Any show making its debut in the midst of Wimbledon and the Euro-football, plus a spectacular performance by Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone, is likely to be gasping for air, and BBC Two’s ditzy new cop series didn’t so much charge out of the blocks as trip over them. Masterminded by Ben Schiffer, the eight-part series is based on Barbara Nadel’s Inspector Ikmen novels, which are much loved by their readers.I wouldn’t bet on them feeling the same about the TV version. The plot-driving device is the arrival in Istanbul of Detective Mehmet Suleyman (Ethan Kai from Killing Eve), who finds himself Read more ...

Showing over four consecutive nights, Night Caller is a stripped-down psychological thriller which steadily boils up to a conclusion which is both shocking and tragic.Robert Glenister turns in a meticulously controlled performance as Tony Conroy, a former schoolteacher now scraping a nocturnal living as a cab driver in Liverpool (you’d never guess the show was filmed in Dublin). A haunted and lonely character, broken by his failed marriage, he becomes fixated with the small-hours radio talk show hosted by Lawrence Brightway (Sean Pertwee, pictured below), whose relaxed, sandpapery voice makes Read more ...

It was 20 years ago that Celine Dion first experienced the muscle spasming which would eventually be diagnosed as Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS). She suddenly found she couldn’t control the pitch of her voice, a calamitous occurrence for a singer renowned for the almost superhuman power and accuracy of her vocal control. The condition advanced surreptitiously over the succeeding years, and when Dion had to pull out of her residency in Las Vegas in 2021 it became clear that the problem was acute.The Cleveland Clinic website informs us that SPS is “a rare autoimmune neurological disorder that Read more ...

Lucie Shorthouse is enjoying some high-profile TV action with her roles in Channel 4’s We Are Lady Parts, about the adventures of an all-woman Muslim punk band, and in BBC One’s reincarnated Rebus. In the former, she plays the band’s niqab-clad manager Momtaz, while the latter casts her as rookie cop DC Siobhan Clarke, trying to cope with the maverick behaviour of the titular John Rebus, played by Richard Rankin. Both shows have enjoyed a surge of critical acclaim and have pulled healthy audiences, which must surely have got the phones ringing in the office of Shorthouse’s agent. And that’s Read more ...

Scott Turow published his cunningly-wrought legal thriller in 1987, and Alan J Pakula’s powerful movie version, starring Harrison Ford, appeared in 1990. Enough time has elapsed, perhaps, for Apple TV’s revised version of Presumed Innocent for the streaming age.There’s plenty to like about this eight-episode reincarnation, which casts Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead role of Rusty Sabich, a Chicago prosecutor who seems to have enough on his plate coping with the poisonous internal politics of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, even before he has to undergo the ordeal of being tried for an Read more ...

New York in the 1980s is the setting for Abi Morgan’s new six-part drama, and it’s a city riddled with squalor, homelessness, racism and rampant crime. The Aids pandemic is also beginning to rear its hideous head. It’s here that the brilliant puppeteer Vincent Anderson (Benedict Cumberbatch) has masterminded his children’s TV puppet show Good Day Sunshine, which bears a striking resemblance to such Jim Henson creations as Sesame Street and The Muppets.You might think that Vincent would be happy with his life, since he’s hailed as a genius in his field and Good Morning Sunshine isn’t just a TV Read more ...

Maybe California-born Matthew Modine caught the movie bug courtesy of his father Mark, who used to manage drive-in theatres, but after bagging his first film role in John Sayles’s Baby It’s You (1983) he never looked back. Blessed with a gift of employability that must make many of his fellow-actors green with envy, Modine has been clocking up a stream of memorable performances for 40 years on both the small and big screens.The title role in Alan Parker’s Birdy (1984), where he played opposite a fledgling Nicolas Cage, signalled the shape of things to come. His performance as Private “Joker” Read more ...

It’s entirely fitting that Jake Adelstein should have a poster for All the President’s Men on the wall of his Tokyo apartment, since it was the filmic apogee of the notion of journalist as superstar. But where Alan J Pakula’s 1976 movie had Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as ace reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, knocking the bottom out of Richard Nixon’s presidency with their coverage of the Watergate scandal, Tokyo Vice tracks the intrepid efforts of expatriate American crime reporter Adelstein to expose the murderous activities of the local yakuza gangs.The series is based on the Read more ...

It was – let’s see – 63 years ago today that Brian Wilson taught the band to play. Fabled for their resplendent harmonies and ecstatic hymning of the sun-kissed California dream, the Beach Boys seemed to represent everything golden and glorious about the mythic American West Coast. If you lived in Detroit or Deptford, it looked like a wonderland indeed.But as we now know from a variety of books and documentaries, the history of the Beach Boys would prove to be long, tortuous and bittersweet, littered with casualties and various kinds of heartbreak. Disney+ have brought the heavy mob in to Read more ...

He’s not the kind of actor who has paparazzi following him around Beverly Hills or staking out his yacht in St Barts, but Eddie Marsan, born into a working class family in Stepney in 1968, has amassed a list of acting credits that your average superstar will never be able to match.On the big screen he has appeared in such diverse productions as Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, V for Vendetta, Me and Orson Welles, Warhorse, Atomic Blonde, Hancock and Entebbe, and he plays Amy Winehouse’s father Mitch in the new biopic Back to Black.He’s also part of Guy Ritchie’s regular stable, having appeared in Read more ...

The previous incarnation of Ian Rankin’s Scottish detective on ITV starred, in their contrasting styles, John Hannah and Ken Stott. For this Rebus redux, arriving nearly 25 years after the original first series began, screenwriter Gregory Burke has reworked the character as a younger Detective Sergeant, drawing on the spirit of Rankin’s original novels but with the author’s blessing to take the character somewhere new.Richard Rankin (no relation to the writer) is an excellent choice for Rebus. Rough, tough, scruffy and not to be trusted around a bottle of whisky, he comes equipped with the Read more ...

To mark the 40th anniversary of New Jersey’s second-greatest gift to rock’n’roll, Disney+ have served up this sprawling four-part documentary which tells you more about Jon Bon Jovi and his band of brothers than you ever needed to know. Or, possibly, wanted to.One has to conclude that it has been created in the image of Jon Bon himself, in all his obsessive, control-freak glory. Far from a hell-for-leather rock’n’roller, too fast to live and too young to die, he comes across as a sober, thoughtful workaholic who has maintained a steely grip on his career virtually since he learned to walk. He Read more ...