BBC One
Veronica Lee
Ben Chanan's The Capture (BBC One), which he wrote and directed, is a bang-up-to-the-minute dystopian thriller about the increasingly surveilled society we live in. In last night’s opening episode of six, he set out his stall from the first frame, where the bored staff in a CCTV control room were doing routine scans of the neighbourhood, until one of them saw a violent crime taking place in which a soldier attacked a woman in the street.Then we flashed back several hours to see the soldier, Shaun Emery (Callum Turner), winning his appeal against his conviction for murdering an insurgent in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is how Steven Knight pictured Peaky Blinders when he first set about creating it. “I was very keen not to do a traditional British period drama, especially where it comes to depictions of working class people. Where the impulse is to say ‘it’s a shame, it’s a pity, isn’t it awful, wasn’t everything terrible for women’.“The Shelbys are a family that completely controlled their own destiny, and also coming from that background myself I wasn’t surrounded by people walking around saying ‘poor me, isn’t it terrible’. They were enjoying life and making the most of it, glamourising it, and that Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The BBC’s version of Love Island has familiar ingredients: ten 20-somethings, many with pale manicures and hair extensions, on an island, in this case Mykanos. It’s not to everyone’s taste. “All I see is water, I don’t see no nail shops,” observes Melissa, whose argumentativeness causes her to fall out with people and who wants to improve her friendship skills.The concept that they’re united by heartbreak – they’re not – is a shaky one, which weakens the programme’s impact. There are too many variables, not enough clarity about goals. Are they mainly just here for a nice Greek island break? Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A sad story of lonely men, Simon Rawles's atmospheric and beautifully shot documentary has no narration, apart from the occasional faint, off-camera question from the interviewer. This makes everything more depressing. We’re alone on a nightmare ride, starting with Catfishman. “I catfish females. I’m a legend in the community, a hero.” He is living somewhere snowy and motionless in north America, we’re not told where, and spends his days constructing fake online profiles, targeting women. His mindset is grim. “I pose as a male model, good-looking and attractive, and I set up dates. I reel Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This episode of the celebrity genealogy show began with footage of Naomie Harris at Ian Fleming's former home in Jamaica, where she was helping launch Bond 25 (to be released next year), in which she is playing Moneypenny for the third time. It was a fitting location, as Harris’s folks hail from the Caribbean; her mother was born in Jamaica and her father's family are from Trinidad via Grenada.But, unusually for a subject of this consistently engaging show, Harris told us she was never interested in her origins. It was a strange admission – what really, no interest at all? – but one that a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was a year ago that BBC One scored a smash hit with the first series of Keeping Faith, but as series two opens 18 months have passed since Faith Howells’s husband Evan (Bradley Freegard) disappeared and triggered a traumatic chain reaction of events. Apparently the patriarch of a close and loving family, with himself and Faith both working in the family law firm, Evan had become embroiled in all sorts of murky stuff (bribery, corruption, perverting the course of justice etc). Was this really the devoted husband and father that Faith had known?All will be revealed across these six new Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s a topical idea, at least. Isaac Mensah, a child actor from a working-class family in London, has been cast in a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, and when he returns home his family and friends are agog to find out what his amazing movie experience was like. But the sky falls in when Isaac (Max Fincham) plays his parents a video he shot on his phone, containing evidence that he was abused by the film’s all-powerful producer, Jotham Starr, the boss of Yonder Starr Productions.Somehow though, the parts add up to less than a whole, with neither characters nor action feeling especially plausible Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Not too long ago it would have been unthinkable for a BBC One Sunday-night period drama series to tell of one woman’s love for another. Whatever anyone thought of it – and not everyone bade it the hearty welcome it merited – Gentleman Jack has shifted the dial.Was it a coincidence that it completed its run the day after a reported one and a half million people in London turned out to celebrate the freedom to love whoever you choose? (And the day the mauve-maned Megan Rapinoe completed her apotheosis as a gay icon in the final of the Women's World Cup?) Anne Lister, so cussed and crotchety in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Russell T Davies’s doomsday odyssey reached its endgame on BBC One, feisty grandma Muriel (played by indestructible Anne Reid) got to deliver the moral of the story. With the Lyons clan gathered round that now-familiar dining table, she spelt it out for them. “It’s all your fault,” she scolded, reminding them how they’d all twiddled their thumbs and done nothing while everyone was ripped off by the banks, let themselves be seduced by dirt-cheap globalised manufacturing, and let the evil Vivienne Rook become Prime Minister. “This is the world we built,” she jeered. “Congratulations!”This Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Does every generation suffer its own form of doomsday paranoia? In Stephen Poliakoff’s BBC Two drama Summer of Rockets, it’s the late 1950s and everybody’s convinced they’re about to perish in a nuclear holocaust. In this penultimate episode of Russell T Davies’s Years and Years (BBC One), the near-ish future was being sucked into a hideous vortex of Biblical plagues (power blackouts and 80 days of rain), terrorist bombings and a global wave of fascistic governments.Davies is an ingenious weaver of narrative spells, and as the series peaks he’s escalating the shocks and terrifying revelations Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Writer Dan Sefton’s four-part hospital drama reached a modestly satisfying conclusion as the phantom killer stalking the wards was finally unmasked, following the usual twists and misdirections obligatory in thrillerland. I felt quite pleased with myself for guessing the perp’s identity in advance, but only by boiling it down to a formula – find a reasonably prominent character who hasn’t really done very much so far, and it’s a good bet they’ll show their hand for the denouement.Overall, there was a lurking sense that despite some strong characters and a sinister setting in a gloomy old Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The porn was a bit disappointing, was it not? Dear old Ted, no longer romantically active, admitted to being a user. The Superintendent Hastings fanclub sighed for sorrow to witness him toss away his status as an essentially decent heartthrob for the Saga generation. Sorry for your loss, ladies. It was also disappointing because the high-risk act of wiping his laptop turned out to have such a bathetic explanation. The 50k lying around in a brown envelope he clearly deemed to have less pressing potential for embarrassment.At least now we know that Hastings is not H because - guess what? - no Read more ...