TV
Owen Richards
Luca Changretta got his just desserts, Alfie Solomons made a last gasp for the quiet life, and Thomas Shelby revealed his true enemy – Peaky Blinders wrapped up another exciting series in a high-octane and neat finale.Tommy always has a way out; four series in and we still fall for it. In tonight’s final episode, it looked like his reckoning had finally arrived; Arthur’s death snapped Tommy into a violent rage in scenes reminiscent of last series’ capture of Vincente Changretta. It’s in these moments we witness the real Tommy; a terrifying and dangerous man who drags his family down with Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In 1994, a group of students at Bretton Hall drama school – Jeremy Dyson, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith – began writing and performing together. They took as their name the title of a Jack Hawkins film, The League of Gentlemen, and in 1997 won the Perrier Comedy Award at the Edinburgh Fringe. The show, set in a fictional village peopled by some colourful characters, was on BBC Two between 1999 and 2002 and was made into a film in 2005. The four members, meanwhile, have gone on to write and/or star in various projects, singly or in various permutations.So it was a mightily Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
“I am going to find out how much my trees live, breath, and even communicate. I am Judi Dench, and I have been an actor for 60 years – but I have had another passion ever since I was a little girl: I have adored trees. My six acres are a secret woodland, and my trees are part of my extended life.”What a lovely introduction! In My Passion for Trees, we spent a year, condensed into an hour, with Dench in her Six-Acre Wood in Surrey. A national treasure speaking of national treasures, she was wide-eyed at the wonder of trees. Indeed, there are more trees on our planet than stars in our galaxy. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Crooked House is being released as a film in various territories, but has already been shown on television in America and has now surfaced as a drama on Channel 5 bearing the title Agatha Christie’s Crooked House. It duly falls in with a recent televisual tradition for serving up the Queen of Crime as a Christmas treat. See also A Witness for the Prosecution and And Then There Were None (which would have been joined by Ordeal by Innocence on Boxing Day until the BBC pulled it on learning that its star Ed Westwick was accused of rape and sexual assault).Adapted from the novel published in 1949 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s remarkable how pervasive the Scandi-noir formula has become, with its penchant for weird and perverted killers, labyrinthine plotting and intriguingly flawed protagonists. The French-made Witnesses: A Frozen Death was another fragment chipped off that Nordic iceberg, though it developed its own particular character thanks to strength in depth in the casting and a strong visual signature which fully exploited moody, melancholy locations in northern France.Absorbing as it was, A Frozen Death did little to promote optimism about human nature. There are plenty of miserable real-life stories Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For the third and allegedly final time, we hasten back to the Kent coast for another outbreak of cross-Channel crime. Not all that surprisingly, this new series of the Franglais cop show focuses on a people-smuggling racket bringing bedraggled Syrian refugees over to Britain from the French coast, though it might have been a bit more fun if we’d had a mackerel war between French and British fishermen, or were plunged into the unfolding crisis as a Eurostar-load of Brussels bureaucrats were forced to drink Kentish sparkling wine.Anyway, it’s bonjour all over again to dogged British detective Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week we were all meant to be gripped by a bunch of ancient geezers nicking diamonds in Hatton Gardens. The postponement of ITV’s nightly four-part drama – the second of four (four!!) different versions of the infamous burglary – is a bit of a mystery. Now you see it on the cover of the Radio Times. Now it’s in mothballs. The beneficiary of this hasty swerve was Bancroft. Originally made for ITV Encore, a channel which is about to become an ex-channel, it has suddenly come in from the cold.What does it say about a drama that was to have been launched in a graveyard where thousands not Read more ...
Katherine Waters
The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter on the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico decomposes, brine and methane are produced, and where these saline pockets collect, nothing grows. Dead creatures drop into it; live creatures that linger in it die. In this lifeless zone their bodies float preserved, a rich and dangerous larder for scavengers such as the giant mussels fringing its edges and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Beneath the creamy overlay of gowns, crystal chandeliers, palaces, uniformed flunkies and a sumptuous (albeit CGI-enhanced) Royal Yacht, a steely pulse of realpolitik fuels The Crown, returning to Netflix for its much-anticipated second series. Vaulting straight back on the horse, creator Peter Morgan pitches us into a royal marriage heading for the rocks, a weak and wobbly Prime Minister getting sucked into a disastrous escapade in the Middle East, and the story of the Queen’s troubled younger sister trying to a find a place in the world away from the flotsam of European royalty offered up Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How good was Howards End (BBC One)? Practically flawless. Even if it broke into a bit of an action-packed sprint towards the dénouement, it’s been a triumphant reaffirmation of EM Forster, a canonical favourite back in the 1980s courtesy of Merchant Ivory and David Lean who has since fallen out of favour with dramatists.It began with the casting. As the capable, questing Schlegel sisters Hayley Atwell and Philippa Coulthard (pictured below) rejoiced in a physical similarity which made it extraordinarily easy to believe in their mutual loyalty and intellectual compatibility – though of course Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Eureka! A programme about a woman artist that doesn’t define her as a wife and mother first and an artist second. In fact, Rachel Whiteread’s husband and two sons were mentioned only briefly in this excellent documentary that followed her career from 1988, when she began making plaster casts of furniture, through to the monumental public sculptures that have attracted so much controversy over the years. The beginning was horribly predictably, though. First we saw footage of the Turner Prize ceremony in 1993, when Whiteread became the first woman to win the £20,000 award. Earlier that Read more ...
Owen Richards
Long before Barack Obama spoke about the audacity of hope, the Voyager mission left the Earth driven by something else: the audacity of curiosity. What do the outer planets look like? What are they comprised of? And what’s beyond that?Storyville: The Farthest - Voyager’s Interstellar Journey is an immersive study of NASA’s most audacious mission. Condensed by BBC Four by 30 minutes from a cinematic release, this incredible documentary looks at the infinite and infinitesimal questions that Voyager dared to answer. It makes you proud to be human, and embarrassed to still use your fingers when Read more ...