Oxford. A glum afternoon in early spring, 2000. Tourists clogging the city’s arteries. On a terrace overlooking the river Cherwell, a tour guide finishes her spiel and shepherds a flock of pensioners on to the next destination. A lone squat figure with silver hair, leaning contemplatively against the railings, doesn’t budge. The tour guide is convinced he’s one of hers. A quick cup of tea, she says kindly, and it’s back on the coach to Stratford. He turns the sad hound’s face on her, with its blowtorch eyes, and advises her brusquely of her mistake.Up on Magdalen Bridge, a group of Italian Read more ...

Does Caroline Aherne hate women? Surely not, but given that there have been plenty of painfully humourless so-called comedies over the years with this heavy a reliance on recurring jokes about older women’s breasts you could be forgiven for hoping that one of the country’s most high-profile comediennes might use her position to produce something a little less puerile than The Security Men.Aherne and Pope's foursome at least seem to be having funThe flimsy hour-long programme was co-written with Jeff Pope, who worked with Aherne on 2009‘s The Fattest Man in Britain. The Security Men reused a Read more ...

Always a treat to see the shrewd, penetrating gaze of DCS Christopher Foyle back for one of its all-too-brief runs, though no doubt rationing Foyle's War to short series at long intervals is what has enabled writer/creator Anthony Horowitz to sustain it for so long. The three episodes in the new Series 8 find Foyle back in Britain, following a trip to the USA to "tie up some loose ends" from a previous case.It's 1946, and he's becoming embroiled in the Cold War as East faces off against West and rampant paranoia stalks the corridors of power. One of the strengths of Foyle has always been the Read more ...

Watching Mr Selfridge has been like one of those whirlwind tours with the refrain, “It’s Tuesday, so it must be Rome”. Episodes have been defined by the drop-in appearances of Blériot and his aeroplane, Conan Doyle and the séance, Mr FW Woolworth and the like. They've succeeded one another like the purring Monsieur Leclair’s window displays, leaving ongoing interest in character in the shade.Crowning, in every sense, this closing episode was the private visit paid to the store by Edward VII, received with customary unctuousness by Jeremy Piven’s Harry Selfridge. Either it was the King of Read more ...

It looks as if Broadchurch will reveal itself as a "town-with-murky-secrets" story, but on the evidence of this first episode we can expect it to be done with a skilful touch and a fine eye for detail. The trigger for the action is the death of 11-year-old Danny Latimer, but writer Chris Chibnall is focusing on the effect this has on family and friends as much as on the grim event itself.Broadchurch is a small seaside town in Dorset where violent crime is largely unheard of. When Danny's body is first discovered on the beach, suicide or an accident are canvassed as possible causes. Then Read more ...

Television is a regular prison visitor. You can’t keep Louis Theroux out of the grimmest Stateside penitentiaries, the drama departments drop in now and then for a stretch inside – most recently in Prisoner’s Wives. And then there’s ITV. A couple of years ago it reported from Wormwood Scrubs to find out how the prison system was coping in Brown’s Britain. It wasn’t the prettiest sight. The channel turns its attention to Aylesbury, a young offender institution heaving with the sort of hoodies the Prime Minister may not after watching this first episode feel quite so inclined to hug.Aylesbury Read more ...

Pantomime is one of the great festive traditions and the version of Dick Whittington envisaged by John Bishop in this one-off comedy drama checked off every single one of the clichés. Taking a writer’s credit alongside Jonathan Harvey of Gimme Gimme Gimme fame, the Liverpool comic drew on his experiences on regional stages near the beginning of his showbiz career in pulling together the script.Bishop starred as Lewis Loud, a local radio DJ making his pantomime debut at the Grand Theatre Lancaster as part of a group of characters straight out of central casting. There was soap star Tamsin Read more ...

When watching an adaptation there are times when it's better to have no acquaintance with the original. That certainly goes for thrillers, in which the reveal is all, so it is with considerable smugness that one brandishes one’s ignorance of The Poison Tree. Wiki advises that it is a bestselling psychological thriller which has floated the boat of the likes of Richard and Judy and their estimable book club. And that author Erin Kelly has filched the title from one of Blake’s Songs of Experience. Whereafter similarities with romantic poetry cease.ITV’s two-part dramatisation tells of Karen, an Read more ...

Charm, politeness and glittering repartee are clearly not considered important qualities for the Yorkshire-based policepersons who work alongside DCI Banks. TV coppers are rarely a barrel of laughs but for this bunch, spitting, snarling and glaring are their default modes of communication. Banks himself, played by Stephen Tompkinson as though he's lugging an invisible York Minster around on his shoulders, has assembled his characterisation of the doleful detective from a mixture of gloom, depression and disgruntlement.Still, all this fits quite well with panoramic shots of windswept moorlands Read more ...

The uproarious success of Downton Abbey, now firmly established as one of Britain's great national pastimes, seems to have had the happy effect of persuading ITV1 that it must make more drama. Thus, the autumn of 2012 has been ushered in by new ITV dramas swirling about our ears like tumbling leaves, from The Last Weekend and The Scapegoat to the comeback of Downton itself.More interestingly, the channel has also served up a batch of conspicuously female-centric pieces, albeit with mixed results. The murdered-girl story A Mother's Son felt like a series brutally curtailed by chainsaw, losing Read more ...

The small screen has always been as much a mirror as a window into other worlds. Even when the picture-box is switched off it reflects the viewer. If light is both particle and wave, glass is both solid and liquid. It shows things and hides things. Now you see it, now you don’t.Daphne du Maurier was obsessed with ways of seeing. Her short story, “Don’t Look Now” – made into a truly great film by Nic Roeg – explores the grief of a bereaved couple and the possibility that their drowned little girl has come back to life. Her shiny red mac is continually glimpsed among the calles and canals of Read more ...

Although you probably wouldn't want to cast Rupert Penry-Jones as Falstaff or Arthur Daley, point him in the direction of a privileged and successful London barrister and you can't miss. In this three-part adaptation of Blake Morrison's novel, Penry-Jones is instantly in his element as Ollie, metropolitan legal eagle and partner of the glamorous Daisy (Genevieve O'Reilly), a professional head-hunter.However, all is not as it seems, as his old college friend Ian (Shaun Evans ) and his wife Em (Claire Keelan) begin to discover when they join the gilded couple for a weekend in an old house in Read more ...