sat 20/09/2025

tv

Get Shorty, Sky Atlantic review - Elmore Leonard meets Tarantino

Mark Sanderson

Emma Daly (Carolyn Dodd) tells her estranged husband Miles (Chris O’Dowd): “There is always an angle, a shakedown.” Of course there is: Davey Holmes’s Get Shorty is “partly based on” the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name (“inspired by” would be more accurate).

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Hidden, BBC Four review - a death in Snowdonia

Adam Sweeting

Nordic shmordic. Why travel to Scandinavia to get your dark, disturbing mysteries when you can find them in Wales? You even get subtitles for an extra frisson of otherness.

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Our Girl, Series 4, BBC One review - 2 Section versus Boko Haram

Adam Sweeting

I’ve never been in the Army, but I can’t imagine anybody involved with the making of Our Girl (BBC One) has either.

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Line of Separation, All 4, review - handsome if soapy epic

Jasper Rees

You don’t see a lot of German drama imported to British television. France, Italy, Scandinavia, yes. But the biggest country in Europe is less of a player. The great exception – and it really was great - was Deutschland 83, a thrilling hit when shown on Channel 4.

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Africa: A Journey Into Music, BBC Four review - too little, too late?

Peter Culshaw

BBC Four is the TV music equivalent of those oldsters music mags like Q and Mojo. Have there been five, or is it six, documentaries about Queen on the channel?

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Peter Kay's Car Share: The Finale, BBC Two review - happy ever after?

Jasper Rees

Would it be happy ever after for John and Kayleigh? Would they or would they not drive off into the sunset? By the end they weren’t driving off anywhere. Thanks to an errant hedgehog, the finale of Peter Kay’s Car Share (BBC One) turned into Peter Kay’s Car Crash and blew the bloody doors off. So they went home holding hands on the bus.

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King Lear, BBC Two review - modernised TV adaptation is a mixed blessing

Adam Sweeting

Some have contended that King Lear is unstageable, and perhaps it’s unfilmable too.

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Hip Hop Evolution, Sky Arts review - foundations of a revolution

Owen Richards

Comprehensively charting hip hop’s rise from the underground to the mainstream is no mean feat, but that’s exactly what Canadian MC Shad aims to do over four hour-long episodes. Originally shown in the US in 2016, and available in full on Netflix, Hip Hop Evolution has finally reached the British box via Sky Arts.

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Big Sky, Big Dreams, Big Art: Made in the USA, BBC Four review - unexpected facts aplenty

Marina Vaizey

“Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light” was a vision of the American flag, that star-spangled banner, riding proud from Francis Scott Key’s patriotic poem of 1814 based on an episode in the War of 1812.

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Manchester: The Night of the Bomb, BBC Two review - devastating account of the lottery of terror

Jasper Rees

“I thought she maybe had superpowers to go that high.” Emilia Senior, 12, watched her sister Eve, 15, thrown into the air by the force of the explosion.

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