BBC Two
Adam Sweeting
Admittedly, Antarctic explorer Captain Scott was at the other end of the earth from the protagonists of The Terror (BBC Two), but they would surely have concurred with his anguished observation: “Great God! This is an awful place.” Based on Dan Simmons’s novel, The Terror is a fictionalised account of the 1845 attempt by Sir John Franklin to find the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific via the Arctic Ocean. This ended in disaster when his Royal Navy ships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus became stuck in pack ice, with the crews subsequently dying slowly of disease and starvation.A Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Back to Georgian brothels, now – at least, for those of us who don’t have a Hulu subscription. The BBC’s airing of the second series of Harlots over the summer felt strangely timely. Barely an episode in and an angry crowd was hammering at the local judge’s door, demanding justice after the needless death of one of the city’s poorest residents. The third series, showing weekly on Wednesdays on BBC Two and available in its entirety on iPlayer, is less easily related to 2020, but it’s still a rollicking ride. Harlots, created by Moira Buffini and Alison Newman, is billed as a bodice- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Enlisting Hollywood giant Samuel L Jackson to host a series about the history of slavery, his own ancestors having been trafficked from West Africa to the Americas, was a headline-grabbing move, and scenes where we travelled with Jackson to the historic slaving hotspot of Gabon rang with a steely sense of commitment. Elsewhere, though, the editorial focus was slack and the content rambling, as though the project (on BBC Two) had undergone a last-minute salvage job using whatever was at hand.However often you hear them, the details of the slave trade are stomach-turning – it’s estimated that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stories of the destruction of the natural environment are depressingly common, but Frank Gardner brought a fresh slant to this punchy account of a botanical expedition to Colombia (BBC Two). Best known as the BBC’s security correspondent, Gardner was partially paralysed in a terrorist attack in Riyadh in 2004, but was determined that this wouldn’t stop him. “I traded in my wheelchair for a pack horse,” he declared.It almost didn’t work, because a panicky Gardner, unable to cling on with his legs, was almost flung from his horse while descending a steep mountain track. The local Colombian Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of the malignant fantasist Carl Beech is one of the more iniquitous episodes in British legal history, a stomach-turning swamp of lies, gullibility and heinous incompetence. It shook faith in some of our supposedly most robust institutions to the core, and Beech’s lies tainted the reputations of some innocent victims who went to their graves with a shadow still hanging over them.Vanessa Engle’s documentary (BBC Two) told Beech's story with a sardonic eye, though the repeated jokey images of a Pinocchio figure tended to undermine the gravity of the tale. In 2012 Beech had cashed in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mandy started life in the Comedy Shorts season last year, and has now been given a six-part series. Diane Morgan, who has a solid CV in other writers' work including Philomena Cunk, Motherland and After Life, here writes, directs and stars as the title character, who has a messy beehive, always wears thigh-high boots, has a fag on the go and a face set to permanent grimace.She's a walking disaster, finding that her aim in life – to own doberman pinchers – has many hurdles, and we follow them knowing that Mandy will never prosper. But Morgan, while keeping her creation just this side of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Sun bears and moon bears are probably doomed, so why bother? Wildlife trafficking is a hugely profitable worldwide criminal enterprise, with small charities (fingers in the dyke, anyone?) doing their best to stem the flow.The international charity Free the Bears operates in several south-east Asian countries, trying its best to save the sun bears and moon bears. In a pair of BBC Two programmes, over a year we followed the efforts of the conservationist Giles Clark to help his friend Matt Hunt (who runs Free the Bears) set up a bear sanctuary just outside Luang Prabang in Laos. Crucially Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As an opening line to BBC Two's new three-part series, “Rupert Murdoch is an enigma” failed to set pulses racing. It rather implied that after three hours of documentary TV, we may end up none the wiser about what makes the scary Australian media tycoon tick.Still, director Jamie Roberts and his team had done their due diligence in the research department, turning up a trove of nuggets from the archives interspersed with pithy interviews from assorted players in Murdoch’s extraordinary journey, including Alan Sugar, Hugh Grant, Piers Morgan and Andrew Neil. There were some chilling Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Once again the incredible healing powers of Gareth Malone swung into action, as his quest to find a universal anthem for the Covid crisis boiled up to a climax (BBC Two). Considering that he’s been masterminding his Home Choir and his songwriting quest over broadband links from his garden shed, he has managed to tap into an amazing shared reservoir of pent-up emotions.In this final episode he focused on “The Shielded”, people who through age or their medical condition have spent months under a kind of house arrest. We met 24-year old Mairin, who’s been looking after her 84-year-old Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The spoof “rockumentary” always sounds like a great idea, but it’s hard to pull off. Largely this is because rock stars are so divorced from reality that an element of self-parody is already built in, albeit unwittingly (“everybody’s so different, I haven’t changed” as Joe Walsh deadpanned in "Life's Been Good"). This Is Spinal Tap (the Rosetta Stone of the genre) worked because it didn’t try to invent its material so much as amass a load of real-life examples and compress them into 82 minutes.At least writer/director Rhy Thomas has some credibility in this area, having masterminded the droll Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Singing in a choir can be terrific therapy for anxiety, depression or loneliness, but one of the cruellest effects of the coronavirus is the way it has restricted normal human interaction. The notion of social distancing might have been designed to sabotage the proximity and togetherness which is so much a part of collective singing.However, choir supremo Gareth Malone (now sporting a shaggy lockdown hairstyle) doesn’t give up easily, so he’s made the best of what technology has to offer to create an online facsimile of the choir-singing experience. He’s the first to admit that hooking up a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Setting his third series of A House Through Time in Bristol (BBC One) was a stroke of inspired prescience for historian and presenter David Olusoga. His chosen house, Number 10 Guinea Street, had been built in 1718 by the slave-trafficking Captain Edmund Saunders, at a time when Bristol was becoming one of the leading slaving ports in Britain.The recent furore over the statue of the city’s most notorious slaver, Edward Colston, which was hurled into the river Avon by Black Lives Matter protesters, was a lurid reminder of how the legacy of slavery continues to burn a hole through time. Current Read more ...