TV drama
Marina Vaizey
Part of the BBC's Gay Britannia season, here was a programme fulfilling what it said on the tin: prominent LGBTQ (when will all these expanding acronyms cease to confuse us all) figures narrating, examining, discussing, analysing, letting it all hang out about LGBTQ folk and the arts during the past half-century. The usual suspects were interviewed, from Maggi Hambling – her smoking more shocking than anything else on the programme – to Stephen Fry, Sandy Toksvig and David Hockney, although there was no Alan Bennett or Grayson Perry.In the 1960s before the act that partially Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the riveting first series of Top of the Lake, it was personal for Down Under detective Robin Griffin. She headed to a hilly corner of New Zealand to be around for the death of her mother while looking into the disappearance of a young girl. There she fell in love with the estranged son of a local villain but had to pull out upon learning that he was in fact her half-brother. A last-minute denial of paternity by the villain left her with something to smile about, especially as she also exposed a paedophile ring and shot its facilitator.Spool forward to the second series on BBC Two, and the Read more ...
David Benedict
The thing almost no one remembers about the great Nora Ephron/Rob Reiner 1989 romcom When Harry Met Sally is that the love story is intercut with real couples talking to camera about the mechanics and longevity of their true-life loves. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Remarkably, Fergus O’Brien’s deeply moving BBC film Against the Law, armed with far darker material, pulls off the self-same trick. Surprising though that may sound – this is a drama about fear and loathing in 1950s Britain – it is also highly appropriate since it is, in so many ways, a story about love.Unless you’re up to speed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was a coup by ITV to get Homeland writer Patrick Harbinson to pen this paranoid-conspiracy series, and rather droll to get Helen McCrory (wife of Homeland’s Damian Lewis) to play the lead. Yet even though the story of high-minded human rights lawyer Emma Banville had obvious potential in this era of terror plots and ubiquitous surveillance, the eventual solution was neither particularly surprising nor very satisfying.Throughout the series, McCrory had sunk herself into the role with steely-eyed determination and pursed lips, but it became increasingly hard to find her convincing as her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If nothing else, Game of Thrones has surely been the greatest boon to the British acting profession since they invented tights and greasepaint. Part of the fun is trying to think of somebody who hasn’t been in it yet. So far we haven’t seen Maggie Smith or Sean Connery (though we’ve had Diana Rigg as Olenna Tyrell), but new in series seven is Jim Broadbent, playing somebody called Archmaester Marwyn, a venerable sage at that seat of scholarship, The Citadel.Jim (pictured below) was his usual disarming self as he coolly dismembered the corpse of a deceased alcoholic on his anatomist’s slab, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
All’s fair in love and law in I Know Who You Are. BBC Four’s latest Euro-import hails from Spain and, as per the channel’s practice, is coming at you in intense double doses, two 70-minute episodes every Saturday night. Already it’s hard to imagine how the drama can possibly be spun out to the end without viewers getting RSI from repeatedly bitten fingernails, mopped brows and also scratched heads. It might be helpful to construct your very own wall map to keep track of the cat’s cradle of conflicting loyalties and rivalries that seem to be standard in both family life and legal practice in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Jodie is a remarkable young woman. She’s game. She’s a good actress, and she’s willing.” So said Peter O’Toole of the first female Doctor Who. Jodie Whittaker, born in 1982, is best known for Broadchurch on the small screen and Attack the Block on the big screen. But there’s a lot more to her than those two roles.At 23 and fresh out of drama school, she starred opposite O’Toole in Venus as a surly teenager from Yorkshire who captivates a withered old actor. The role, written by Hanif Kureishi, allowed her to paint with many colours. Her character Jessie is by turns sullen, unimpressed, Read more ...
David Nice
Rippling outward from the initial story of a seemingly nice WASP woman who finds herself having to adapt in a women's prison, Orange Is the New Black quickly developed into the most multilayered, almost indigestibly rich of American TV dramas. By the second series, it had become a tricky-to-balance polyphonic symphony, giving its mushrooming cast of important characters a plethora of vital story-lines, combining themes, forging unlikely alliances. Season Five, scripted by 11 writers including the creator Jenji Kohan, had a brainwave of an idea: focus on the three-day life of a prison riot, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How much plotting went into GLOW? It has been gussied up by the people who brought you the jumbo Netflix hit Orange Is the New Black. Both shows are based on a true story and feature women of all ethnicities bitching and slapping in a contained environment. In Glow there’s less orange, and less black, but even more bitching and slapping.This time the perimeter wall is not a prison but the ropes of the wrestling ring. GLOW is based on the true story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling who were a cable TV hit in the late Eighties. Netflix supplies a complementary documentary all about the real Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Catholic Church hasn’t enjoyed a good press on screen lately. Nuns punished Irishwomen for their pregnancies in Philomena. Priests interfered with altar boys in Spotlight. And in The Young Pope a Vatican fixated on conservatism and casuistry elects a pontiff who sees himself as a rock star. Broken was Jimmy McGovern’s agonised absolution for a church in crisis.Over six parts on BBC One, Broken has felt like walking along half a dozen stations of the cross. McGovern’s portrait of a broken priest – and by extension, a broken priesthood – was exceptionally short on levity or solace. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Presumably it seemed like a good idea at the time. Broadcasting juggernaut Lord Bragg would undertake a sweeping survey of the way that television has transformed our lives and reflected British society in the last 70-odd years, soaring over dramas, documentaries, current affairs, soaps, reality TV shows etc with hi-def satellite vision. Clips of key programmes from the archives would cue up bouts of discussion among hand-picked experts.Only two major problems. At two hours it was far too long, yet paradoxically each section was much too short. It felt as if a collection of long lists had Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hugh Laurie, in his new role of forensic neuropsychiatrist Eldon Chance, tells us that he works with those who are “mutilated by life”, and we soon see that Chance himself falls into that category. He’s in the midst of a divorce, he only sees his daughter Nicole at weekends, and his work seems to fill him with a kind of morbid weariness.This is Laurie playing the flip side of Dr Gregory House, the brilliant and fearless diagnostician happy to break every rule and offend whomever it may concern in pursuit of the right result. Chance, on the other hand, is timid and full of doubt, and even his Read more ...