TV
Adam Sweeting
A disclaimer in the opening credits confessed that some scenes in this three-part history of disgraced Labour MP John Stonehouse had been “imagined for dramatic purposes”, but there was no need. The man’s life story fell comfortably into the “you couldn’t make it up” zone, and there wasn’t really much that screenwriter John Preston needed to add.It was indeed true that Stonehouse was given a job as a junior minister of aviation, that he negotiated a technology agreement between Britain and Czechoslovakia, and that he was later found to have been spying for the Czechs (he was depicted here as Read more ...
theartsdesk
It may be the lack of old-fashioned blockbuster movies that explains the staggering success of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick, and the explanation for the lack of blockbuster movies may be that all the money and effort are being poured into television.But the downside is that we now have far too many streaming services, and viewers are sick of having to fork out for yet more subscription plans. It’s baffling for TV critics too, since nobody can agree on what ought to be reviewed any more.Despite all that, 2022 had many memorable moments, and we pick out our favourites (and not-so-favourites) Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In 10 series stretching over the last 18 years, ITV's Doc Martin unobtrusively became an enduringly popular household name, but it finally reached the end of the road with this Christmas one-off. Unless, of course, there’s a prequel, a sequel, an origin story or a transformed internationalised version from Netflix.But barring all that, this was the last we’ll see of Martin Clunes’s doggedly grumpy and stone-faced Doctor Martin Ellingham. He’s a bit like a medical Blackadder. Series creator Dominic Minghella based Ellingham on Dr Martin Bamford from the 2000 movie Saving Grace, also played by Read more ...
graham.rickson
The BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series first consisted of eight short films broadcast between 1971 and 1978, five of which were adaptations of short stories by MR James.Shot on 16mm film instead of videotape, most were directed by documentary maker Lawrence Gordon Clark. Itching to move into drama, Clark had persuaded the controller of BBC to let him make an adaptation of James’s The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral. And, despite a tiny budget, the 45-minute film is a triumph. The chills are suggested rather than explicitly shown and offset with black humour, Robert Hardy’s Archdeacon, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As the third series of All Creatures… ended a couple of months ago, Britain had just declared itself at war with Germany and the men of Darrowby were queuing resolutely in the town square to join the armed forces. Intriguingly, as the credits rolled, it seemed that among them was one of our headlining vets, Tristan Farnon (Callum Woodhouse).So it proved, and Tristan’s determination to join the war effort, and the despairing efforts to stop him by his older brother Siegfried (Samuel West), provided the running theme of this Yuletide one-off. Screenwriter Ben Vanstone, who must still be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There’s no stopping Harry and Meghan. Logic, reason and facts can’t stand in the way of their “war on oppression and injustice” and determination to become “advocates of healing”. Even though their notorious interview with Oprah Winfrey was littered with demonstrable untruths, it seems their target audience buys into the notion of them telling “their” truth, surely the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. The absurdity of preaching eco-awareness while travelling everywhere by private jet and motorcade never seems to prick their perma-bubble of blissful self-regard.Finally their Netflix Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some may consider country music to be corny, sentimental and a relic of a forgotten era. If so, this six-part dramatisation of the lives of Tammy Wynette and George Jones is a reminder of how powerful and soulful the best country music can be, fuelled by raw emotions and personal turmoil.The tumultuous and frequently agonising progress of Jones and Wynette’s relationship was so traumatic that nobody could have dared to make it up, but the series is based on the factual recollections of the couple’s daughter Georgette in her book The Three of Us: Growing Up with Tammy and George. It’s a bone- Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Apple TV+ is using the arrival of season two of Slow Horses to offer a generous three-month free trial to its streamer service. Ample time to catch up with season one and watch it multiple times before all of season two is available at the end of December. Go for it.Mick Herron is now preparing the ninth Slough House novel for publication in 2023 (there have also been three related novellas in the sequence), while the TV series is just embarking on volume two, Dead Lions. Predictably, the literary critical backlash has already begun: the books are formulaic, the magic doesn’t last, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There was originally a plan to make Tokyo Vice a movie starring Daniel Radcliffe, but it has ended up as a TV series starring Ansel Elgort. It’s almost certainly the better for it, because the eight episodes of this first season – the way it ends, or rather doesn’t, makes a second helping inevitable – give it space to explore Japanese culture and its often mutually uncomprehending relationship with American or European values.It’s based on the book of the same name by Jake Adelstein, a Missouri-born journalist who relocated to Tokyo, joined the staff of a Japanese newspaper and worked his way Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese won delirious acclaim for their previous Netflix series Dark, a labyrinthine and fantastical account of children vanishing from a small German town. Anyone familiar with its baffling events and leaps across different timelines will probably feel at home with 1899, the duo’s similarly mind-bending follow-up.The story this time pivots around the disappearance of an ocean liner, the Prometheus, which has been missing at sea for four months. When a strange, constantly-repeating telegraph message is received, apparently coming from the vanished vessel, it prompts Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
“It was like Woodstock on steroids,” opines an expert in Netflix’s new release about the doomed marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn (yes, another one).Not sure you remember anything of that description from your history lessons? That would be the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the lavish spectacle staged near Calais in 1520 for a summit between Henry and François I of France. This remark should tell you the key thing you need to know about Blood, Sex & Royalty. It’s probably not for you, unless you are vetting it on behalf of teenage offspring. Its mesh of costumed soap with Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Why did Maui work better than Taormina? Mike White’s second series of The White Lotus, which has relocated for its second season from an upscale Hawaiian resort to the fleshpots of Sicily, is still a worthwhile watch, but it’s hard not to wonder where that special savour has gone this time. We know the drill now, for starters: a dead body turns up in an earthly paradise for rich people, and six episodes later we will know the who, why and when. Season one had fun misleading us about the perp; the second has opted for the trickier stunt of concealing exactly how many bodies there are, and Read more ...