drama
Jasper Rees
What is it about Denmark? What, specifically, is it about Danish drama? I am currently fourth in the queue to borrow a box set of The Killing ( I know, I know: late), which all experts advise is as lethal as crack and to which Jennifer Saunders lately paid hilarious homage in Absolutely Fabulous. Borgen has just started trafficking across our screens, and last autumn there was the piercingly good low-budget film The Silence, partly German but also robustly Danish in its aesthetics and ethics. And now there’s In a Better World, best film at last year’s European Film Academy. And deservedly.It Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Since Prime Suspect introduced television viewers to the writing of Lynda La Plante, the concept of event television has lost a little of its lustre. Such was the remarkable heft of La Plante’s storyline about a serial killer and Helen Mirren’s performance as DI Jane Tennison that schedulers have ever since been sending out their pedigree crime dramas in great big lumpy chunks. Twenty years on, La Plante doesn’t quite kick down the door the way she used to. Above Suspicion is back for a fourth formulaic turn around the block and it’s going out not on three consecutive drop-everything evenings Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Diehard Morsians have been harbouring murderous thoughts ever since it was announced. No doubt they communicate these to one another in fiendish acrostics and cryptic clues. It was one thing giving Lewis his own spin-off, quite another to bring Morse back to life in the form of a prequel. The heretical suggestion of Endeavour is that the grumpy old sleuth did not in fact spring fully formed into the world in the shape of John Thaw, with that slow world-weary lope and a withering glare lurking in those iridescent peepers.Well, at least the eyes have it. Shaun Evans is in most respects a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“For three weeks the Beans leave rich pickings for us Borrowers”. It’s probably not how most of us see the Christmas season, but if you’re a miniature person living under the floorboards, the seasonal treasures of the full-size humans – Beans – are irresistible. Setting this lovely one-off adaptation of Mary Norton’s books about the tiny recyclers over the advent count-down and bringing it up to date might have been obvious, but it charmed.The Clock family live under the floorboards of the house lived in by Human Bean Granny Driver. Living with her is lonely James, her grandson. His mum has Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though the wind had wailed mournfully through the plot-holes of the second series of Downton Abbey, writer Julian Fellowes was in his element for this two-hour Yuletide spectacular. With the characters in place and a cluster of storylines tantalisingly in play, it boiled down to a grand game of tying knots, building climaxes and sawing off the loose ends. Framed as a Christmas shooting party with a grand gathering of friends, relatives and prospective in-laws, it was the Gosford Park of the Downton canon.It was a year on from the end of the Great War, but while Matthew Crawley was Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It was several minutes into The National Anthem, Charlie Brooker's latest dramatic output on Channel 4 after his excellent 2008 mini-series Dead Set, a zombie-laden satire about reality television, before I laughed. I say that not as a criticism – far from from it – but as a huge compliment. For Brooker neatly confounded our expectations by making the opening scenes (shown as part of the Black Mirror season) appear as if they were part of a serious political thriller. It was only when the storyline took a ridiculous and hilariously obscene turn that one realised this was meant to be Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Those of a certain age have certain memories (very certain) of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, wife of the Bionic Man and not exactly unbionic herself, especially in that poster of her in the red one-piece with Seventies enormohair and fluorescent American Dream gnashers. There were a couple of others in Charlie’s Angels. One forgets their names, and indeed faces. (Feel free, scholars of the era, to write in on this.) It was revolutionary at the time: girls had been high-heeling men in the schnoz since The Avengers, but only one lady at a time. Now three bra-burners, Aaron Spelling’s fantasy answer to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I suspect writer Julian Fellowes's guilty secret is that he has an attic stuffed with novels from Mills & Boon, such are the luridly romantic plotlines and cliché-flirting characters in Downton Abbey. If you think you can see it coming, then you probably can.Though Downton is an original story, you get more déja vu moments than in the 27th televised version of Pride and Prejudice, and the way the speeding narrative seems to fling out another major dramatic development in between each ad break - and we know there are far too many of those - is like being trapped in a carriage being driven Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Unless one has been misreading the policy stylings of the oddly named "Nigel Farage" and his merry band of isolationists, the general idea behind UKIP is that Nothing Good ever came out of Europe. Party members may therefore wish to pursue a blanket avoidance of decent crime drama, almost all of which comes from our continental neighbours. First there was The Killing which went on more or less forever and was more addictive than crack. Spiral was barely less cultish. And after the entries from Denmark and France, now a succulent Italian crime drama takes its turn to stick around for an Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A couple of series ago Alan Yentob took himself off to Monte Carlo to grill Dame Shirley Bassey for Imagine about her life in showbiz. Kissinger got more out of Gromyko at the height of the Cold War. (The Soviet foreign minister’s nickname was Nyet.) The BBC have had another stab at showing what makes the girl from Tiger Bay tick, this time in the form of drama, where there is licence to make things up.The first thing Shelagh Stephenson’s script put straight is this business about Tiger Bay. The multiracial dockside slums of Cardiff was her home for only a couple of years before her black Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Directing and writing his first full-length feature, John Michael McDonagh fully exploits the wild and windswept landscapes of Connemara, and similarly extracts maximum value from his leading man, Brendan Gleeson. Perhaps he picked up tips from his brother Martin, who directed Gleeson in In Bruges. As Garda Sergeant Gerry Boyle, Gleeson finds himself on the trail of a trio of ruthless drug smugglers, about to land a colossal stash somewhere on the Irish west coast. This has attracted the attentions of FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle).The narrative is partly driven by the culture shock Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The pre-publicity has been spinning this saga of the notorious Renaissance family as a kind of origin story for The Sopranos. I suppose you could argue that Rodrigo Borgia, like Tony Soprano, was in the waste management business, as he himself suggested when he took the Papal throne as Alexander VI: "God has chosen us as a new broom to sweep the Vatican clean of corruption."But Rodrigo is undoubtedly aiming higher than a few sleazy rackets in New Jersey. As the incantation went at his spectacular coronation in Rome, "You are father of kings and monarchs, lord of the globe, earthly resident of Read more ...