How much more can Jeremy Clarkson’s body take? The fifth season of his reality show about his Oxfordshire spread, Diddly Squat Farm and pendant pub, could have been borrowed from the Book of Job.
Neatly winding up season four with an impending heart attack, this time, as headlines have announced, he calmly reveals to his team that he also has aggressive prostate cancer to tackle. But not until his drought-addled crops have been harvested, of course.
Can you remember what you were doing on 23 June 2016? You might well have been out to cast your vote in the EU referendum, which has thrown its interminable shadow over our benighted country ever since.
Aptly scheduled for our Great British Heatwave, writer Catherine Shepherd’s eight-part drama whisks us away to a remote Greek island, where a band of friends (four of them having been at university together) have rented an aesthetically pleasing but somewhat decrepit house for the titular fortnight.
Screenwriter Neil Forsyth earned kudos a-plenty with his two BBC One series of The Gold, a dramatisation of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat bullion robbery and its aftermath. Now he’s stepped aboard the good ship Netflix for this story of heroin-pushing gangs in London and Liverpool, set in the dying days of the Thatcher government at the turn of the Nineties.
Melbourne’s petite popstrel Kylie Minogue zoomed to superstardom in the late Eighties, with her celebrity from Aussie TV soap Neighbours helping to boost her spectacular recording career under the manipulative auspices of the Stock, Aitken and Waterman hit factory. Apocryphally, her debut UK Number One hit "I Should Be So Lucky" was knocked together in a brisk 40 minutes, though, interviewed here in director Michael Harte's compelling three-part documentary, Pete Waterman insists it took all of two hours.
Will viewers tire of Rivals before It runs out of Rutshire Chronicles to adapt? Not if these screen versions of Jilly Cooper’s novels about toffs and hot totty in the Cotswolds are executed with the brio of the first two series.
The writer of the edgy TV drama The Responder, Tony Schumacher, is back with an equally edgy but surprisingly warm-hearted story of people down on their luck in Liverpool. On paper, The Cage sounds like another run-through of the clichés of casino dramas, but it regularly confounds expectations.
Filmmaker Charlotte Regan has been moving steadily up the creative ladder with music videos, short films and her 2023 feature debut Scrapper, which made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival. Now she takes a crack at a major drama for the BBC with Mint, whose eight 30-minute episodes describe a tale of young love, family dysfunction and gang violence.
With the good looks and dash of his signature 1947 Triumph Roadster, the Jersey detective is back for a second season in his new incarnation: the polar opposite, seemingly, of his colleagues in Shetland.
It was back in 2019 when The Capture made its debut on BBC One, with writer Ben Chanan skilfully exploiting the sinister potential of deep-fake technology and ubiquitous mass surveillance conducted by the authorities. But if it seemed like sci-fi at the beginning, the new third series lands in a world where ever-evolving gadgetry has made all this stuff not just entirely feasible but almost commonplace.