fri 10/10/2025

tv

Poldark, Series 3, BBC One review - tempestuous passions and pantomime villains ride again

Adam Sweeting

Is it always the same bit of Cornish clifftop they gallop along in Poldark? Anyway here it was again, raising the curtain on the third series.

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Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World review - the weird and wonderful roots of the Sixties counterculture

Adam Sweeting

As the accompanying music reminded us, it's the time of the season for looking back in languor at the psychedelic daze that descended on America's West Coast in 1967. It was an era when one was enjoined, if going to San Francisco, to "be sure to wear flowers in your hair".

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Election Night 2017, BBC One, ITV, Channel 4, Sky News

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.

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Ackley Bridge, Channel 4 review – can the town's new academy bring racial and social harmony?

Adam Sweeting

Welcome to Ackley Bridge Academy, home of a new Channel 4 drama and a new amalgam of two segregated schools in a Yorkshire mill town setting out to prove itself “a new school with a new attitude”.

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Lord Lucan: My Husband, The Truth review - the coldest case of all

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.

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The Handmaid's Tale, Channel Four review - triumphant dystopian drama

Markie Robson-Scott

The second episode of Bruce Miller’s brilliant dramatisation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale on Channel 4 finds Offred (the wonderful Elisabeth Moss) being penetrated by Commander Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes, looking conflicted).

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Sgt Pepper's Musical Revolution, BBC Two review - how the Fab Four changed pop music forever

Adam Sweeting

It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the triumphant vindication of the Beatles' decision to quit touring and instead exploit the possibilities of the recording studio.

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Broken, BBC One review - things look bleak in McGovernville

Adam Sweeting

This is Jimmy McGovern, so it’s no surprise to find ourselves up north and feeling grim.

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Paula, BBC Two review - Denise Gough's the real thing

Jasper Rees

Playwrights have long migrated to the small screen in search of better pay and room to manoeuvre. Most don’t leave it as long as Conor McPherson, who was perhaps cushioned from necessity by the global success of The Weir.

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White Gold, BBC Two review – rattling pace and razor-edged dialogue

Adam Sweeting

In the dog-eat-dog world of White Gold it’s 1983, when greed was about to become good and (as the show’s creator Damon Beesley puts it) “a time when having double-glazed patio doors installed meant you were winning at life”. The streets were full of sludge-coloured cars from British Leyland, and Duran Duran and Bonnie Tyler ruled the charts.

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