ITV
Adam Sweeting
The flying Twitter fragments said more about The Wedding than the battalions of experts, "palace insiders", historians and friends ever could (couldn't somebody have put a bag over Simon "infinite loop" Schama's head and had him bundled away from the BBC studio in the boot of a car?) Everybody seemed to adore Kate's dress. Some suggested that princesses Eugenie and Beatrice were in drag. "The Royal Family is BACK", tweeted Piers Morgan. "#proudtobeenglish" added former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan. "Harry's thinking, how did I not end up in a carriage with Pippa Middleton?" Read more ...
howard.male
I made the mistake of catching up with the darkly sumptuous The Crimson Petal and the White just before knuckling down to review this new two-part drama, and it was like moving from fine vintage wine to warm supermarket-brand lager. To begin with, I couldn’t dissociate Ashley Jensen from her perky but dim character in Extras, so the moment she found herself confronted with a game-show-from-hell scenario of committing a murder in return for five million quid, I expected Ricky Gervais to pop up in the next scene, giving her wisecrack-littered advice on what to do next.But unfortunately she was Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Seven works are collected on this sampler of the formidably prolific Plater’s television writing - a soupçon from a broth that is rich, flavoursome, and usually satisfying. Though omitting anything from The Stars Look Down, The Good Companions, Get Lost! and Selwyn Froggitt, among other series he wrote for ITV, the set fully demonstrates Plater’s affinity for the common man, his sensitive approach to the class struggle, and his taste for cryptic humour.
A Jarrow-born Humbersider, Plater (1935-2010) is considered a Northern dramatist, but the earliest play contained here, Brotherly Love ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So Monroe reached the end of series one, and I still couldn't read what its tone was supposed to be. Some artsdesk readers have expressed enthusiasm for the theme tune, but I find its jogging Celtic jauntiness symptomatic of Monroe's wider problems. Obviously you can't expect too much from a bit of title music, but surely it should give you a clue as to whether the show is a hard-hitting drama about life and death or a sitcom?Quips and badinage abound when Monroe (James Nesbitt) and his team are in action, and staff and patients alike are lucky to survive the barrage of one-liners Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Read Adam Sweeting's review of "Intelligent Design", the last-ever episode of LewisAlthough its steepling body count is almost enough to rival the trail of carnage in The Walking Dead (which rose from the grave on 5 last night after its original appearance on FX last year), at least Lewis never underestimates the value of a good education. This episode, "Wild Justice", was a crossword puzzle of literary clues, all taking their cue from a lecture delivered at St Gerard's college entitled "Justice and Redemption in Jacobean Revenge Drama".There were recurring appearances by John Webster's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It'll be interesting to see what the recent race row - or more accurately, lack-of-race row - does for the ratings of Midsomer Murders. Possibly nothing, if the research that says that people from ethnic groups all hate the show and never watch it is to be believed. It certainly defies logic that producer Brian True-May has been made to walk the plank for saying that the programme has an all-white cast when... it does. Somehow, everybody has contrived not to mention this ever since Midsomer began in 1997.That aside, it was nonsense as usual for last night's opening episode of series 14 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
James Nesbitt has always looked full of himself and too bumptious for comfort, so who better to play a smart-arse neurosurgeon who prides himself on his rock-steady hands and steely nerves? "What really matters is how well you handle losing," he bragged to his attending team of young doctors as they gathered round the latest sawn-open skull, delivering the line with the air of a riverboat gambler striking a match on the sole of his boot.He was showing his underlings how to insert a pressure-relieving catheter into the patient's head, a bread-and-butter routine – a no-brainer, even – within Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Notwithstanding his regrettable central role in the recent remake of Bouquet of Barbed Wire, Trevor Eve is an actor who has improved vastly with age. Once cursed with a kind of shiny smugness, the 21st-century Eve is rougher round the edges and indelibly lined with decades of thespian rough'n'tumble. Best of all, he now exhibits a hard, lethal streak, painstakingly honed by a decade of digging up mouldering corpses in Waking the Dead.In the first part of ITV's new three-parter, Kidnap and Ransom, Eve (who's an executive producer on the project) stepped into the expensive shoes of hostage Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Television is pretty awful at the moment,” said Eileen Atkins the other week. “Is that because I'm getting old?” Age wouldn’t dare to wither Dame Eileen, of course, who has just bounced back in fine sparky fettle in the BBC's remake of Upstairs Downstairs.She’s right – lots of television is awful. Always has been. On the other hand, there's now so much of it on so many channels that with a bit of judicious schedule-surfing and deft deployment of the various on-demand services now available, you can almost certainly find enough worthwhile stuff to stretch through the week. Also, it' Read more ...
Veronica Lee
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 bird Miss Marple, in The Secret of Chimneys.Miss Marple (Julia McKenzie) is asked by Lady Virginia Revel (Charlotte Salt), the daughter of a dead cousin (what a lot of those the old girl appears to have), to be part of a lavish weekend party at the family’s country pile, Chimneys. The house was once known for its society gatherings until a rare Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Jason’s toby jug of a face has been on the television screen over Christmas since the days when you had to get up and switch between three channels by hand. There was nothing ostensibly seasonal in his latest vehicle. A Yuletide entertainment for our times, Come Rain Come Shine had starring roles for three very contemporary ghosts of Christmas Present - belt-tightening, debt and social implosion. But scratch at the surface and what emerged was a neat inversion of the Scrooge tale, in which it was a big spender rather than a miser who had to learn the value of family.Jason played a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Once upon a time, just before Lord Reith began permanent rotation in his place of rest, there was a hideous botchjob of a television genre known as the docusoap. It wasn’t quite documentary and it wasn’t quite soap. It was scriptless drama with “characters” whose “narrative arcs” were tweaked and massaged into what you'd loosely call "stories" in post-production. The docusoap launched the idea that the public will gladly work on television for sweet Fanny Adams. If there’s one thing you can applaud reality TV for – if there’s just one thing - it’s that it pulled the trigger on the docusoap. Read more ...