TV
Adam Sweeting
When they read the roll-call of British Formula One champions, the likes of Jackie Stewart, Graham and Damon Hill and Nigel Mansell tend to grab the spotlight, but Jenson Button’s dramatic and totally unexpected win in 2009 is every bit as worthy of celebration. It get its due here, in Disney’s hugely entertaining account of how Button, team boss Ross Brawn and his unfancied and underfunded squad defied the odds and provoked apoplexy among the F1 aristocracy.It’s a great story, though it undoubtedly helps if you have some interest in F1 to begin with, and it gains an extra jolt of horsepower Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Four centuries on from the publication of the First Folio, is there anything new to be said about William Shakespeare? Well, the fact that there is nothing old to be said about him (very little is known about the life of the glover’s son from Stratford) means that there’s always something new, as the evidence to gainsay any claim is minimal. Tedious conspiracy theories aside, it’s the kind of paradox the man himself might have appreciated.That’s the jumping off point for 72 Films’ lavish production for BBC Arts, a three-hour series that sits somewhere between the "clips and talking heads" Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The question they’re all asking is, can Shetland survive the loss of Douglas Henshall as DI Jimmy Perez? After all, it was Henshall’s shrewd and quietly anguished performance which gave the show much of its allure. And now there’s no Mark Bonnar either, who could always be relied on to add a soupçon of angst.Instead, it’s Ashley Jensen (Agatha Raisin, After Life etc) who’s front and centre in the new, revamped Shetland. She plays DI Ruth Calder of the Metropolitan Police, investigating the murder of a London gangster, Philip Remis. She’s looking for a runaway witness to the crime, Ellen Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you thought being a pop star might be fun, this four-part voyage around the tortured soul of Robbie Williams may convince you otherwise. He has sold 75 million records and historic numbers of concert tickets, scored 13 Number One albums and seven Number One singles in the UK, and has a shed full of gongs including 18 Brit Awards. But even so, now three months short of his 50th birthday, he still seems to feel that it could suddenly all end tomorrow, or possibly even this afternoon.“Nobody graduates from childhood fame well balanced,” he comments, having first been blasted into the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Derived from the similarly-titled novel by Thomas Mallon and directed by Ron Nyswaner, Fellow Travellers tracks the course of its protagonists through several decades of 20th Century American history. It’s also an account of changing attitudes to homosexuality, and how gay culture emerged from the shadows and went mainstream.Spanning the era from the Joseph McCarthy witch-hunts of the early 1950s to the Aids crisis of the Eighties, the story revolves around the entwined fates of Hawkins Fuller (Matt Bomer) and Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey, familiar from Bridgerton), who meet when both are Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
When the Oscar-winning documentary-maker Errol Morris sat David Cornwell down before his Interrotron camera in 2019, the first salvo of the chat came, not from the interviewer, but from his subject: “Who are you?” By which Cornwell meant, who does Morris see as the audience for this interview and what are its ambitions? By the end of the film, it will also be clear that Cornwell’s question carried an even weightier payload than that. It was to be the last filmed interview by the author known as John le Carré, conducted over four days the year before he died, at 89. Even fans steeped Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
F. Scott Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in American lives, but here’s Frasier Crane coming back for his third. Frasier first appeared on TV in the third series of Cheers in 1984. After Cheers bit the dust in 1993, Frasier was transported from Boston to Seattle and reborn in his own show, which ran until 2004 and stands as one of the most revered comedies in TV history (alongside, it must be said, Cheers). Twenty years on, you might think the odds were stacked against this re-revival of the pompous, pontificating shrink. We now find him transplanted back to Boston having Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The problem with star casting is that the viewer can’t escape what it is: a very well known face pretending to be another very well known face. So Steve Coogan’s portrayal of Jimmy Savile in The Reckoning is both a fine impersonation of the abusive DJ turned TV presenter and a distraction. He has been given a prosthetic chin and nose, a series of peroxide-blond wigs and (I’m guessing here) orthotics in his footwear that help him pull off that bandy swagger of Savile’s. His costumes are note-perfect, a hideous collection of jazzy sportswear and lurid suits, and the script conveys the mad Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Dramatisations of real-life crime have become all the rage on TV, as screenwriter Neil McKay and producer Jeff Pope are well aware. Their history of morbid collaborations includes See No Evil: The Moors Murders, the saga of serial killers Fred and Rosemary West in Appropriate Adult, and, in Four Lives, the story of serial killer Stephen Port.Now, in The Reckoning, they’ve focused their energies on Jimmy Savile. It arrives on BBC One and iPlayer on Monday (9 October) with Steve Coogan in the leading role. The series was first announced by the BBC three years ago, but its long gestation has Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The problem facing any chef series is that its daily dramas are essentially rooted in the same small, sweaty space. It’s like one of the reductions prepared there, all the flavours compressed into an intense spoonful of sauce.As in Disney+’s riveting The Bear, the cast can take trips outside – that Chicago restaurant’s patissier even travelled as far as Copenhagen – but the triggers of the drama will most likely be in the pass and the pot-washing. Even so, taking a leaf out of the Shane Meadows film-to-TV-drama playbook, Stephen Graham’s production company has created a terrific series Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Now that earnings from the John Wick movie franchise have topped a billion dollars, it’s no surprise that there should be moves afoot to cash in by developing a “John Wick Universe”.And here we have it, since Amazon's The Continental (subtitled "From the World of John Wick") is the back story of the renowned New York hotel in the Wick movies. It's a demilitarised zone of mandatory calm where weary hitmen come for a bit of rest and relaxation in between their murderous endeavours.In the movies, the Continental is suavely managed by Winston Scott, played with cynical guile by Ian McShane. But Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Jenna Coleman has had a mostly upbeat acting CV to date, notably playing Clara in Doctor Who and the young Queen in ITV’s Victoria. The mood darkened with her excellent turn as the French-Canadian girlfriend of the mass murderer in The Serpent; now it turns to pitch with Wilderness.This time Coleman is Liv and attemptedly Welsh (the accent comes and goes), recently married to aspirational Englishman Will (Oliver Jackson Cohen), who is promoted to a plum job in New York by the luxury hotel company he works for. There, in her sumptuous apartment, where she is ostensibly writing an untitled Read more ...