BBC Two
Jasper Rees
Playwrights have long migrated to the small screen in search of better pay and room to manoeuvre. Most don’t leave it as long as Conor McPherson, who was perhaps cushioned from necessity by the global success of The Weir. A quarter of a century after his stage debut, Paula (BBC Two) is his first go at television drama. In order not to frighten the horses, it features some conventional post-watershed thrillerish tropes: an extramarital affair, a psychopath, a murder, a police investigation.But some things never change: frightening the horses is a McPherson speciality. Tom Hughes plays white Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the dog-eat-dog world of White Gold it’s 1983, when greed was about to become good and (as the show’s creator Damon Beesley puts it) “a time when having double-glazed patio doors installed meant you were winning at life”. The streets were full of sludge-coloured cars from British Leyland, and Duran Duran and Bonnie Tyler ruled the charts.Beesley (of Flight of the Conchords and The Inbetweeners fame) served time as an Essex Man in his youth, and this pungently-flavoured opener dripped with closely-observed ambition and ruthless one-upmanship. Our protagonist and narrator Vincent Swan ( Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Imagine a doctor has just told you that you have only a year to live. What would you do? Learn to sky dive, spend every last penny you have, be brutally honest with anyone who has crossed you, or curl up in a ball and wait for the inevitable? Producer and director Sue Bourne decided to talk to people who have indeed been told they have only a little time left, and A Time to Live on BBC Two is the remarkable result.“This is a film about living,” her voiceover told us at the beginning of the hour-long documentary, and it turned out to be the case. One after another, the 12 participants – people Read more ...
Sue Bourne
Do you ever wonder what you’d do if you were given a terminal diagnosis and told you may only have months to live? That question is what my latest film is all about. It may sound maudlin and sad but I can assure you it isn’t. And the reason for that is that the people I set out to find may have been terminally ill but they’d all chosen to make the most of the time they have left. The film is honest, uplifting, thought-provoking and, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, it’s also pretty remarkable.It’s not like other films I‘ve seen about death and dying because in essence it’s a film about Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Actor Oliver Chris, who plays William in Mike Bartlett’s ingeniously-crafted play about the monarchy, was doing some pre-transmission fire-fighting by going round telling interviewers he couldn’t see what anybody (eg the Daily Mail) could find to get upset about. Why would they? King Charles III only depicts the ghost of Diana speaking with forked tongue, a political and constitutional crisis, and an internal putsch within the Royal Family. There’s even a jibe about Harry’s paternity. And all this after having buried the Queen.To be sure, the piece has already enjoyed a lavishly-acclaimed run Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of The Last Kingdom in 2015 kicked off with a blockbuster episode which managed to encompass savage violence, dynastic rivalry and a speedy tour of the state of Britain in the ninth century, while allowing the central protagonist, Uhtred, to grow from boy to man. It was a virtuoso feat, and one which the opener of series two couldn’t quite repeat.But have no fear. The new series has been steadily building momentum, and with this explosive fourth episode it once again looked like one of the very best things on television. It was here that Uhtred (Alexander Dreymon), the Saxon- Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The soothing voice of David Attenborough narrated this cautionary tale, which is improbably heading not for a happy ending but a happy new beginning. Puerto Rico, the so-called island of enchantment, overwhelmed early western visitors with its charms: its beaches, its rainforest, its animals, its beauty. But nature was unprepared for the greatest threat, human predation, and the general mayhem wreaked by homo sapiens on other species.Heavy industrialisation and urbanisation were to follow, wrecking the previously pristine environment. Scientists reckon 95 percent of the original rainforests Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
To Westminster and Meet the Lords, a series which Radio Times assures me follows “the larger-than-life characters” in one of our “most idiosyncratic and important institutions”. Obviously it was shot well before the current Brexit deliberations in the Lords, and this first of three films was largely concerned with the passage of the government’s housing bill last year. This perhaps offered a taste of what their Lord and Ladyships hope to do with Brexit, as they roused themselves indignantly from their post-prandial slumbers against aspects of the housing legislation, and forced the government Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Television audiences love seeing familiar faces in different contexts – whether it’s actors exploring their ancestry in Who Do You Think You Are? or politicians awkwardly busting their moves on Strictly. But there’s always a risk that the camera will reveal more than you’d like. For a political journalist like Andrew Marr, famous for hard-hitting interviews on his Sunday show, allowing director Liz Allen to make a film about his quest to recover fully from the stroke that almost killed him in 2013, required careful consideration.Liz Allen (pictured below) is an award-winning observational Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Francis Bacon died in April 1992, aged 82, but heaven knows how he managed to live that long. The tortuous story of his life is now fairly well known, but Richard Curson Smith's documentary marshalled a formidable array of critics, biographers and celebs including Marianne Faithfull, Damien Hirst and Terence Stamp to create a portrait of a man capable of effervescent wit and charm, yet fuelled from within by a monstrous darkness.The film lit the blue touch paper by looking at Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which, when exhibited in London in 1945, did little to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s the ghastly scenario of a grim morality play. A man called Simon comes into hospital for the removal of a tumour in his oesophagus and the construction of a new food pipe. But there are not enough berths in the intensive therapy unit to ensure he can have post-operative care. Why? Because elsewhere in the country Janice has ruptured her aorta in a car accident. She is on her way to the London hospital which specialises in such cases. If she dies in the ambulance on the way, Simon can have his op. If not, he has to go home (for the second time). How does that make Simon feel? "Guilty, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been 12 months since the news guy wept and told us: David Bowie, ever out in front, became the first to depart in the year of musical mortality 2016. After the initial lamentations, the memorial tributes have been a mixed bag. Best was the life story stitched together for Radio 4 from a vast back catalogue of audio interviews. Less impactfully there was also the well-meaning misfire at the Proms, plus a messy Dadaist meta-biog rushed out by Paul Morley. Broadcast on what would have been Bowie’s 70th birthday, The Last Five Years is the best attempt yet to contextualise late Bowie in Read more ...