ITV
Jasper Rees
Emma Banville is almost too good to be true: a human rights lawyer who houses Syrian refugees, wins the most hopeless cases of wrongful conviction, won’t be bullied by anyone – coppers, prison wardens, the system. OK she smokes, presumably for the stress, and pints of lager don’t sit quite right in her hand. And she’s trying to adopt a child with, somewhat implausibly, John Bishop. But she’s played by Helen McCrory, who can do no wrong, and her heart is in the very epicentre of the right place.Fearless (ITV) began as a bog-standard drama about a cold case. Banville was called in to help Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
There’s something nasty in Loch Ness – a corpse tied to a curling stone – but, this being tellyland, the real monsters lurk on its shores. The Loch aspires to be a Scottish Broadchurch – Braidkirk? – but, alas, is nothing of the sort. The fact it is set in the fictional town of Lochnafoy – clearly based on Loch Na Fooey in Galway whose name means grave-shaped lake – is an early indication that writer Stephen Brady has not gone far to find his inspiration.An early scene in which three students arrange a load of bones and offal in the shape of a beached Nessie – while Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The latest test of the nation’s perseverance and patience – a snap election called just before the negotiations for Brexit are due to start – seemed like an extraordinary act of hubris at the start. The initial billing of “Strong and stable” vs “Coalition of chaos”, was a statement that implied the Tories’ lead was so big that only by ganging together could the other parties beat it. It also appeared to be an assumption that was probably fair enough.However, a decision for Theresa May to fight the campaign on personalities not policies stumbled upon the realisation that hers is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Four years ago the BBC dramatised the story of the Lucans. Rory Kinnear donned the forthright moustache and Catherine McCormack played his spouse Veronica as a brittle victim of mental cruelty. The script speculated about the murder of the nanny Sandra Rivett using all the known sources. A year later Laura Thompson’s book A Different Class of Murder was published and last year the vanished earl’s death certificate was issued. That might have been thought to be that. But since 1974 Lucan’s widow – whose official name is Veronica, Dowager Countess of Lucan - stayed mainly silent. In this Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Turning the real-life murder of an 11-year-old boy into a four-part TV drama carries obvious risks (might it be exploitative, sick or in bad taste, for instance?), but judging by this opening episode of Little Boy Blue (ITV), screenwriter Jeff Pope has skilfully walked the line. His account of the shooting of Rhys Jones in Liverpool 2007 managed to combine sympathy with objectivity, and laid out the story with a careful restraint which was far more effective than shrill hysterics would have been.The way it’s told here, Jones was the unwitting victim of a local gang war between the so- Read more ...
David Benedict
“Take your pick. Who shall we talk to first?” DI Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and DS Miller (Olivia Colman) had their three prime suspects waiting for them in custody. The fact that none of them proved to be the guilty party was what was wrong not only with their investigation but with the construction of the third and final series of the dramatically serious, but seriously uneven, Broadchurch (ITV).On the absolute plus side was the handling of the subject matter. Following extensive consultation and research with women’s organisations and other bodies working in the area of rape, the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We’re three films into Rowan Atkinson’s tenure as Inspector Maigret and so far he’s barely twitched a facial muscle. Gone are the eye bulges and nostril flares, the rubbery pouts. There’s sometimes a hint of a frown, the odd twinge in a wrinkle around the eyes, but Atkinson’s performance continues mainly to be about keeping his cards superglued to his chest. Gnomic is about the size of it.The murder Maigret was investigating in Maigret's Night at the Crossroads (ITV) was of a Jewish jewel fence called Goldberg who, we later discovered, was recklessly eager to pull off one last high-yield deal Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Sunshine, sex and oodles of style: Vera (ITV) has no truck with any of them and is therefore unusual among Sunday evening dramas. There’s no escaping its mission to prove it’s grimy up north.The Blanket Mire, the fourth and final mystery of this seventh series, began with grey skies and torrential rain. A team of geologists, floundering in mud, unearthed a human arm. It belonged to an 18-year-old girl who has been missing for six weeks.There was no shortage of suspects: a dumped boyfriend, a handsome ex-soldier (Jonjo O’Neill, pictured right), the lead singer of a local band and a field of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We like to think of Georgian England as a wellspring of elegance: the Chippendale chair and the Wedgwood teapot, the landscaped vista and the neoclassical townhouse. But, as subversively embodied in the mock heroic couplet, the seemly Age of Reason had a seamy underbelly. There was order, but also ordure.Take Harris’s Life of Covent Garden Ladies, published in 1789 and updated four years later, advised on the services available to gentlemen of leisure. Miss All-s-n of No 4 Glanville Street, it reported, is “now just in her prime… rising seventeen… can trot, amble, & even gallop, if Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The prequel is here to stay. In the end every popular TV drama flogs itself to death. The star wants out, or the writer dies, or the original source material runs dry, or the public falls asleep. And there’s nowhere else to go. Nowhere, that is, apart from back in time. Hence the retro-fitted Endeavour and Gotham and Better Call Saul. In these risk-averse times, the execs enjoy the reassurance that the hard yards of establishing a character have already been gained. It (sort of) worked for Morse. How about the other great ITV cop of the last 30 years?Jane Tennison in the early 1990s was the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of Broadchurch was a gigantic hit four years ago, though 2015’s follow-up suffered a bit of a slow puncture. Can this third and supposedly final outing restore the show to its former glories?Episode one made a tidy and reasonably tense starter, though with seven more to go, you knew that whatever happened here was merely slapping on the undercoat for the (presumably) astounding and stunning revelations scheduled for later on by writer Chris Chibnall. Also, revisiting the same picturesque Dorset coastal town for the third time inevitably means its original freshness and Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now…One of the many ironies of Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s massive novel partly set in 1940s London, is that what follows these opening lines (760 pages in the original edition) actually occurs in the blink of an eye: the time it takes for the falling bomb to hit the sitting ducks in a picturehouse audience. Viewers of The Halcyon have known a bomb explodes at a party to celebrate the luxury hotel’s 50th year in November 1940 ever since the first episode eight weeks ago. Tonight we learned Read more ...