TV
Adam Sweeting
Documentaries about sports stars are now a dime a dozen, but you can only be as good as your subject matter. We know Andrew Flintoff (usually known as Freddie) is a larger-than-life character who has had his fair share of both success and failure, but in this new film for Disney+, directed by John Dower, he emerges as a charismatic personality who can inspire undying devotion among friends and teammates while being brutally honest about his own shortcomings.Though he suffered periods of despair and insecurity, not to mention numerous injuries, during his cricketing career, he has subsequently Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It had begun to seem that Jon Hamm, whatever other roles he might appear in, was destined to be forever remembered exclusively as Mad Men’s Don Draper. Character and actor had made such a perfect fit that it was impossible to prise them apart. I always liked the idea of Hamm as a retro-James Bond set in Ian Fleming’s original 1950s period, but they wouldn’t listen.So Hamm must be ecstatic with his new role as Andrew “Coop” Cooper in Your Friends & Neighbors, since it appears that lightning has struck twice. Cooper is a Manhattan hedge fund executive at a company called Bailey Russell. He’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A year ago Guy Ritchie brought us the Netflix series The Gentlemen, and now here he is on Paramount+ with his latest romp through the verdant pastures of criminal low-lifery. It seems that top thespians are queueing up to bag a slice of Ritchie-world, and an impressive cast includes Pierce Brosnan, Tom Hardy and Helen Mirren.To add a bit of extra lustre, screenwriting duties have been handled by Ronan Top Boy Bennett, with a bit of help from Jez Butterworth in episode one.Ritchie, a bit of a posh boy who likes slumming it, remains fascinated by the underworld/highlife divide. Thus we have Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The dramatic allure of families neck-deep in organised crime never seems to falter, and Stephen Butchard’s new series continues that great tradition in rambunctious style. Sean Bean (pictured below) plays Ronnie Phelan, paterfamilias of a Liverpool cocaine-importing operation, with Jack McMullen as his son Jamie. Julie Graham steps up to the plate as Ronnie’s wife, Elaine.However, it’s inherent in the theme that blood will be thicker than water. The man who has helped Ronnie build his Scouse drug empire is Michael Kavanagh, played with watchful, steely-eyed menace by James Nelson-Joyce. But Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
When the world’s darkness is too much, there is a Netflix rabbit-hole you can disappear down to a kinder place: the Korean romcoms section. This is a recommendation for romcom fans, a warm indulgent bubble bath of a watch. It's like turning the clock back to more innocent times, while full of contemporary pizzazz. The latest series to drop, a Netflix coproduction, is the most accessible yet, and the funniest. Having said that, The Potato Lab sounds as if it comes from the People’s Republic in the north. It’s a variant of the workplace comedy that’s been in TV’s DNA since The Rag Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A dictionary definition of adolescence is “the transitional phase of growth and development between childhood and adulthood”, but in this four-part drama it looks more like a nightmare zone of uncontrolled rage, anxiety and sexual confusion.Created and co-written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (also one of its stars), Adolescence is the story of how 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested for the murder of Katie, a fellow-pupil at Bruntwood Academy in an unspecified Yorkshire town.Obviously this hurls his parents, Eddie (Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco), into a state of blind panic and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year’s sixth season of Drive to Survive radiated an air of diminishing returns. It was as though the novelty of its spy-in-the-paddock ethos was wearing off as the Formula One teams sought to mould the show to suit their own interests, and what once felt spontaneous had begun to seem rehearsed.They can’t turn back time to the long-ago year of 2019 of course, but 2025’s new series benefits from covering a 2024 racing season which bristled with various kinds of personal and corporate dramas. The allegations of “inappropriate behaviour” by Red Bull boss Christian Horner, triggering a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of Ruth Ellis’s execution in 1955 has found its own macabre niche in British folklore, and has been been the subject of several film, stage and TV treatments. Perhaps the most memorable of these was Mike Newell’s 1985 film Dance with a Stranger, in which Miranda Richardson played Ellis.For ITV1’s new four-part drama, Kelly Jones has based her screenplay on Carol Ann Lee’s book A Fine Day for a Hanging: the Real Ruth Ellis Story, and it brings a heavy-calibre cast to bear on the story of the woman who shot dead her lover, David Blakely, outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead. Toby Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The BBC’s latest “cool” Agatha Christie adaptation has many hallmarks of the decidedly dark ones that were considered prestige Christmas treats until recently. But although it’s lovely to look at, it’s low on chills and thrills.The 1944 Agatha Christie novel it’s based on, later a play, has been given a makeover by Rachel Bennette, whose reworking winds back the clock to the mid-1930s. We get the usual moody coastal setting with raging seas and lowering skies, and gloomy interiors that are so underlit you can’t see what’s happening at crucial points. Sunny south Devon this is not. But the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They stopped making the BBC’s original Bergerac in 1991, so you can hardly complain that this reboot is premature. John Nettles became closely identified with the titular detective Jim Bergerac before he decamped to Midsomer, murder capital of the world, and has declared himself impressed with Damien Molony’s performance as the born-again sleuth (pictured below, Molony picks up the baton from Nettles).So, we’re back among the picturesque architecture, broad sandy beaches and French-sounding place names of Jersey, where we find Chief Inspector Bergerac in a troubled frame of mind.His wife Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Steven Knight is beginning to resemble the British version of Taylor Sheridan. While Sheridan has been saturating our screens with Yellowstone, 1923, Landman etc, Knight has been reeling off Peaky Blinders, SAS Rogue Heroes and even the story of opera star Maria Callas.With A Thousand Blows, Knight has travelled back to Victorian London in the 1880s, the era of Jack the Ripper, for a lurid exploration of the city’s foul-smelling underworld of crime, corruption and illegal boxing rackets. His chief protagonists are boxer Henry “Sugar” Goodson (Stephen Graham, pictured below, making a deft Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems that esteemed former US President George Mullen is subsiding gently into retirement on his luxurious country estate, with a publishing contract for his memoirs if he can ever manage to knuckle down and write them, when fate throws a curve-ball.Without warning, the USA suffers a total blackout of power, communications and computer systems. The resulting chaos in air, road and rail transport, not to mention medical facilities, causes thousands of casualties, and nobody has a clue how it happened.This blackout only lasted a mere 60 seconds, but the perpetrators have sent out ominous Read more ...