fri 11/10/2024

costume drama

Agatha Christie's Marple: The Secret of Chimneys, ITV1

If there’s one thing the British love on television at Christmas time, it’s a period drama, and even better, a period mystery. So what joy when there’s a bit of sleuthing by Agatha Christie's yin to Hercule Poirot’s yang, the eagle-eyed wise old...

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Upstairs Downstairs, BBC One

Thirty-five years after Rose Buck took what she thought was her final nostalgic stroll through the empty rooms of 165 Eaton Place in Belgravia, where she had served the Bellamy family for four decades, Jean Marsh has brought Rose back home in the...

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When We Are Married, Garrick Theatre

He Leica the liquor: Roy Hudd plays a bibulous photographer in J B Priestley revival

Those who want a taste of the way the West End used to be - that's to say, bustling star vehicles where the furniture isn't the only amply upholstered aspect of the evening - will relish When We Are Married, the 1938 J B Priestley comedy that tends...

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Downton Abbey, ITV1

With the BBC still in the middle of shooting their revival of Upstairs, Downstairs, ITV1 have nipped in ahead of them with Julian Fellowes's spiffing new sundown-on-the-aristocracy drama. In a battle of the stage dames, the Beeb has bagged Eileen...

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Alan Plater, 1935-2010

Plater's republic: the cast of Z Cars

They don't make television writers like Alan Plater any more. He entered the profession when there was still an audience that could be relied upon to sit down in their millions and watch challenging drama from strands such as Armchair Theatre and...

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DVD Release: The Best Intentions

At long last it's here on DVD: the greatest Bergman movie the master didn't make, though he wrote the most meticulously detailed, 300-page screenplay-cum-novel (which covers all the events of the four-part Swedish TV miniseries rather than the much...

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Emma, BBC One

There’ll always be Austen on the telly. As the Bard is to the boards, so is Saint Jane to the box. The six novels were published (though not all written) in a seven-year period in the 1810s. In a rather shorter tranche of the 1990s they were all...

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