TV
Mark Sanderson
It’s not hard to see what attracted Nick Hornby to Nina Stibbe’s surprise bestseller: Love, Nina (BBC1) is about two boys who are mad about football. Set in the halcyon days of 1982 – no internet, no mobile phones – it fictionalises the experiences of a 20-year-old wannabe nanny from Leicester who enters the weird world of bohemian north London. Surveying the comfortable squalor and polished floorboards of 55 Gloucester Crescent, NW1, Nina (Faye Marsay) asks her future employer: “Have you just moved in?”Culture clash and class collision are staples of period drama. Think of dear Downton Abbey Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You are a massive cock. A gigantic tool. You are a monumental prick. Grayson Perry did not mince his message as he concluded his portrait of modern maleness with a tour of the City of London. At the end of each programme he has presented the subjects of his study with an artistic response to their world. The men working in so-called financial services inspired him to create a work called Object in Foreground (pictured below) in the shape of a giant penis. Exhibited on an empty floor of the Shard (the most giant penis of them all), its contours mirrored the silhouette of the phalluses Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the end, the swirling fragments of Marcella all fell together quite nicely, though Anna Friel's portrayal of Marcella Backland never made you think you were watching a real detective in action. Afflicted with memory loss, blackouts and intermittent "fugue states", she was more like a series of devices and obfuscations to make sure you never had a fighting chance of being certain about what was going on. It was like guessing at a crossword from which somebody had Tippexed out a few clues, though I do have an intuitive friend who guessed the killer's identity several episodes back – pure Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
What larks! The first run of Zoo Quest – itself the first of the wildlife programmes – started 62 years ago, in 1954. It was thought it had all been filmed in black and white, on small 16mm cameras, but in fact a condition imposed by the BBC was to shoot in colour to produce a sharper image in black and white. Discovered in the archives a few months ago were perfectly preserved canisters of colour film, six hours' worth in all. This was all a decade before colour came regularly to television.So, perfectly timed for Attenbourgh's 90th birthday, the story of Zoo Quest was retold in this Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In its final episode Undercover tied up a lot of loose ends and introduced a number of new ones. The biggest loose end to remain unaddressed was pretty big. Nick Johnson was the alias of a policeman who in 1996 went undercover to spy on black activist Michael Antwi and his lawyer Maya Cobbina. Nick promptly fell in love with Maya; they married and had children. For the next 20 years, Maya, possessed of such a brilliant legal mind that she ends up as Director of Public Prosecutions, never once questioned Nick’s claim to be a writer despite his prodigious – nay absolute – lack of output.OK, so Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The comedy of widowhood is the brave territory of Mum. Lesley Manville plays Cathy, whom we meet on the day she is burying her husband Dave – although not literally doing it herself, as has to be explained to the nice but dim new girlfriend of her stay-at-home son Jason (Sam Swainsbury). As the mourners gather at her Chingford semi, each fresh arrival proves more grotesque than the last, and poor Cathy’s face becomes a little more pinched as her heroic reserves of tolerance run almost dry.First there’s Kelly (Lisa McGrillis, pictured below) who arrives in a short red dress, needing to borrow Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
The pre-title sequence – in which a middle-aged man without any trousers lies trussed up on the floor – immediately tells us that we are not to take Billions too seriously. A woman in thigh-high leather boots with killer heels towers over him. Removing a cigarette-holder from her lips, she tells him he’s in need of correction before stubbing out the fag on his bare chest.All that’s missing on the soundtrack is Disco Inferno by The Trammps. Burn, baby, burn… As if this weren’t enough, the dominatrix then puts out the fire by urinating on him. That’s right: someone is taking the piss.A turn-off Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Parodic ignoramus Philomena Cunk has been flaunting her narrow cultural horizons on Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe for many years, and more recently extended her shallow range to such weighty issues as feminism and the financial crisis in her Moments of Wonder series. Shakespeare, though? There is plenty of opportunity to be dumb, but could it still be funny? Actually, it was a delight.Cunk’s stock-in-trade, the faux-naif misunderstanding, delivered completely deadpan, worked a treat, but that’s only the start of her comic journey. The best lines emerged in a baroque concatenation of idiocy, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Time was when the words “a new sitcom from Ben Elton” wouldn't make anyone's heart quicken with anticipation. I think it's fair to say that after the glorious Blackadder (1983-89), he struggled to write anything so brilliantly, giddily funny, but with Upstart Crow he has made a storming return to form.David Mitchell is William Shakespeare, here played as a man for whom one word will never do when he can say ten, and always on the verge of a moan – whether it's about the poor 16th-century transport system between London and Stratford-upon-Avon, or the fact that, as a Midlander, he's seen as an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Allegedly one of the worst plays Shakespeare wrote (which he may have done in cahoots with Thomas Nashe), the first part of Henry VI emerged victorious from this TV adaptation. Whereas one might think twice about chopping and rejigging Hamlet or King Lear, director and co-adapter Dominic Cooke had applied some muscular compressing and reshaping which meant that the piece gathered pace steadily, and was thundering ahead at full steam by the time it hit the final credits.Mind you, it wasn't strictly Henry VI Part 1, since some of the later scenes (most notably the harrowing denunciation and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There’s little chance, I would guess, that the Windsors were gathered on the sofa to watch The Windsors last night. The show, thankfully, is not another attempt to oil up the collective fundament of the British royal family (and goodness knows television producers were doing enough of that in programmes about the Queen’s 90th birthday recently), more an attempt to destroy it by spoof.Royalists needn’t worry about the imminent downfall of their favourites, though; as funny as much of The Windsors is, there’s nothing much to challenge the crown in George Jeffrie and Bert Tyler-Moore’s scripts. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sometimes compared to Boardwalk Empire or The Wire, and raved over by the likes of Brad Pitt, Snoop Dogg and even Jose Mourinho, Peaky Blinders opened its third series by becoming positively Godfather-esque. Writer Steven Knight whisked us away from the satanic mills of Birmingham to Tommy Shelby's sprawling Warwickshire mansion, where the Peakies supremo was trying to celebrate his unexpected wedding to Grace.It was a fraught gathering of clans, set in a tenebrous anti-Downton. The extended Shelby brood, which teems with brothers and cousins and aunts like dynastic knotweed, is never more Read more ...