Motherhood seems to be a thing for Sharon Horgan at the moment. First came Catastrophe, the Channel 4 comedy about unplanned parenthood she writes and co-stars in with Rob Delaney, and now Motherland, a pilot co-written with Graham and Helen Linehan and Holly Walsh for the BBC.Like Catastrophe, it's an acutely observed comedy, this time about middle-class mums in suburban London. Anna Maxwell Martin is superb as Julia, a time-stressed events organiser with two young children who has been relying on her mother for childcare. Julia's day starts out badly and unfolds into a series of disasters Read more ...

H Division has a new home in Whitechapel that basks in the white heat of the technological revolution. The police station not only has a telephone but a “microreader” that allows the user to check thousands of miniaturised card indexes. Alas, a wry smile is all the viewer is likely to get from this opening episode of the fourth season. Nothing happens until the last ten minutes.When it was originally broadcast on Amazon Prime, Ripper Street 4 began with a two-hour episode. Terrestrial viewers on BBC Two have to make do with 60 minutes of scene-setting, throat-clearing and explanation. Three Read more ...

There is a grand ongoing project in Wales at the moment, the goal of which is to hunt for the deep ancestral DNA of the Welsh people. CymruDNAWales has already made some startling findings, in particular about a dozen all-powerful chieftains from 1500 years ago whose DNA is found in a large number of Welsh males. But enough about Welsh men and women. What about Welsh dogs?A country whose image is bound up in sheep farming doesn't seem to have a national herding dog to match. The Welsh sheepdog is the only candidate, and a few years ago it was very nearly extinct: only 80 were left in the Read more ...

So much has happened since the first of June when Versailles flounced on to our screens with its flowing locks and flashing cocks. The British people have voted to widen the Channel, the Conservatives have a new leader, Labour doesn’t have one and Christopher Biggins has been expelled from the Big Brother house. As Louis XIV might have said: plus ça change…The title song (Now and Forever by M83) became increasingly haunting as the weeks and wigs (often with heads still attached) rolled by. The series lost interest in sex as more and more bricks were laid, the palace took shape and glory shone Read more ...

Incredible but true, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein really did hire a largely-British film crew to come to his country and make a movie called Clash of Loyalties, about how Iraq freed itself from British influence in the 1920s and blossomed into an independent state. It never made it as far as a cinema release, but the footage was recently rediscovered in a garage in Surrey by its producer, Latief Jorephani (pictured below).This entertaining but slightly ragged documentary by Stephen Finnigan (★★★) told the story of the film and rounded up several of the surviving cast and crew, though the Read more ...

The comedy of widowhood is the brave territory of Mum. Lesley Manville plays Cathy, whom we meet on the day she is burying her husband Dave – although not literally doing it herself, as has to be explained to the nice but dim new girlfriend of her stay-at-home son Jason (Sam Swainsbury). As the mourners gather at her Chingford semi, each fresh arrival proves more grotesque than the last, and poor Cathy’s face becomes a little more pinched as her heroic reserves of tolerance run almost dry.First there’s Kelly (Lisa McGrillis, pictured below) who arrives in a short red dress, needing to borrow Read more ...

Time was when the words “a new sitcom from Ben Elton” wouldn't make anyone's heart quicken with anticipation. I think it's fair to say that after the glorious Blackadder (1983-89), he struggled to write anything so brilliantly, giddily funny, but with Upstart Crow he has made a storming return to form.David Mitchell is William Shakespeare, here played as a man for whom one word will never do when he can say ten, and always on the verge of a moan – whether it's about the poor 16th-century transport system between London and Stratford-upon-Avon, or the fact that, as a Midlander, he's seen as an Read more ...

Allegedly one of the worst plays Shakespeare wrote (which he may have done in cahoots with Thomas Nashe), the first part of Henry VI emerged victorious from this TV adaptation. Whereas one might think twice about chopping and rejigging Hamlet or King Lear, director and co-adapter Dominic Cooke had applied some muscular compressing and reshaping which meant that the piece gathered pace steadily, and was thundering ahead at full steam by the time it hit the final credits.Mind you, it wasn't strictly Henry VI Part 1, since some of the later scenes (most notably the harrowing denunciation and Read more ...

Sometimes compared to Boardwalk Empire or The Wire, and raved over by the likes of Brad Pitt, Snoop Dogg and even Jose Mourinho, Peaky Blinders opened its third series by becoming positively Godfather-esque. Writer Steven Knight whisked us away from the satanic mills of Birmingham to Tommy Shelby's sprawling Warwickshire mansion, where the Peakies supremo was trying to celebrate his unexpected wedding to Grace.It was a fraught gathering of clans, set in a tenebrous anti-Downton. The extended Shelby brood, which teems with brothers and cousins and aunts like dynastic knotweed, is never more Read more ...

At last, after three series, Line of Duty delivered a denouement that felt like a satisfying jackhammer to the solar plexus. In the first series the bent copper under investigation escaped justice by jumping in front of a lorry. In the second there were more loose ends than are generally produced by a rope factory. It turns out that patience is a virtue and we should all have had faith.Jed Mercurio had long-term plans for Lindsay Denton that even Keeley Hawes knew nothing about. Also for the late Tommy Hunter and, of course, DC Nigel Morton, in which role Neil Morrissey kept hobbling back on Read more ...

Every few months we get a new Project Fear campaign by "experts" announcing that a small glass of Bristol Cream twice a week now qualifies as "binge drinking", and guarantees certain death. However, none of the interviewees in Louis Theroux's latest documentary had paid any attention to these warnings. They were patients at the specialist liver centre at King's College Hospital in south London, and each of them was fighting a different kind of battle with alcohol.There was Stuart the antiques dealer, suffering from cirrhosis and with perhaps only months to live, though this information was Read more ...

In 2014 the Channel 4 series Confessions looked at the changing face of the old professions. In the programme about doctors, one GP remembered the standard practice of deploying acronyms on patient notes that looked like arcane medical terminology but were in fact nothing of the sort. One of them was NFN, which meant Normal for Norfolk.It’s not quite clear why a new docusoap of that name has adopted it. East Anglian safe spacers may be triggered into a sense of mortal offence followed by noisy excommunication for BBC Two. The title is more harmless than it looks. This is yet another Read more ...