tue 26/08/2025

tv

The Blacklist, Sky Living

Adam Sweeting

No brilliant new ideas? Well then, let's just boil up a compilation of a few old ones. Result? The Blacklist, a slick and surprisingly brutal spies-and-black-ops drama from NBC that speeds along blithely without an original thought in its head.

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Drama Matters: Lawless, Sky Living

Adam Sweeting

There's no denying the allure of a well-crafted legal drama, and there's also  probably a hefty swathe of fans pining for the return of Maxine Peake in Peter Moffat's superior Grays Inn yarn, Silk. They will have found plenty to cheer in Suranne Jones's thumpingly enjoyable performance as Lila Pettitt in Lawless [****], one of the female-centric pilot shows in Sky Living's new Drama Matters series.

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Secret Voices of Hollywood, BBC Four

Claudia Pritchard

They called Rita Moreno the triple threat – she could dance, act and sing. But even her spirited performance as Anita in West Side Story could not satisfy United Artists: the doomy low notes of "A Boy Like That" were considered out of her range, and the number was ghosted by Betty Wand, one of the scores of unknown singers who rescued on-stage stars from ignominy.

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Atlantis, BBC One

Jasper Rees

Ancient Greece has been having a bit of a run lately what with Dr Michael Scott’s recent primers on Greek culture and society and the like. There are, however, certain parts of the television audience a Hellenistic scholar cannot reach, and they are to be found on a sofa looking for something to watch between Strictly and Casualty. In the event that such viewers choose not to gorge on The X Factor, they can now opt to spend time in Atlantis.

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Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Channel 4

Lisa-Marie Ferla

There are two schools of critical thought when it comes to stories set in fantastical worlds. The first implies that it’s difficult to argue for realism and consistency in something that’s supposed to be a bit of fluff, where not only have aliens invaded New York but those aliens have been defeated by “among others: a giant green monster, a costumed superhero from the 1940s, and a god”.

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Meet the Russians, Fox

Tom Birchenough

There’s a great line near the beginning of Fox’s nine-parter Meet the Russians: “Money can’t buy you taste. It can buy you a personal shopper.” If this show's participants had splashed out on a bit of PR advice as well, you wonder whether the answer would have come back to steer clear of such television exposure, even when Fox came knocking.

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The Wrong Mans, BBC Two / London Irish, Channel 4

Veronica Lee

Love him or hate him, James Corden undeniably does have a range of talents – actor, writer and co-creator of some very funny comedy (we'll politely forget the car crash of his misguided BBC sketch show with Mathew Horne). And now, dontchaknow, he's come up with another comedy vehicle, The Wrong Mans [****], which had a very accomplished debut last night.

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Being Paul Gascoigne, ITV

Jasper Rees

There was a time when England’s greatest and most charismatic footballer of the last 40 years would inspire fine writers to flights of poetry. Karl Miller in the London Review of Books compared him to “a priapic monolith in the Mediterranean sun”. Not to be out-hyperbolised, Ian Hamilton in Granta invoked a Miltonic Old Testament hero in his essay “Gazza Agonistes”.

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Downton Abbey Series 4, ITV / By Any Means, BBC One

Adam Sweeting

"The price of great love is great misery when one of you dies," intoned the Earl of Grantham lugubriously in this fourth-season opener [****], and the death of Matthew Crawley hovered heavily over the household. His widow Lady Mary haunted the corridors like the Woman in Black, speaking in an even more dolorous monotone than usual. The great Penelope Wilton imbued Matthew's mother Isobel with a piercingly real sense of grief.

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Vinnie Jones: Russia's Toughest, National Geographic

Tom Birchenough

Once you’d got over an initial sense of absurdity at Vinnie Jones as travel guide, to Russia and for National Geographic to boot, a certain logic kicked in: hard country, hard man. Some time after we'd lost count in Vinnie Jones: Russia’s Toughest of how often our guide had described himself as "football hard man and Hollywood tough guy”, something unfamiliar crept into view, namely an element of humility in the face of challenges that boggled the Jones imagination.

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