Channel 4
Mark Sanderson
Was it just a coincidence that budding serial killer Sam attended Ripley Heath High? Probably not. Born to Kill, written by Tracey Malone and Kate Ashfield, was keenly aware that it followed in the bloody footsteps of both real sociopaths such as Harold Shipman and fictional ones such as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. And what a dance it led us!Over the past four weeks on Channel 4 we have seen the schoolboy move from the edge of things – a diving board, a wooded hollow where he hid his trophy tin, a birthday party for his only friend’s father – to the centre of a full-blown psychotic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was a long time coming, but Homeland’s sixth series at last awoke from its early-season slumbers to put on a late surge over the closing episodes. For a while, it had seemed that the story was barely advancing at all, as the screen was self-indulgently hogged by Carrie Mathison’s emotional life, particularly her anguish over her daughter being taken into care. Yet by the end, she found herself in the teeth of the hurricane as the USA was threatened by a brutal coup d'état.Homeland has always been about the personal cost of undercover work, where commitment to the greater cause tends to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the beginning it was about good catastrophes. A shotgun pregnancy after a hot hook-up. A dysfunctional transatlantic romance in which opposites attract. The boredom of looking after babies. The boredom of being a wage slave. Catastrophe was created out of an unlikely sitcom scenario that managed somehow to stay funny through two series on Channel 4.The third series, in which avid fans probably expected more of the same good thing, has struggled to land on a robust and coherent through-line. There have still been wonderful laughs. Sharon and Rob carried on amusing each other: she guffawed Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“The following images are extremely graphic.” The words appeared in white lettering against a black background, two-thirds of the way in. For the next minute, the screen filled with photographs of naked, emaciated corpses, some with crude writing across their bodies, others with labels affixed to foreheads. The eyes of one were gouged out; another’s mouth gaped open as if emitting a final scream of terror. These pictures weren't captured in the lager or the gulag or the killing fields of yesteryear. They tell of present-day atrocities in the Syria of Bashar al-Assad.Syria’s Disappeared: The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the mindset of Nigel Farage and his biddable followers, the route from Asia into Europe throngs with undesirables. Their threatening faces can be plastered on a vote-winning poster. In this calamitous failure of empathy, young men – hordes of them, to use our former Prime Minister’s lexical choice - are seen to be bent on kettling Western women and hoovering up benefits. Leave.eu’s dehumanising propaganda was a degrading moment of national shame which found its twin in the US’s decision to close its borders to travellers from seven predominantly Muslim countries.War Child put a young human Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The masochistic reality show heralds a culture with an inferiority complex. There have been documentary re-running the race to the South Pole. Countless series place modern Britons in historical contexts where the dietary, sanitary and heating arrangements leave much to be desired. At the heart of them all is an anxiety that mod cons – radiators, white goods, frozen readymeals – have softened us. Are we simply not fit to lace the boots of our forebears?The latest endurance test is possibly the genre’s horriblest yet: a reboot of the journey undertaken by Captain Bligh and his loyal sailors Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Five years ago BBC Panorama went undercover, sending in a reporter with a hidden camera to expose the horror going on at Winterbourne View, a hospital for people with learning disabilities and/or autism. There was outrage as the nation watched Winterbourne’s patients being tortured, degraded and abused by staff. After the programme aired, it made headlines and debates in Parliament led to promises of major reform. There was a commitment that the 3,000-plus disabled or mentally ill people kept in Assessment and Treatment Units would be moved instead to smaller units closer to their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Can something be gained in translation? From its title The Swingers promises much. Much more than the original Dutch title Nieuwe Buren, which the caption in the opening credit sequence translates as The Neighbours. Someone in syndication has asked themselves the question: who the hell watches Dutch TV dramas called The Neighbours (aside from captive Dutch audiences)? And made the decision to pep things up for the international audience.It’s a bold change. Will the show come good on the promise of what in the patriarchal 1970s they used to call wife-swapping? Channel 4 is positioning it as Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a nice pairing to these two character-led documentary films, as reflections on concepts of partnership presented from different ends of the spectrum of innocence and experience. Treating innocence, Someday My Prince Will Come (2005) is the story of 11-year-old Laura-Anne, growing up in an isolated village on the Cumbrian coast, as she begins to engage with the boys around her.There’s an almost conscious naivety, as well as plenty of humour in its observation of childhood, as the director follows his subjects over the course of a year in the deprived community in which they live, its “ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Another night, another woman battered/strangled/raped/murdered. On Sunday a pregnant woman was brutally slapped about by her husband in Call the Midwife, while Emily Watson’s character in Apple Tree Yard was the victim of a punishment rape. And so it continues in Case, the latest Nordic noir to make its way here, this time from Iceland. It opened with two police officers making their way to the stage of a theatre. A glimpse through a doorway revealed what had brought them: the bottom half of a young woman’s body, dangling six feet above the ground.Lara is roughly the same age as Nanna Birk Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The big surprise of this new-season opener of Homeland was that black ops specialist Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) didn't die at the end of series 5 after all, despite the fact that we last saw him apparently moribund in his hospital bed, having penned a poignant adieu to sometime paramour Carrie Mathison. But, after surviving a hefty dose of sarin gas, he isn't the man she used to know.The action has moved from last season's Berlin to New York, where Carrie (Claire Danes) is working at a Brooklyn-based foundation which provides assistance for Muslims, such as those who may find themselves Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Tom Lehrer famously declared satire dead when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger not long after he'd bombed Cambodia back to the Middle Ages. Lehrer never wrote another song. Meanwhile other satirists battle on. Every day delivers fresh material to work with. This documentary supplied a little more by rummaging around on Donald Trump's family tree.Put succinctly, Meet the Trumps: From Immigrant to President reported that the rise and rise and rise of the Trump dynasty is a tale of brothel-keeping, horsemeat burgers and much rapacious trousering of federal Read more ...