TV
Markie Robson-Scott
At the end of the first series, MI6 spy Eve (Sandra Oh) stabs psychopathic assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) in the stomach as they’re together on the bed in Villanelle’s gorgeous Paris flat ("chic as shit" according to Eve). “I really liked you! It hurts!” cries Villanelle. Series two doesn't mess about. It starts 30 seconds later, as Eve rushes down the spiral staircase, gasping, distraught, carrying a bloody knife.“I think I might have killed her,” Eve tells her crisp boss Carolyn (Fiona Shaw), who's on the phone from London. A couple in love, the man with an engagement ring at the ready, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It helps to be of a certain vintage to appreciate the first impact of Tales of the City. Armistead Maupin’s column, begun in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1978 as a frank and joyous portrayal of gay culture, became a series of half a dozen cult novels. These started appearing in the UK from the mid-1980s. It was a British broadcaster, Channel 4, which began the project of adapting them as dramas in 1993, joined for the second series by Showtime who did the third on their own in 2001.The next three novels, which culminated in the departure from San Francisco of its female protagonist Mary Ann Read more ...
Tom Baily
Shane Meadows has said that he always wanted to make a film where people didn’t talk. It’s homage to the European cinema he loves, with its preference for atmosphere over action, ambiguity over resolution, but it is also a way to confront an experience that lay dormant within his own life for too long. That is the trauma of the sexual abuse survivor, who is locked in silence and trapped by what cannot be said. If there were periods in The Virtues (Channel 4) that ambled along too slowly, or were simply too unbearable to watch, Meadows has achieved a redeeming climax in this final episode Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first film in this extraordinary series, Seven Up!, was made for Granada Television’s World in Action in 1964. It picked 14 seven-year-old British children from different social backgrounds, aiming to revisit them every seven years to see how their lives were progressing. Paul Almond directed the first programme, but ever since this has been Michael Apted’s baby.The slow, methodical progress of the series down the decades has meant that it has steadily accumulated a strange power, as these lives of others have in some ways become merged with our own. Those original seven-year-olds are now Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you should happen to be loitering in London’s Knightsbridge at 4am, don’t panic if you find yourself surrounded by the massed horsemen of the Household Cavalry. When they need to rehearse for great occasions like the Queen’s birthday, they can only do it in the middle of the night when there’s no traffic on the roads.This was one of many factoids packed into this new ITV documentary series. Other gems included the news that the regiment’s horses produce 6,000 tons of “royal poo” every year, which the lucky troopers have to shovel down the “dung tunnel”, while the horses have their faces Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Chernobyl (Sky Atlantic) is the most unmissable show on TV. Perhaps it’s because the Soviet nuclear catastrophe in 1986 was so blood-freezingly horrific that the filmmakers didn’t need to fictionalise or exaggerate.This penultimate episode was bad news for animal lovers. It opened with an elderly woman trying to milk a cow, only to be ordered at gunpoint to leave her home right away, because of the morbid threat of radiation. She reeled off a litany of historical famines, wars and invasions that she’d lived through, and concluded that she’d be damned if she was going to leave because of some Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Professor Brian Cox, still looking cheekily boy-band-ish at the age of 51, has made himself a child of the universe. His day job is professor of particle physics at Manchester University, but turn him loose with a camera crew and an unfeasibly large budget and he turns into a starry-eyed cosmic hippy.In his new series for BBC Two, the Prof is taking a survey of Earth and the other seven planets which make up our solar system. His thesis is that each of these – Mercury, Venus, Mars and the rest – experienced a period when they enjoyed conditions in which life could develop, but for various Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hallelujah! At last the BBC have commissioned a Stephen Poliakoff series that makes you want to come back for episode two (and hopefully all six), thanks to a powerful cast making the most of some perceptively-written roles.His most recent efforts, Dancing on the Edge and Close to the Enemy, were distinguished only by their contorted implausibility and woefully unconvincing characters. This time, he has drawn deeply on personal experiences of himself and his family, which seems to have helped him create rounded individuals it’s possible to identify with, amid a persuasive depiction of the way Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Persistent depression is debilitating and terrifying, as Alastair Campbell illustrated vividly in this punchily-argued film. We first saw him looking like a disturbed, miserable ghost, as he described in his video diary a sudden plunge into depression at New Year, 2018. He seemed to be ebbing away before our eyes.Campbell is shrewd and perceptive, but not easy to like. The former bellicose henchman of Tony Blair (and presumed model for Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It), Campbell was closely involved in the process leading to the 2003 Iraq invasion, and his arrogance and aggression often Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s remarkable that this meandering observational documentary about the five square mile airport west of London has stretched to a fifth series. Heathrow may have 77,000 staff and expect 80 million passengers to pass through this year, but that doesn’t mean everything they do is interesting.For instance, a slender storyline about Thai Airways passengers stranded without a seat when the airline replaced a double-decker Airbus A380 with a much smaller Boeing failed to fizz when none of the passengers became violent or unreasonable. In fact they were delighted to be paid £535 compensation per Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Have we passed peak Hatton Garden? It’s now four years since a gang of old lags pulled off the biggest heist of them all. They penetrated a basement next door to a safe-deposit company, drilled through the wall, and made off with many millions quids’ worth in diamonds, cash and the like. All but one of them ended up in prison, where they will probably see out their days, being all of them well past pensionable age.Owing to the age of the criminals, the story had immense appeal to that section of the British film industry that rushes to glamorise London gangsters. The burglary triggered a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Is there some tongue-in-cheek irony in BBC Two starting a five-part biographical documentary on Margaret Thatcher this Monday? Mrs Thatcher was Britain’s first female Prime Minister, Conservative to boot, and regardless of gender her years of leadership were among the most forceful and controversial ever. And it may be just days – May ends in June, as one headline put it – before the second Conservative female Prime Minister bows out amidst Brexit chaos and the potential implosion of the Conservative Party as a capable political force.In this first episode, Making Margaret, we heard from Read more ...