BBC One
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 ...
Katherine Waters
Peer down the glassy dark and you’ll see them. White bubbles trapped in the frozen lake which appear to be rising to the surface. Look through the permafrost this way and you’re seeing into the past: as the ice melts, gas which was captured and stored tens of thousands of years ago when woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed cats stalked Alaska is released into the atmosphere. Each slick of melt water is another decade returning to the rivers. A scientist pokes a flare towards a hissing vent and the lake burps fire. It is methane, a gas with 21 times the smothering effect of carbon dioxide which Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Great, a new drama not by the Williams brothers. Instead it’s Dan Sefton’s second iteration of his medical thriller Trust Me, last seen in 2017 starring Jody Whittaker. Since she’s off being Doctor Who, the new series has a new cast, with John Hannah as Dr Archie Watson and Ashley Jensen as physio Debbie Dorrell.Front and centre, though, is Corporal Jamie McCain (Alfred Enoch), who’s been brought to the neurological unit of South Lothian hospital after suffering a spinal injury during a shoot-out in Syria. He’s currently in the “spinal shock” phase (in medic-speak), which has left him with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The problem with Fleabag (BBC Three/BBC One) is that it makes almost all television look pedestrian. It’s like the difference between Fleabag’s scummily inadequate boyfriends and the unattainable perfection embodied by the cool sweary priest. Earth vs heaven. Water/wine. And now it is gone.Having delivered a raging aria about the cruelty of love, the sinning father fled back to the triumphant embrace of the Almighty, pursued by a cunning fox. Having declared her own simple truth about love Fleabag, clutching a re-stolen effigy of her mother’s fecund body, set off in the other direction, her Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Piers Morgan hated This Time with Alan Partridge (BBC One) and predicted it would be pulled before the end of the series. This may be taken as a kitemark of quality. And yet the prime target for Steve Coogan’s satire was no voice in the wilderness. A lot of viewers professed themselves underwhelmed by the return of Partridge to mainstream broadcasting and voted with their remotes: the show managed to shed a third of his audience between the first and second episode.One of the disappointments for Partridge fans is that for five episodes he has been on if not best, then better behaviour, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Congratulations to Stephen Graham, guest-starring in this fifth season of BBC One’s Line of Duty, for still being alive at the end of episode one, a favour not routinely granted to headline names in Jed Mercurio’s diabolical labyrinth of deception. Then again, death needn’t necessarily be the end, as we were reminded when the late and exceptionally unlamented ACC Derek Hilton, the sleazy string-puller from series four, repeated on us here like a bad oyster.Mercurio isn’t just telling a story, he’s spinning a kind of Game of Villains epic that stretches out to unknowable horizons. Just as the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Let me be clear. The agonising process of the UK’s departure, or not, from the EU will be an infinite field of academic study over the decades to come. Road to Brexit (BBC Two) will not be a valuable source of research material, because it was a farrago of misinformation and fantasy, but it least it delivered a reasonable percentage of cheap belly laughs.It was a vehicle for Matt Toast of London Berry, appearing here as the imaginary historian Michael Squeamish. Slobbish, bearded and long-haired, Squeamish exuded a bellicose air of entirely unjustified certainty as he rode roughshod over 60- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thing is, a lot of this unpleasantness could have been avoided if DI Jimmy Perez had just watched the second series of The Missing. From this he could have deduced that there was every chance that Derek Riddell (who plays Chris Brooks in Shetland (BBC One), and was sinister kidnapper Adam Gettrick in The Missing) was a thoroughly bad egg, and cut to the chase a good deal sooner than he eventually did.However, Perez’s sleuthing instincts had been severely blunted by his growing entanglement with Brooks’s wife Alice (Catherine Walker), and as a couple they seemed potentially to have quite a lot Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a super-talented woman Phoebe Waller-Bridge is. Hot on the heels of the success of her adaptation of Killing Eve, she now spoils us with a second series of Fleabag (BBC Three, then BBC One) that opened with an episode so gobsmackingly good that I wanted to give her a standing ovation in my living room when I watched it for the second time. (In fact, like everybody else at a press screening a few weeks ago, I had done just that.)Fleabag began life as a one-woman show (directed by Waller-Bridge's long-time collaborator Vicky Jones) at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013. Waller-Bridge then pulled Read more ...