BBC One
Adam Sweeting
Talk shows can go one of two ways. You can create a welcoming space where your guests can kick their shoes off and start telling daringly revealing anecdotes. Alternatively, there’s the Dame Edna formula where the guests are cannon fodder for the host.At 85, the Dame isn’t as laser-sharp as she was 20 years ago, and her guests wore barcode badges so Edna could flash up their details on a screen, but you wouldn’t dare play poker with her. The fiction for this BBC One show was that she had taken to the high seas on the cruise ship Ocean Widow to safeguard her ill-gotten earnings, having been “ Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What joy to be back with the Shipman and West families, created by writing team James Corden and Ruth Jones. It has been 10 years since sitcom Gavin & Stacey left our screens, and in this Christmas special there was some catching up to do as the two families, who alternate hosting Christmas in Billericay and Barry, were this year in South Wales.Gavin and Stacey (Mathew Horne and Joanna Page), who were expecting their first child when we last saw them, now have three children, and Nessa and Smithy's (Jones and Corden) boy is now 11, although still called Neil the Baby. Everyone was there, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you came to this expecting to be reminded of such ghosts of Scrooges past as Alastair Sim or Bill Murray, you will have been reaching either for the brandy or the defibrillator. In the hands of screenwriter Steven Peaky Blinders Knight and director Nick Murphy (from BBC One in partnership with the American FX network ), Dickens’s perennial tale of seasonal repentance has been transformed into a gruelling journey of cathartic horror.Having said that, it was frustrating that the opening episode (with the final two following on consecutive nights) is the least compelling of the three. It took Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
In films, as in life, unreliable narrators are not hard to find. But there is something remarkable about the unreliable narrator of Elizabeth is Missing, BBC One’s newest feature-length drama. Its protagonist, Maud (Glenda Jackson), is unreliable in the extreme – confused, forgetful and emotionally wounded. Yet unlike most unreliable narrators, we never fear that Maud is trying to sell us a false story. She is so clearly fighting to understand the truth.Here’s the thing: Maud has advancing dementia. She’s a strong-willed 80-something, trying to remain independent as the disease wreaks havoc Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A tip of the hat to Julia Ormond for boldly going where many an actress might have chosen not to. In this new six-parter by Marnie Dickens, she plays Julia Day, a mother of three who’s just divorced her husband and is turning 60. Dickens’s objective, we may surmise, was to drive away the fog of invisibility which can descend irrationally upon mature women, however capable they may be, and demonstrate that age can indeed be just a number.Julia has reached a turning point, and is brooding over roads taken or not taken, and what her life is worth. As she puts it in a voice-over, “daughter, wife Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A bit like all those people on the home front in 1940 (but only a little bit), we sit and nervously wait for news. Is World on Fire (BBC One) still listed among the living? Or even now is someone typing up the letter and sticking it in a brown envelope? “Fell bravely in the field … did its country proud etc…” Please may this ambitious Sunday-night drama live to fight another day? In seven highly impressive and involving episodes the first series has managed the near impossible and found an original way back to the Second World War.The portal in was the human heart, a messy and complicated Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You wouldn’t expect a drama called Dublin Murders (BBC One) to be a laugh a minute, but the cumulative anguish, menace and torment of this eight-parter made it almost unbearable, even if viewers were thrown a tiny scrap of hope in the final frames. Adapted by screenwriter Sarah Phelps from Tana French’s novels In the Woods and The Likeness, it was (mostly) the story of detectives Cassie Maddox and Rob Reilly (Sarah Greene and Killian Scott, both consistently impressive) trying to solve the murder of aspiring young ballerina Katy Devlin while struggling with traumas from their own pasts.The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This series examines murders in the USA “with elements of love and passion as well as prejudice”, and the second season opened (on BBC One) with "Killing in the Classroom", the story of the fatal stabbing of New York school student Matthew McCree by bisexual teenager Abel Cedeno. It was a case bristling with overtones of racism and homophobia, but this skilfully-made documentary also threw light on the arcane workings of the US justice system.The fatal 2017 incident stemmed from persistent homophobic bullying of Cedeno, a solitary and apparently mild-mannered boy who preferred practising as a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What did we learn at the end of The Capture (BBC One)? A rice jar is a good place to hide USB sticks. It’s possible to withhold the opening credits for 11 whole minutes. A green coat works exceptionally well with light blue eyes and shoulder-length auburn hair. And Ben Chanan, who originated the script and directed it himself, is a television dramatist to watch, and watch again.Whether we’ll be watching another round of The Capture remains to be discovered. We were left with the possibility that DI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger), having weighed up her options, has set herself up as a mole Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Five episodes ago, BBC One's The Capture set off at a cracking pace with the apparent abduction and murder of barrister Hannah Roberts by army lance-corporal Shaun Emery. With Roberts’s help, Emery had been acquitted of killing a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan in cold blood, the defence’s case hingeing on a timing glitch in the video taken at the scene by Emery’s body-camera.It didn’t make sense that he’d want to bump off the woman who’d dug him out of a huge legal hole, especially as he’d also become more than slightly enamoured of her. The feeling between them appeared to be mutual. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For his new drama series for BBC One, writer Peter Bowker (The A Word, Monroe etc) has taken as his canvas no less than a panorama of Europe in 1939, just as World War Two is breaking out. His principal characters include Harry Chase, a young man from a wealthy family who’s in love with Manchester factory girl Lois Bennett, the Polish Tomaszeski family whose lives are upended by Germany’s invasion of their country, and Berlin-based American journalist Nancy Campbell, who’s trying to interpret the European turmoil for her listeners on American Radio International.Developing all these different Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
David Cameron has been a recluse since the fateful days of June 2016 when the referendum on EU membership didn’t go quite the way he’d hoped. He’s probably been living through a private purgatory. “I think I will think about this forever,” he murmured to the camera in this first instalment of BBC One’s two-part doc.Finally, though, his inevitable (though surely not “long-awaited”) autobiography is hitting the shops. Dave, who now looks like a slightly melancholy hedge fund manager or the kind of chap who skippers a 40-foot gin palace down the Solent on the weekend, has dragged himself out of Read more ...