drama
Veronica Lee
It was several minutes into The National Anthem, Charlie Brooker's latest dramatic output on Channel 4 after his excellent 2008 mini-series Dead Set, a zombie-laden satire about reality television, before I laughed. I say that not as a criticism – far from from it – but as a huge compliment. For Brooker neatly confounded our expectations by making the opening scenes (shown as part of the Black Mirror season) appear as if they were part of a serious political thriller. It was only when the storyline took a ridiculous and hilariously obscene turn that one realised this was meant to be Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Those of a certain age have certain memories (very certain) of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, wife of the Bionic Man and not exactly unbionic herself, especially in that poster of her in the red one-piece with Seventies enormohair and fluorescent American Dream gnashers. There were a couple of others in Charlie’s Angels. One forgets their names, and indeed faces. (Feel free, scholars of the era, to write in on this.) It was revolutionary at the time: girls had been high-heeling men in the schnoz since The Avengers, but only one lady at a time. Now three bra-burners, Aaron Spelling’s fantasy answer to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I suspect writer Julian Fellowes's guilty secret is that he has an attic stuffed with novels from Mills & Boon, such are the luridly romantic plotlines and cliché-flirting characters in Downton Abbey. If you think you can see it coming, then you probably can.Though Downton is an original story, you get more déja vu moments than in the 27th televised version of Pride and Prejudice, and the way the speeding narrative seems to fling out another major dramatic development in between each ad break - and we know there are far too many of those - is like being trapped in a carriage being driven Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Unless one has been misreading the policy stylings of the oddly named "Nigel Farage" and his merry band of isolationists, the general idea behind UKIP is that Nothing Good ever came out of Europe. Party members may therefore wish to pursue a blanket avoidance of decent crime drama, almost all of which comes from our continental neighbours. First there was The Killing which went on more or less forever and was more addictive than crack. Spiral was barely less cultish. And after the entries from Denmark and France, now a succulent Italian crime drama takes its turn to stick around for an Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A couple of series ago Alan Yentob took himself off to Monte Carlo to grill Dame Shirley Bassey for Imagine about her life in showbiz. Kissinger got more out of Gromyko at the height of the Cold War. (The Soviet foreign minister’s nickname was Nyet.) The BBC have had another stab at showing what makes the girl from Tiger Bay tick, this time in the form of drama, where there is licence to make things up.The first thing Shelagh Stephenson’s script put straight is this business about Tiger Bay. The multiracial dockside slums of Cardiff was her home for only a couple of years before her black Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Directing and writing his first full-length feature, John Michael McDonagh fully exploits the wild and windswept landscapes of Connemara, and similarly extracts maximum value from his leading man, Brendan Gleeson. Perhaps he picked up tips from his brother Martin, who directed Gleeson in In Bruges. As Garda Sergeant Gerry Boyle, Gleeson finds himself on the trail of a trio of ruthless drug smugglers, about to land a colossal stash somewhere on the Irish west coast. This has attracted the attentions of FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle).The narrative is partly driven by the culture shock Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The pre-publicity has been spinning this saga of the notorious Renaissance family as a kind of origin story for The Sopranos. I suppose you could argue that Rodrigo Borgia, like Tony Soprano, was in the waste management business, as he himself suggested when he took the Papal throne as Alexander VI: "God has chosen us as a new broom to sweep the Vatican clean of corruption."But Rodrigo is undoubtedly aiming higher than a few sleazy rackets in New Jersey. As the incantation went at his spectacular coronation in Rome, "You are father of kings and monarchs, lord of the globe, earthly resident of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s something elemental in Elizabeth Mitchell and Brek Taylor’s Island – a small-scale British independent film that scores highly on performances and more than relishes the visuals of its setting.The landscapes, shot mainly on the Isle of Mull, are glorious, and speak for the mood of the film’s heroine Nikki (Natalie Press): the emotional undercurrents of the script seem as tempestuous as local nature, especially the surrounding sea. The directors don’t hurry to bring a trace of explanation to their story (based on the novel by Jane Rogers), but it gradually becomes apparent that this Read more ...
joe.muggs
This series of supernatural dramas from the early 1980s is the sort of thing that could very easily be parodied – has been parodied, in fact, by everyone from Victoria Wood and French and Saunders to The League of Gentlemen and Garth Merenghi's Darkplace. Every shonky visual effect, every discordant stab of strings as the camera's point of view creeps up behind a character, every window that blows open extinguishing a candle: these are meat and potatoes to sketch writers, and this makes it hard to watch these episodes with a straight face... at first.Sit down and watch the episodes in full, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a recent article, David Hare complained about “a national festival of reaction” in the arts, exemplified by such supposedly Establishment-leaning works as The King’s Speech and Downton Abbey. His real target was Terence Rattigan, currently being hailed in many quarters as a national theatrical treasure enjoying a renaissance in this centenary year of his birth.Far from being neglected, argued Hare, Rattigan has rarely been out of the limelight, but his work now chimes with the “wheedling tone of self-righteous privilege” which he detects as a hallmark of the David Cameron era. I don’t know Read more ...
james.woodall
In the spirit in which these reviews are intended, I can report that all the bits of Anne Boleyn are working. The chrome is gleaming; all cylinders are firing. It’ll be good – roadworthy, Globe-worthy – for another year at least. Tudormania, as David Nice intimated last year, is here to stay, and will presumably carry on growing and glowing, and this play’s arrival (after Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, et al) is perfect timing. Howard Brenton’s take on the brief but influential marriage of England’s most brilliant beheaded queen to Henry VIII is intentionally tilted towards farce, though if Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Although it's a period drama set in the dim and shadowy London of 1956, The Hour can’t help reminding us that the more things change, the more inclined they feel to do a brisk U-turn and fly back to hit us in the teeth. I even wondered whether the BBC had felt like pulling this first episode from the schedules, on account of the scene where chippy young BBC news journalist Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) slipped a bribe to a police officer to gain access to the corpse of a murder victim. In this particular week, it was uncannily close to the bone.Lyon himself would surely have relished being Read more ...