TV drama
Adam Sweeting
While Miranda Hart's Chummy is no more and Jessica Raine (who played Jenny Lee) has long since departed to perish in Line of Duty and pout crossly in Wolf Hall, Call the Midwife has evolved into a sort of Heartbeat with nuns, featuring antique pop songs and round-the-clock childbirth. In a sign that writer Heidi Thomas may be struggling to squeeze more mileage out of the show's East End locations, this seasonal special headed out for the brilliant skies and rolling veldt of South Africa.Very nice it looked too, as an emergency squad of Nonnatus House nuns, midwives and Dr Turner (pictured Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Cambridge 1954, and Christmas was coming, which meant carol singing, mince pies and an unnecessarily conceptual nativity play. But murder was also on the menu, and once again handsome, jazz-loving vicar Sidney Chambers (James Norton) was about to prove himself a more imaginative crime-fighter than his buddy Inspector Geordie Keating (Robson Green).Our victim on this occasion was a banker, Bill Davis, a widower about to marry his platinum blonde girlfriend Linda (Maimie McCoy) and then leave gloomy Fifties Britain for a romantic honeymoon cruise under sunnier skies. In doing so, he was defying Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Another week, another serial killer on prime time. In Dark Angel we had the grim story of Mary Ann Cotton, the Victorian poisoner who killed her husbands for the insurance. Meanwhile John Christie continues his grim work in Rillington Place. And now In Plain Sight introduces another chilling psychopath going about his business.While Christie is memorialised in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors and in Richard Attenborough’s screen performance, viewers have far less to go on with Peter Manuel, who operated in the same post-war period as Christie and did most of his killing in Scotland. His Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Anyone hoping for a few laughs and a nice bit of catharsis after enduring the eight unstintingly miserable episodes of The Missing would have got none of the former and hardly any of the latter. Writers Jack and Harry Williams had sprung most of their biggest surprises in earlier episodes, such as the revelation that the real Alice Webster was still alive and being held captive in Adam Gettrick's Swiss Alpine cottage, and indeed that Gettrick was the abductor of the girls around whom the story has revolved.Some loose ends were at least tied up. We saw how Gettrick (Derek Riddell) had killed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We last encountered Stephen Poliakoff on TV in 2013's Dancing on the Edge, which provoked mixed reactions (not least on theartsdesk). That was the story of a black jazz band in 1930s London, who played gigs at swanky hotels. Close to the Enemy (★) is set in London just after the end of World War Two, and happens to feature a jazz band with a black singer who perform in a once-swanky hotel somewhat gone to seed.Many have pondered over the way the BBC likes to shovel hefty chunks of the licence fee in Poliakoff's direction, and their doubts may not be assuaged by Close to the Enemy, on Read more ...
Jasper Rees
So, a rough tally. We’ve had a trial, a near suicide, a punch-up, death by drowning, a near bankruptcy, a tin rush, another punch-up, a baby, a probable rape, a riot, another baby, and another one on the way, possibly a product of that probable rape. And more. Poldark (★★★), in the delivery of incident upon full-blooded incident, could be accused of many things, but it will not die wondering.After another 10 episodes, we are where we are. Cap’n Ross is not off to the wars after all, but the milksop doctor Dwight is, having sailed after an off-screen night of torrid smooching with the blue- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the end, what makes a good drama series? It’s probably that you want more of it. This is the end of Cold Feet until a next time which has already been promised, and more is certainly what’s wanted. No one was quite sure if a reincarnation of Cold Feet was a good idea eight episodes ago. Back when the characters were in their 30s the show slowly turned into a bit of a weight round its own neck. Fay Ripley opted out of one season. Helen Baxendale was written out of another. The show began looking under rocks for characters to replace the ones who weren’t there. Eventually it ran out of steam Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The concept is somewhere between single drama and series: to stay in one place while shifting focus from one character to another. Paul Abbott did it in Clocking Off, telling a different story each week about a group of workers in a Manchester textile plant. Jimmy McGovern exported the idea to The Street, where he opened one door at a time to find out what was going on inside. The common denominator of both series was scriptwriter-for-hire Danny Brocklehurst.Brocklehurst took the format and made it his own in Ordinary Lies. The first series was set in a car showroom in Warrington which was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems morbid, and perhaps even in dubious taste, to create a TV drama franchise focusing on the hideous fate of abducted children and the repercussions this has on their family and friends. Still, ratings are their own reward, and the first series of The Missing (a collaboration between the BBC and the US network Starz) was a critical and commercial success.So welcome to series two, now starring Keeley Hawes and David Morrissey in place of series one's James Nesbitt and Frances O'Connor (they call this an "anthology series"). Our new protagonists are Gemma and Sam Webster. Thanks to Sam's Read more ...
Jasper Rees
One down, eight childbirths to go. The young Queen Victoria was delivered of her first child at the climax of this moreish opening series, and the bells of Windsor tolled for joy. ITV, debutant scriptwriter Daisy Goodwin and biographical consultant AN Wilson will be feeling parental pride that between them they have given birth to a healthy 10-pound whopper that looks very much like the natural heir to Downton.Victoria took its cue from dynastic romance to tell the story of a proto-feminist teen thrust into the limelight like a 19th-century pop starlet forced to grow up on the job. The story Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Michael Crichton's 1973 movie Westworld became a paradigm of fears about technology running amok and turning violently against its human creators. HBO's new series, executive produced by JJ Abrams and written by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, looks as if it's aiming to explore the ghosts in the machinery, and take us to a Blade Runner-ish place where the boundary between the human and the man-made starts to dissolve.But this was only episode one, so let's not get ahead of ourselves. If you know the film, you'll recognise the set-up. Westworld is a futuristic holiday resort, where vacationers Read more ...
Jasper Rees
At the age of 80 Woody Allen has made his first television series. It’s for Amazon, which would suggest he knows how to move with the times. That would be a false impression, because Crisis in Six Scenes is vintage Allen in the sense that it's a museum piece starring Allen himself as yet another of his neurotic hypochondriacs. The only novelty is that it comes in the shape of half a dozen bite-sized squibs, released weekly. Lump them together and they’d amount to one of another movie.The opening montage features archive images of riot and imminent revolution in Sixties America, accompanied by Read more ...