TV drama
Adam Sweeting
Last week we left Homer Jackson, the raffish ex-Pinkerton detective with the exceedingly chequered past, languishing in jail, after being fitted up for a Ripper-style killing by the murderous Frank Goodnight (played by cultish US actor Edoardo Ballerini). For this week's finale, Matthew Macfadyen's DI Reid urgently needed to get Jackson out again in order to apply his advanced forensic skills to unravelling a white slaving racket.Jackson was slickly able to prove his own innocence, then quickly extracted crucial clues about the gang who were drugging and kidnapping young women. His medical Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perpetually reborn in movies and TV series, Jack the Ripper rides again in Ripper Street, which is set in Whitechapel in 1889, in the aftermath of the much-mythologised murders. Except this time, the subject isn't the Ripper himself so much as the dread and hysteria he left in his wake, which shrouds the murky streets like poison gas.We got the message in the opening sequence, when sightseers on a tour of notorious Jack the Ripper landmarks stumbled across a murdered woman, her body grotesquely slashed and mutilated in the old familiar ways (pictured below). Instantly, the neighbourhood Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Far be it from me to try to impose shape or meaning on the past 12 months of television. You'd need teams of statisticians and psephologists to have any chance of drawing conclusions from the whirling cosmos of TV, and its infinite variety of soaps, shopping, repeats, weird sports, ailing current affairs programmes, forgotten comedies and obscure dramas. Instead, in a spirit of shameless subjectivity, here are 10 of my favourite performances from 2012.Ben Whishaw in The Hollow Crown: Richard II, BBC TwoIn a year saturated in Shakespeare, the Hollow Crown series of history plays stood out for Read more ...
fisun.guner
William Boyd wrote the screenplay for this adaptation of his 2006 espionage novel, and since it’s integral to the whole he retained its two-part structure. The first concerns the World War II activities of former British intelligence spy Eva Delectorskaya, the second, set in 1976, concerns her efforts to lay the past to rest. Not only has the past cast a dark shadow over her life but it continues to endanger it. For this she enlists the help of her daughter.Yet if you’ve read the book, the most compelling parts concern the daughter and the contemporary political events that intrude upon her Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Pantomime is one of the great festive traditions and the version of Dick Whittington envisaged by John Bishop in this one-off comedy drama checked off every single one of the clichés. Taking a writer’s credit alongside Jonathan Harvey of Gimme Gimme Gimme fame, the Liverpool comic drew on his experiences on regional stages near the beginning of his showbiz career in pulling together the script.Bishop starred as Lewis Loud, a local radio DJ making his pantomime debut at the Grand Theatre Lancaster as part of a group of characters straight out of central casting. There was soap star Tamsin Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The uproarious success of Downton Abbey, now firmly established as one of Britain's great national pastimes, seems to have had the happy effect of persuading ITV1 that it must make more drama. Thus, the autumn of 2012 has been ushered in by new ITV dramas swirling about our ears like tumbling leaves, from The Last Weekend and The Scapegoat to the comeback of Downton itself.More interestingly, the channel has also served up a batch of conspicuously female-centric pieces, albeit with mixed results. The murdered-girl story A Mother's Son felt like a series brutally curtailed by chainsaw, losing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At the end of episode four, we left ferret-faced copper Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) seemingly having his fingers hacked off with a bolt-cutter by a gang of hooded thugs and their poisonous little child-sidekick, Ryan. Boringly, the glum and dislikeable Arnott was rescued in this finale when the supposedly corrupt DCI Gates organised a police rescue, and got away with all his fingers mostly intact.It seemed to symbolise Line of Duty's annoying habit of setting up ever-murkier scenarios, then wriggling its way out of delivering a real punchline. It really, really wanted us to believe that it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Those quaint old TV shows in which we were invited to support and admire the police unreservedly have long been overtaken by real-life events. Now evolution has brought us to Line of Duty, a series that presents the police as a failing bureaucracy hamstrung by paperwork and political correctness. From what one gathers of how our contemporary rozzers operate - inviting you to report crimes by email, for instance, because police stations are only open some of the time, or arresting victims instead of perpetrators - this may be unpleasantly close to reality.Perhaps writer Jed Mercurio picked up Read more ...
Veronica Lee
And so Desperate Housewives has ended after eight funny and entertaining seasons. Marc Cherry's creation, which first went on air in October 2004, deservedly won numerous Emmys and Golden Globes along the way. It was set in the small town of Fairview in the fictional Eagle State and followed the lives of four neighbours on the same street - Susan (Teri Hatcher), Bree (Marcia Cross), Lynette (Felicity Huffman) and Gaby (Eva Longoria).The series started with the suicide of their Wisteria Lane neighbour, Mary Alice (Brenda Strong), and the roles in it played by her husband and son. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
How delightful to welcome the return of Peter Moffat's skilful legal series. Yes alright, sceptics may contend that the law firm drama has already been road-tested to destruction via the likes of Rumpole of the Bailey, Kavanagh QC and many more - indeed, Kavanagh veteran Nicholas Jones popped up in tonight's opener as Judge Goodbrand - but Silk boasts a superb cast and a thoughtfully-drawn set of characters, whose already fraught personal relationships are being given some cunning new twists.Series one focused on the rivalry between barristers Clive Reader (Rupert Penry-Jones) and Martha Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
The most shocking moment in this feature-length episode of Mad Men – for which the phrase “long-awaited” seems an understatement after a 17-month hiatus – is a quiet one. It’s not a moment on the level of a man getting his foot severed by a lawnmower, or Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) out-of-nowhere proposal to doe-eyed secretary Megan (Jessica Paré) in last season’s finale. The moment comes when Don, a man who has built a house-of-cards false identity around his passion and creative ingenuity as an ad man, casually admits to his new wife, “I don’t really care about work.”It’s just one of many Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The compulsive TV series about the Sixties advertising industry, Mad Men, opens its fifth season tomorrow night (on Sky Atlantic only, chiz), overflowing to the brim with its usual drinking, smoking, sex, sexism and wholesale un-PC liberality. Does it, however, miss the point of the real Mad Men? A new book by actual ad man Andrew Cracknell tells what he describes as "the remarkable true story of Madison Avenue's golden age, when a handful of renegades changed advertising forever".While it tends to be the sex lives and style of Don Draper, Roger Sterling, Peggy Olson and Joan Harris that Read more ...