TV drama
Florence Hallett
With a raft of high-quality digital effects available, real stunts might seem a little old-fashioned. In truth, the art of the stunt is alive and well: according to veteran performer Tracy Caudle, not only is it often cheaper to film the real thing, but “a computerised fall never looks quite right.” She has filmed scenes for TV and film, and with credits including Skyfall, Shaun of the Dead, Midsomer Murders and Doctor Who, chances are you’ve seen her fall to her death, crash a car or come to grisly grief one way or another, many times over.Read the full article about Tracy Caudle on the site Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Seventh series (★★★★) of the superior legal drama (still perversely tucked away on the obscurantist More4), and Alicia Florrick is having to get back to legal basics. Having been blown up by a political landmine in series six, as she made an ill-fated attempt to become State's Attorney, she's now trying to start her own law firm from home and scuffling for work.Thus she found herself on the cab-rank of hard-bitten bar attorneys down at the bond court, waiting to be lobbed a sheaf of the day's drink-and-drugs cases by the abrasive Judge Schakowsky (Christopher McDonald). Some comic value was Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
We have been here before – literally. Morse and his colleagues discreetly observe a gangster’s funeral in Kensal Green cemetery – just as they did in Promised Land, one of the best episodes of Inspector Morse, first broadcast in March 1991. A quarter of a century has passed (along with John Thaw) yet ITV are still trying to breath new life into the ratings warhorse.Coda, the last episode in this third series, is Russell Lewis’s eighth screenplay for Endeavour. Alas, a better title would be Codswallop. He has also written one episode of Inspector Morse and four episodes of Lewis. He has made a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The miracle of galloping digital technology has become a mixed blessing. We have iPads, space stations and self-parking cars. On the other hand, we also have what might be perfectly good TV programmes made ludicrous by absurd CGI monsters.ITV's new-look Beowulf (★★) is an odd beast. Ostensibly, it's based on the epic Anglo-Saxon alliterative poem about the titular hero and his Scandinavian exploits, but students of Old English literature should look away now, because it's more like the computer game Clash of Clans, or a reduced-scale Game of Thrones with a cheaper cast. The best thing about Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Interesting idea – a Western set in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1870s. Jessica Raine, spotted last year as the other Boleyn girl in Wolf Hall and evidently keen to put Call the Midwife as far behind her as possible, stars as Annie Quantain, a schoolmaster's widow forced to leave the family home thanks to a mountain of debts. As the bailiffs cart away the furniture, she's horrified to find herself a penniless vagrant. Desperate not to give up her children, she gets a tip that there's work to be had on a new viaduct-building project out in wildest Culverdale, and before long she's in among the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since Benedict Cumberbatch is now one of the world's most in-demand actors, and his sidekick Martin Freeman isn't doing too badly either, getting them on a set together is like trying to get Simon & Garfunkel to do a reunion. Hence Sherlock fans now have just this one-off New Year special to slake their Cumberlust.To compensate, writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat (pictured below) had laboured feverishly to cram as much as possible into this swirling 90-minute ride. The novelty du jour was to whisk the sleuthing chums back to the 1890s, into which they slotted so slickly that you Read more ...
theartsdesk
It's hard to disagree with Matthew Wright, in his brisk analysis of the shortcomings of British crime drama (see below). He notes how flashes of inspiration are smothered by skimpy budgets and the timidity of commissioning editors. The disastrous anti-climax of London Spy was a classic example. A British Sopranos seems further away than ever.But all is not lost, and as our picks of the year show, there has still been plenty of great stuff to watch, from the finely-woven historical drama of Wolf Hall to the dark and daring Jessica Jones or the comic touch of Mackenzie Crook and Peter Kay. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Earlier this year, Sky Living showed The Enfield Haunting, a tale of eerie events in a 1970s council house. One of its stars was Timothy Spall, playing a paranormal researcher. Maybe he had a premonition that his son Rafe would carry on the family's supernatural tradition in the leading role of Harry Price: Ghost Hunter (★★★★★).Anyhow, Spall Jr was shrewd, witty and skilful in the role of a 1920s spookbuster called in to investigate the mysterious case of a politician's wife, Grace Goodwin, who had been found wandering naked in a London market. Part of the problem was that she and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
On Monday ITV showed BAFTA Celebrates Downton Abbey, in which a massed gathering of cast and crew plus a few celebrity guests toasted Downton's five-year stampede to global acclaim. Its creator Julian Fellowes waddled onstage and told an anecdote about how he'd been accosted by a Downton fan while browsing in a Barnes & Noble bookshop in New York. "Just let Edith be happy!" she wailed at him.As it turned out in this double-length finale, he did, exercising the God-like authority the Emmy, Golden Globe and BAFTA-scooping show has bestowed on him. In fact it all went a bit Richard Curtis as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some things never change. Once more, we join DCI John Luther – though only for a two-part special – as he glues himself to the trail of a serial killer. And once again Luther is played by Idris Elba, a man who can freeze time or make villains throw down their weapons merely by gazing into the camera with an expression of quizzical world-weariness.This time, writer Neil Cross opened by taking us to a clifftop near Beachy Head, where Luther gazed moodily out across the English Channel, evidently in the grip of an existential crisis, perhaps a hangover from the death of DS Ripley in series three Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though Alfred the Great was renowned for educational and social reforms as much as for whupping the Danes on the battlefield, I'd never pictured him the way David Dawson has been playing him in The Last Kingdom. Pallid and sickly-looking, and plagued by all-too-human frailties, this Alfred looked more like a weedy consumptive poet than the midfield dynamo of embattled Ninth Century England.Yet it paid off in the end, as Alfred summoned all the strength he could find to drag himself and his entourage out of the soggy Somerset marshes (where, last week, he burnt the cakes in finest 1066 and All Read more ...
Barney Harsent
After the roaring success of Daredevil this year, Marvel brings us the next instalment in the TV rendering of their universe – or part of it at least. Jessica Jones, created by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Michael Gaydos in 2001, is a failed superhero and volatile PI who copes with her demons by drinking so heavily that at least one of her superpowers seems to reside in her liver. Super strength, near-flight and a fine line in withering sarcasm make up the rest.Once again, Netflix have released a show, in its entirety, on one day, so it’s up to us how we consume it. Rather than the Read more ...