TV
Jasper Rees
It’s the ghastly scenario of a grim morality play. A man called Simon comes into hospital for the removal of a tumour in his oesophagus and the construction of a new food pipe. But there are not enough berths in the intensive therapy unit to ensure he can have post-operative care. Why? Because elsewhere in the country Janice has ruptured her aorta in a car accident. She is on her way to the London hospital which specialises in such cases. If she dies in the ambulance on the way, Simon can have his op. If not, he has to go home (for the second time). How does that make Simon feel? "Guilty, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was a good night for British thespians at the 2016 Golden Globes. The stars of The Night Manager – Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman – all visited the podium to collect awards. But of the most deserving winner of all was Claire Foy, whose performance in The Crown on Netflix continues a tradition started by Helen Mirren on film and onstage: portrayals of Queen Elizabeth II bring home the statuary. As she collected her Golden Globe, Foy thanked Her Majesty and suggested that the world could do with a few more women in charge.When I first interviewed the rising actress four years Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been 12 months since the news guy wept and told us: David Bowie, ever out in front, became the first to depart in the year of musical mortality 2016. After the initial lamentations, the memorial tributes have been a mixed bag. Best was the life story stitched together for Radio 4 from a vast back catalogue of audio interviews. Less impactfully there was also the well-meaning misfire at the Proms, plus a messy Dadaist meta-biog rushed out by Paul Morley. Broadcast on what would have been Bowie’s 70th birthday, The Last Five Years is the best attempt yet to contextualise late Bowie in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The arrival of this oppressively atmospheric 19th-century historical drama is being trailed as the BBC's bold attempt to break the Saturday night stranglehold of soaps and talent shows. No doubt they were encouraged by the success of all those Saturday night Scandi dramas on BBC Four, and if Taboo falls short it won't be because of a lack of stellar names.Front and centre is Tom Hardy, starring as the previously-presumed-dead James Keziah Delaney who suddenly reappears in London in 1814 at his father's funeral. Hardy is also co-creator (with his dad Chips) and co-producer of Taboo with his Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This was the first of four programmes looking at houses made of extraordinary materials in various environments, some extreme. We began with "Mountain", and further explorations are promised to "Coast", "Forest" and "Underground". The presenters were a contrasting pair: the rake-thin and wiry architect Piers Taylor, and actress and property developer Caroline Quentin, both at ease conversationally to the camera and with each other. Caroline Q was the surrogate viewer connecting to us. She nearly toppled over as she explored the potential frisson of the instability of a fragment of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Historic unsolved murders have become their own mini-genre, with the likes of Cold Case lurking in the small print of the schedules and Silent Witness still going strong in its 20th series. A hit the first time out in 2015, Unforgotten is back with a new investigation of another mystery cadaver.This time, the deceased was dredged out of the River Lea in north-east London, having been crammed into a suitcase (post-mortem, one hopes). Detectives Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) were promptly down on the riverbank, poking at the mysterious plasticky skin of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We're back at Friday Street, the crumbling cop shop on the wrong side of Manchester, where DI Viv Deering marshals her squad of anarchic misfits to fight crime. Paul Abbott's rude but not crude police comedy drama was a great hit first time round and managed to be riotously unPC while unravelling a complicated serial murder case. And, as with the late, great Cagney and Lacey, some of the best scenes were in the ladies' loo; two of Deering's closest aides are women (played by Elaine Cassidy and Alexandra Roach).At the end of the first series we learned that Deering's husband was the killer and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sherlock’s back in the here and now, and not before time. Twelve months ago, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes laid down his mobile phone to return to Edwardian London for a plate-spinning deer-stalking mind-warping one-off. The Abominable Bride, though good in parts, caused a mass outbreak of head-scratching. Had Team Gatiss/Moffat fallen a little too in love with metatextual rebooting and gone and got lost in their own hall of mirrors?It now looks as if they thought so too. The fourth series began with a story that, by Sherlockian standards, played a unusually straight bat. It began at the Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
The hyperbole began as soon as the voiceover did: “For most of us Judi Dench is M…” So much for Bernard Lee. The implication was that if you can remember him, then Judi Dench: All the World’s Her Stage was not for you. After all, she played James Bond’s boss for 17 years – until, at Daniel Craig’s suggestion, the sky fell in on her in Skyfall.Older fans of 007 – ie those watching BBC Two on a Friday evening – will have heard it all before (on Wogan, Film 97 and Desert Island Discs). Despite promising to uncover her secrets, there were no revelations in Francis Whately’s tribute to the much- Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Yorkshire-born screenwriter Sally Wainwright has carved a distinguished niche for herself as chronicler of that brooding, beautiful region’s social and familial dramas. After the romance of Last Tango in Halifax and the gritty panorama of Happy Valley, she has settled on perhaps the quintessential troubled Yorkshire family, with awesome bleakness on the side: the Brontës.Despite a difference of 150 years in setting, To Walk Invisible is not only a seamless progression from Wainwright’s previous work, but the story comes, ready-made, both achingly sad and also driven by a passion that can’t Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If there's one big question hanging over the television industry, it's "how long can the old broadcast networks survive in the new era of subscription and downloading services?" No doubt there will be a variety of answers, with different hybrid arrangements and partnerships springing up to deliver programming across multiple formats. From the viewer's point of view, it's a pain to have to keep subscribing to multiple providers such as Netflix or Amazon, not to mention all the extra devices we now have sticking out of the back of the TV. On the other hand, have viewers ever had it so good? Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A 90-minute biographical documentary about Bruce Springsteen, you may think, is for Springsteen fans only. But really anyone who is interested in fame, friendship, family relationships and the creative process will have enjoyed this – a revealing mix of personal testimony, The Boss reading from his recently released autobiography of the same title, Springsteen family home movies, and rarely seen footage of his early career.For music fans, the most interesting section was where Springsteen talked about his influences – they are wide and varied, and have a noticeably large number of British Read more ...