TV drama
Mark Sanderson
Emcee Michael Palin, as William Makepeace Thackeray himself, introduces us to the show: “Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy.” All his major characters – or “puppets” – are riding a fairground carousel. They – and very soon, we – are having a great time.Vanity Fair – the title comes from The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the town of Vanity holds a year-round fair – charts the uncertain progress of a minx called Becky Sharp (Olivia Cooke, pert and pretty in equal measure, main picture). First seen giving lip to her elder and better Miss Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been a long haul for Keeping Faith. The drama was shot in Welsh and English simultaneously, and premiered in the former with subtitles on S4C at the back end of 2017. It switched to the latter language on BBC One Wales earlier this year. Word spread like a benign bubonic plague of its tendency to grab you by the throat and not let go. In the summer lull, it has been a valiant schedule filler on BBC One. There will still be fans who haven’t lapped up the eighth and last episode, who should look away now to avoid spoilers, because we need to talk about Evan.I should report that some Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was always a question of when. As in when would the hoity-toity Home Secretary and her poker-faced bodyguard move into the horizontal? “I’m not the queen, you know,” she said, by way of a hot come-on. “You can touch me.” As a mode of discourse, this marked quite a step-up from the first episode of Jed Mercurio's new drama. Then the Rt Hon Julia Montague didn’t even want his vote. Now she was after her bodyguard’s body. “I Will Always Love You”, anyone?The great thrill of Bodyguard (BBC One) is one’s absolute uncertainty about which way it’s going to twist next. By the end of episode two, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Television drama is living through a golden age, yes, but one thing mainly absent from the vast choice available on terrestrial and streaming broadcasters alike is the short story. Short dramas used to be a regular fixture on television, when schedules were more fluid and pre-satellite channels less risk-averse. Half an hour in and out to tell a punchy story on a low budget – it was a keen test of a writer’s mettle, and a good way to blood talent. So On the Edge, part of Channel 4’s 4Stories initiative to bring on new writers and directors, is a welcome addition to TV ecology.The three films Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some contend that this Snowdonia-set mystery was a Scandi hommage too far, a mere recycler of gloom-shrouded riffs familiar from the likes of The Bridge or The Killing. Well yes, there was that element to it, but if you stuck with it it grew into far more than a mere copycat procedural.For a start, it wasn’t your average whodunnit, since the killer’s identity was made pretty clear as early as the first episode. Instead, the eight-part series was more of a whydunnit, as the screenwriters probed methodically into the background, motivation and psychology of Dylan Harris (Rhodri Meilir, pictured Read more ...
Owen Richards
How well do you know the person you love? Are they someone completely different when you’re not around? This is the central question Eve Myles (main picture) has to answer in the BBC’s latest mystery drama. Faced with the sudden disappearance of her seemingly lovely husband, she must piece together where he’s gone and what she’s been missing.Keeping Faith was broadcast in Welsh on S4C last November, and played on BBC Wales earlier this year, following a string of recent Welsh-made dramas. Like them, there’s your obligatory gorgeous scenery, but where Hinterland and Hidden went for Scandi-lite Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How many people were watching Picnic at Hanging Rock as it took its bow on BBC One? This opening episode happened to be preceded by a rival attraction on ITV. The premise of the story, set in Australia in 1900, is that almost no one sees three girls in their long white summer dresses abscond from the eponymous school outing to explore a local attraction and vanish without trace, to be followed by their teacher. Thanks to an unlucky accident of scheduling, the audience may have vanished too.This is a six-part adaptation of the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, but the story is far better known for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on the novel by Gillian Flynn (author of Gone Girl) and directed by Jean-Marc Valleé (who helmed last year’s award-winning Big Little Lies), HBO’s Sharp Objects arrives trailing a cloud of great expectations. Happily – albeit depressingly given its corrosively dark subject matter – it exerts its grip with increasing force, once you’ve committed yourself to stick with it past the first couple of episodes.Mining the kind of steamy, silently menacing American hinterland also exploited by the likes of True Detective or Justified, Sharp Objects whisks us to the small town of Wind Gap, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You don’t see a lot of German drama imported to British television. France, Italy, Scandinavia, yes. But the biggest country in Europe is less of a player. The great exception – and it really was great - was Deutschland 83, a thrilling hit when shown on Channel 4. It was considered a flop in Germany, where it lost half its audience, but don’t let that put you off if you haven’t yet had the pleasure: it’s still on All 4. Now the Walter Presents strand brings us Line of Separation, also on All 4, and you could be forgiven for thinking of it as Deutschland 45.The overlap is partly one of casting Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There was a time when Hugh Grant was viewed as a thespian one-trick pony, a floppy-haired fop dithering in a state of perpetual romantic confusion. But things have changed. He was excellent in Florence Foster Jenkins, hilariously self-parodic in Paddington 2, and he’s brilliant in A Very English Scandal (BBC One) as smooth, treacherous Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe. At moments, he even manages to look uncannily like him.Thorpe himself would doubtless have dreamed of pulling off a similar feat of reinvention, but for all his success as a revitalising force in the Liberal Party, his goose was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not the least startling element of Bishop Michael Curry’s house-rockin’ sermon at the royal nuptials was his quotation from the old spiritual “There is a balm in Gilead”. Evidently the Bishop was not referring to the endlessly looping nightmare that is The Handmaid’s Tale, where “Gilead” means not balm, but torture, terror, misery and misogyny.The first series used up Margaret Atwood’s source novel, so series two relies on showrunner Bruce Miller and his team of writers to take the narrative onwards, while also filling in background information about how the Gilead Republic came into being, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Addressing the baying media on the steps of the courthouse after being acquitted of murdering his wife, for which non-crime he’d spent the last seven years in prison, David Collins (Lee Ingleby) was a bitter and angry man. He wanted to expose the people who’d fitted him up, he wanted his children back, and he aimed to find out who really killed his wife Tara.Three episodes in, he’s been doing pretty well with his personal checklist. We know for sure that he’s innocent, he’s been remarkably successful in building bridges with his children (especially his son Jack), he’s found a sympathetic ear Read more ...