drama
Jasper Rees
New Blood began as it didn’t quite mean to go on. Somewhere in India five Brits on their travels mustered in a medical laboratory as volunteers to test-run a new drug. The tone was pregnant with portent, so it was no surprise when a knife was wielded and blood spattered. You settled in for a moody medical noir.Six years and one title sequence later, the tone made a 180-degree handbreak turn. Standing over the corpse lying at the foot of a block of flats in rainy London, Mark Addy’s old-school plod (pictured below) spouted sarky putdowns at a uniformed young upstart who fancied himself a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Penda’s Fen has so many constituent parts it could burst its seams. Almost-18 schoolboy Stephen Franklin is struggling with determining the nature of his sexuality. His school is about regimentation and promotes the army with drill, uniforms and expectations that commands are to be followed. With his father, the Reverend Franklin, Stephen has prolonged discussions about the nature of faith. The local landscape is mystical, and seems able to manifest historic and mythical figures from its own past. Reawakened Paganism is upsetting the Christian present. All this is happening against a backdrop Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The premise driving A War – lead character Claus Pedersen’s war – is the decision he makes as Company Commander while leading an army patrol in Afghanistan: whether or not to say he and his Danish unit are under attack from a specific house in a village.Up to this pivotal moment, Pedersen (Pilou Asbæk) and his fellow soldiers are seen in their camp and going out on patrol. Routine. The day-to-day life of his wife and children, at home in Copenhagen, is contrasted with the posting. Although apart, each lives in a pressure cooker: his due to the conflict; hers as a result of dealing with their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In its final episode Undercover tied up a lot of loose ends and introduced a number of new ones. The biggest loose end to remain unaddressed was pretty big. Nick Johnson was the alias of a policeman who in 1996 went undercover to spy on black activist Michael Antwi and his lawyer Maya Cobbina. Nick promptly fell in love with Maya; they married and had children. For the next 20 years, Maya, possessed of such a brilliant legal mind that she ends up as Director of Public Prosecutions, never once questioned Nick’s claim to be a writer despite his prodigious – nay absolute – lack of output.OK, so Read more ...
Jasper Rees
At last, after three series, Line of Duty delivered a denouement that felt like a satisfying jackhammer to the solar plexus. In the first series the bent copper under investigation escaped justice by jumping in front of a lorry. In the second there were more loose ends than are generally produced by a rope factory. It turns out that patience is a virtue and we should all have had faith.Jed Mercurio had long-term plans for Lindsay Denton that even Keeley Hawes knew nothing about. Also for the late Tommy Hunter and, of course, DC Nigel Morton, in which role Neil Morrissey kept hobbling back on Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the Ealing Studios’ melodrama Pink String and Sealing Wax was set in the 1880s and based on a play first performed in 1943, the film hit cinemas in late 1945 when World War II was barely over. The war saw a fundamental shift in the role of women in British society and the film’s scenario reflected this in how it revealed a devastating female reaction to an abusive relationship. After the empowered Pearl Bond takes matters into her own hands, it was clear that her husband Joe will not come out of it well.Pink String and Sealing Wax is also a drama of class as well as gender. Pearl is Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Alan Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves – first performed in 1969, in the round at the Library Theatre in Scarborough – was only his second play. Already, though, it has a few Ayckbourn tropes – warring couples and interconnecting sets – and concerns infidelity and the lies that couples tell each other (and themselves) to keep marriages alive.The play is set ingeniously in Fiona and Frank Foster's and Teresa and Bob Phillips's living rooms, melded into one and differentiated by furniture and furnishings. This also being a play about class, it's obvious which bits are the former's and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Halfway through its 10-week run, The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story appears to be running in real time as it slowly, painstakingly tells the story of how one of the US's biggest sports stars was accused of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman in 1994. But moving at what is – by modern television drama standards, at least – a glacial pace allows the creators to burrow deep into the American psyche and, more pertinently, examine the deep-rooted racism lurking in parts of US society.Writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski have set out their stall Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Three and a half years ago the writer Robert Jones and producer Kath Mattock came at the crime genre from an unusual angle. Instead of having characters in a murder case talk to one another, they all addressed the camera directly, each offering their own apparently unmediated viewpoint. The title took its cue from the direct style: Murder. Murder: Joint Enterprise won a Bafta. It has taken a while, but the single experimental film has given birth to a short series of three new cases.The first, The Third Voice, is set in small-town Scotland. Two brothers-in-law go fishing, but only one of them Read more ...
Barney Harsent
You can almost hear the words ringing out in the dramatic pauses. “We should call it Vinyl. Like, y’know... when you could hold music in your hand... touch it... FEEL it. When it was really WORTH something. The Seventies – that was when music had real value, when you had an album and it was like a book – something to treasure...” I’m not sure whether it would have been Martin Scorsese or Mick Jagger who said it, but at some point during the supposed 20-year genesis of this New York-based music biz drama, one of them did. Definitely.Vinyl, however, as the show’s near two-hour pilot ably Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Martin Rauch-stroke-Moritz Stamm, the reluctant spy who by the end of the final, double episode of this eight-parter had achieved more than most in that profession, managed the ultimate last night: he came in from the cold. In a series whose refrain could almost have been “You can’t go home again”, there he was back at the domestic hearth as if nothing had happened (except that his mother Ingrid was healed). Idyllic ending? The irony heavy in the air, of course, was that five years or so later the home he had come back to – East Germany – would itself cease to exist.If we became absorbed in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“It’s routine, it’s procedure.” “It’s wank, it’s toss.” As you can tell, Happy Valley is back. If Sally Wainwright made bespoke ironmongery or dry stone walls or exceedingly good cakes, her work would come by royal appointment. Instead you can tell she’s good because she accumulates awards, including most recently a couple of BAFTAs for series one, and attracts actors from the farthest-flung corners of northern drama such as Cucumber and Downton’s downstairs, all gagging to speak her pearly dialogue.The BBC iPlayer has been running a five-minute recap of where we’re up to pending this second Read more ...