Aptly scheduled for our Great British Heatwave, writer Catherine Shepherd’s eight-part drama whisks us away to a remote Greek island, where a band of friends (four of them having been at university together) have rented an aesthetically pleasing but somewhat decrepit house for the titular fortnight. Their Greek housekeeper patiently explains that the plumbing is dangerously ancient and would they please put used toilet paper in the bin rather than trying to flush it, which prompts a few aghast sideways glances. Oh, and whatever you do, don’t drink the water.History tells us that fictional Read more ...

Screenwriter Neil Forsyth earned kudos a-plenty with his two BBC One series of The Gold, a dramatisation of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat bullion robbery and its aftermath. Now he’s stepped aboard the good ship Netflix for this story of heroin-pushing gangs in London and Liverpool, set in the dying days of the Thatcher government at the turn of the Nineties.Again the story is rooted in fact, and explores how a group of fairly lowly customs officers were recruited to infiltrate and destroy a multi-million pound heroin racket that was wreaking havoc with both poor kids in Northern housing estates as Read more ...

Melbourne’s petite popstrel Kylie Minogue zoomed to superstardom in the late Eighties, with her celebrity from Aussie TV soap Neighbours helping to boost her spectacular recording career under the manipulative auspices of the Stock, Aitken and Waterman hit factory. Apocryphally, her debut UK Number One hit "I Should Be So Lucky" was knocked together in a brisk 40 minutes, though, interviewed here in director Michael Harte's compelling three-part documentary, Pete Waterman insists it took all of two hours.Suddenly Kylie was a pop phenomenon, banging out chartbusters as easily as some people Read more ...

Will viewers tire of Rivals before It runs out of Rutshire Chronicles to adapt? Not if these screen versions of Jilly Cooper’s novels about toffs and hot totty in the Cotswolds are executed with the brio of the first two series.Like The White Lotus, Rivals has already set out its stall as a brand. It luxuriates in its idyllic location, all imposing sandstone piles and legions of big dogs and polo ponies, and has recruited the cream of the acting profession to inhabit it. The dialogue is smart, the tone exceptionally cheeky. Like the US show, it has a distinctive musical landscape – here, a Read more ...

Lindsay Duncan might be British acting royalty, yet her gangster matriarch Ollie in Charlotte Regan’s BBC drama series Mint is not what you'd call stately or regal. Flamboyant, fiery, and unapologetic in her seventies, Ollie certainly isn't a typical granny - as her granddaughter Shannon (Emma Laird) has come to realise a long time ago. Mint centres on Shannon, whose dad Dylan (Sam Riley) - Ollie's son - is the new Godfather of Grangemouth . He now runs the dark and dirty family business that his ruthless father Andy (Clive Russell) built. As a romance blossoms between Shannon and Arran Read more ...

The writer of the edgy TV drama The Responder, Tony Schumacher, is back with an equally edgy but surprisingly warm-hearted story of people down on their luck in Liverpool. On paper, The Cage sounds like another run-through of the clichés of casino dramas, but it regularly confounds expectations.The setup is simple: two casino employees are, separately, skimming the takings, one to save her family from potential homelessness, the other to pay off loan-shark debts. Then it gets complicated. Their paths inevitably are on a collision course, both with each other and with the police and the Read more ...

Sky Atlantic’s new thriller, Prisoner, is a tense and twisty story involving a sinister crime syndicate called Pegasus, whose boss is a sneery tycoon called Harrison Dempsey. This bunch are planning to cause mayhem and chaos across Europe.However, there is one man who might be able to throw a spanner in Pegasus’s works. He is Tibor Stone, a professional hitman who worked for Pegasus, and is said to have killed at least 47 victims. Now, assisted by dogged prison guard Amber Todd (Izuka Hoyle), he’s prepared to give evidence in court which could bring down Dempsey and scupper the Pegasus Read more ...

Filmmaker Charlotte Regan has been moving steadily up the creative ladder with music videos, short films and her 2023 feature debut Scrapper, which made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival. Now she takes a crack at a major drama for the BBC with Mint, whose eight 30-minute episodes describe a tale of young love, family dysfunction and gang violence.At its core is the Glasgow crime dynasty headed by Dylan (Sam Riley), who has been maintaining the thuggish legacy of his appalling father Andy (Clive Russell), but now seems to be wearying of the struggle to keep the operation afloat. Andy, now Read more ...

With the good looks and dash of his signature 1947 Triumph Roadster, the Jersey detective is back for a second season in his new incarnation: the polar opposite, seemingly, of his colleagues in Shetland.Yet Damien Molony’s Jim Bergerac has as many rain clouds over his head in sunny St Helier as Dougie Henshall’s melancholy Jimmy Perez in windy Lerwick, another single father with a demanding job and a teenage daughter to raise. Not the least of Bergerac’s problems is his simmering alcoholism, which his sporadic attendance of AA meetings can’t wholly suppress. This is a more pitiable hero than Read more ...

It was back in 2019 when The Capture made its debut on BBC One, with writer Ben Chanan skilfully exploiting the sinister potential of deep-fake technology and ubiquitous mass surveillance conducted by the authorities. But if it seemed like sci-fi at the beginning, the new third series lands in a world where ever-evolving gadgetry has made all this stuff not just entirely feasible but almost commonplace. In the opening episode we got a quick warm-up about the marvels of identity-snatching and image manipulation in a scene at Heathrow airport where a suspect kept changing his appearance Read more ...

Just a year after the first series, Your Friends & Neighbours returns to titillate and amuse us with the escapades of the moneyed but never satisfied burghers of Westmont Village. This mythical community somewhere in New York’s Hudson Valley has everything that money can buy, and probably a bit more, but does this make the locals happy and well-adjusted? Well obviously not.Jon Hamm returns to reprise his role of Andrew “Coop” Cooper, the former Manhattan financier who was axed from his job and is now pursuing an imaginative new career in burglary, while trying to be a responsible father Read more ...

The baldness of the titles the writer-director Stefan Golaszewski gives his TV series — Him & Her, Mum, Marriage and now Babies — is a misleading guide to the subtlety of their contents. These are, admittedly, Marmite dramas; but for those who love them, they are also finely crafted forays into the everyday existence of most humans today.Marmite actually features in Babies, in a scene midway through its six hour-long episodes in which Stephen (Paapa Essiedu) is munching one of the many slices of toast he gets through, this one smeared with Marmite. Which his wife Lisa (Siobhàn Cullen) Read more ...