BBC One
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 ...
Adam Sweeting
“I’ve remained a vital presence on the fringes of TV Land,” argues Alan Partridge in an interview with Radio Times, the man whose latest claim to… well, not fame, but at least he has been presenting Mid Morning Matters on North Norfolk Digital. For this new series, Partridge has been hauled out of the low-rent regional twilight zone where somebody called Jenny does the station’s accounts in an exercise book to provide sickness cover on the anodyne BBC TV magazine show, This Time.On the This Time sofa he’s joined by Jennie Gresham (Susannah Fielding), who keeps the show rolling along with a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And so back to the windswept landscapes of the Shetland archipelago, where stoical DI Jimmy Perez is still keeping the bad guys at bay while continuing to cope with life as an ageing widower. You do wonder, though, how he sustains his commitment to the job in a territory offering such a restricted career ladder.Anyhow, the challenge is keeping screenwriter David Kane on his toes (the original Ann Cleeves novels having been all used up). This opening episode of a new six-part story revolved around the fate of a young Nigerian man called Daniel Ugara (Ayande Bhebe), although it took a while to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It took the best part of six episodes, but we got there in the end: the reason David Oyelowo accepted the confusingly underwritten part of Inspector Javert in BBC One’s adaptation of Les Misérables was finally revealed. His pursuit of an ex-convict for the theft of a coin stretched across hours and years, and in the process became not so much a single-minded obsession as a kind of exoskeleton that held the character in place. The motive which guided him towards this destination was, alas and bafflingly, never explored.Before the big moment came, Javert spent some of the last two episodes Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
How does an unassuming 36-year-old with a terrifyingly sensible haircut and a mildly flamboyant taste in jumpers become the political playwright par excellence of his generation? That’s the question that Alan Yentob sought to dissect in this first episode of a new series of Imagine, subtitled "In the Room Where It Happens", which deftly anatomised James Graham’s off-the-Richter-scale success in repeatedly making the political both profoundly and compellingly personal.Graham most recently made watercooler conversation sizzle with his Brexit: The Uncivil War, broadcast on Channel 4 earlier this Read more ...