detective Aurelio Zen. Also, his shrewd observations of the hidden undercurrents of Italian society are almost bound to get lost in screen translation. "Books and movies are completely different media", Dibdin once commented, "and the more the Hollywood crowd learns to knit their own stuff, the better."So, it's pleasing - perhaps even slightly miraculous - to Read more ...
josh.spero
All the time I was watching Toast last night, based on Nigel Slater’s memoir of his early years, I was wondering whether it was filmed for the benefit of the audience or of Slater himself. The final scene (no spoiler – we know how this story ends) where the young Slater ran away to join the kitchen at the Savoy was revealing: the head chef who gave him a job was played by Nigel Slater, reassuring his younger self that “you’ll be all right”. This felt more like therapy than drama.But who can deny the author his right to redemption, especially when he has had to survive Helena Bonham Read more ...