ITV
Joe Muggs
Last week I suggested that The X Factor's rules may have been manipulated in order to lead to a more entertaining final week. I would like to apologise unreservedly for this suggestion, in the light of the absolute unremitting shower of dismalness that we had to sit through this weekend. Congratulations to the winner Matt Cardle and all - he seems like a nice chap, sings well sometimes, might even make a career of it – but sweet baby Jesus on a bendy bus, that was truly awful television. And, yes, millions of us sat absolutely glued to it for four hours of our weekends, hoping for some Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Even as a confirmed fan of the soap, I would be lying if I said I tuned in to Coronation Street for great acting. Fantastic comedy, yes; brilliant writing - certainly. But routinely fine exposition of the dramatic art? Nah, although there are honourable exceptions when the occasion demands. But by crikey, did most of the cast pull it off last night in an hour-long live episode to mark the show’s 50th anniversary, part of a week entitled “Four Funerals and a Wedding”, involving a gas explosion, a tram crash on the iconic viaduct and an attempted murder.There were only the tiniest, blink-and- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
To vajazzle or not to vajazzle; it’s the question on everyone’s, er, lips. Thanks to ITV’s unlikeliest of hits, The Only Way is Essex, tans will be brighter, teeth whiter and bodies more diamante-encrusted across the nation this winter. It’s the aesthetic equivalent of missionary work, and boy are these guys devout. Just when Big Brother has stopped watching and we’ve finally waved goodbye to The Hills, reality television has taken a new and sinister turn with a series so holes-in-your-fishnets, last-night’s-cold-pizza-eaten-off-a-copy-of-Heat-magazine trashy as to make even Christine Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I realise actors must be prepared to suffer for their art, but it was truly heroic of Francesca Annis to allow herself to be made up to resemble Cherie Blair after a bout of electro-convulsive therapy compounded by a facelift by Dr Mengele. In The Little House, Annis plays Elizabeth, the cold and controlling mother of Patrick (Rupert Evans, formerly King Richard IV in the hilarious royal soap The Palace).Patrick quite likes the idea of having children with his emotionally fragile wife Ruth (Lucy Griffiths), but his mum has no doubts. She has decided that Ruth is going to have her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
David Suchet has been perfecting his impersonation of Hercule Poirot for more than 20 years, perhaps sympathising with Tina Turner’s maxim, “The longer I do it, the better it gets.” The way Suchet keeps finding new little tics and eccentricities to keep the character fresh is a substantial feat, since around him, the fixtures and fittings of Agatha Christie-land have proved impregnable to change.Hallowe'en Party was published in 1969, but this comfortably upholstered TV treatment (with a screenplay by Mark Gatiss, currently working 25/8) had cloaked itself in the leafy security of the Home Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you can’t play a cop or a mass murderer, steer clear of the acting profession. That would be the logical inference from the swarms of cops’n’killers series cramming the TV schedules. You’d think we’d have had enough, what with Luther, all the CSI franchises, and simultaneous home-grown and American versions of Law & Order squabbling for attention, but they just keep on coming.On Sunday night, Sky1 launches its much-trailed new series Thorne, adapted from Mark Billingham’s bestselling novels and starring David Morrissey as titular ‘tec Tom Thorne. He finds himself on the trail of the Read more ...
howard.male
”The domestic” over at 27, The Hill turns out to be decidedly undomestic. The murderer's basement lair so resembles the blood-splattered dens of every other serial killer that has ever graced the big and small screen (right down to the sickly green light) that it’s hard not to contemplate the notion that there’s some kind of grim finishing school that all blossoming sadistic bastards are obliged to attend before getting their licence to kill.But while Morse would have snorted dismissively at the machete-inflicted carnage and suggested to Lewis that it was time for a pint, DCI Banks - taking Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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 Atkins, whereas ITV has signed up Maggie Smith as Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham. So far she has not been called upon to say, "A handbag?"The extended opening sequence of this 90-minute scene-setter fixed the date as April 16, 1912, and the camera rambled around the sprawling pile of Downton Abbey as the carefully delineated echelons of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Alan Plater wrote to the end. When he died earlier this year, he had completed a final screenplay which found him returning whence he came. Joe Maddison’s War was set in his native North-East, and portrayed the impact of wartime on ordinary working-class lives. With the help of nostalgic singing and dancing, the tone was comic and affectionate, but with an undimmed glint of good old socialist indignation. They don’t make dramas like this any more. But whenever they do, the more senior couch potatoes are entitled to lament once more the passing of Play for Today.It’s quite a thing to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
People are lured to behave like animals for TV now - Big Brother, Celebrity Jungle, The X Factor - so it merely completes the idiotic equation to have animals insistently transfigured into little humans in wildlife TV. Or big, hairy humans in the case of mountain gorillas and Martin Clunes.Horsepower with Martin Clunes (ITV1) should on paper have been dumber than BBC Two’s Mountain Gorillas, two one-hour series that launched last night in thickets of clichés. After all, he doesn’t want to make any claim to be an expert, just to be allowed to be a big soft dad with a horse (well, a dozen maybe Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
He wasn't a jack of all trades, said his friend June Whitfield, "he was a master of all trades". The charge of "smarminess" dogged Bob Monkhouse throughout his career, but as this quietly penetrating documentary made clear, he was highly intelligent, multi-talented and had a lot of layers he kept to himself. Actor, scriptwriter, singer, novelist (though they didn't really mention that part), stand-up comic, cartoonist, radio star, gameshow host and posthumous campaigner against the prostate cancer that killed him - the only thing Monkhouse couldn't manage too successfully was his work-life Read more ...
Veronica Lee
"Welcome to the new-look, high-risk, high-speed show,” said presenter Chris Tarrant at the top of the programme. Well, sort of new-look; the opening titles are new (although they still haven't managed to put the question mark in the logo), but the music is the same and the set appears to have had no more than a dust down since the last series. But let’s not quibble, as producers Celador have indeed rung the changes and in doing so have given the long-running show a much needed fillip.Who Wants to be a Millionaire? first aired in the UK in 1998 and is a broadcasting phenomenon. Its Read more ...