TV
Marina Vaizey
China’s tumultuous recent past attempted to selectively obliterate the history of one of the world’s great and ancient civilisations, with the neatly complementary result in the past several decades of a huge upsurge in Chinese studies, East and West, from publications to exhibitions to enormous advances in archaeology. At the same time, a sense of preserving the material past has been threatened by urban development, a habit copied perhaps from the West.And here comes a six-part television history, sprawling and ambitious, of the past 4,000 years masterminded and narrated by Michael Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A year ago, Channel 4 aired Jamie Roberts's documentary Angry, White and Proud, the result of a year Roberts spent getting to know members of far-right splinter groups. Now here's the follow-up, this time the result of two years' research into Islamic extremism in Britain.Amid the mountain of hair-raising material he came away with was the revelation he kept until last (except it had already been trailed fairly heavily, but never mind). This was that the man he'd come to know as Abu Rumaysah, who lived in Walthamstow and used to make a living by renting out bouncy castles for children's Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Created and written by the abundantly talented Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who also stars, Crashing is set among a group of twenty- and thirtysomethings living in a disused hospital in London, which the characters are “protecting” – sort of legalised squatting, where the sanctioned occupants pay a small rent and protect the building from being taken over by, well, squatters. It was filmed in an actual disused hospital, with lots of rooms and shared spaces such as bathrooms, which lends bags of atmosphere and allows the story to have several strands.In the first episode we saw Waller-Bridge's Lulu Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Even the most glazed-eyed Europhile must have begun to notice that the EU's righteous halo is dimming a tiny bit. Against a backdrop of currency chaos and uncontrolled immigration, issues of sovereignty and national self-determination are beginning to loom large. This is the aiming point of this new drama series, created by Norwegian novelist Jo Nesbø, though it comes in at a slightly different angle.The setup is that the Norwegian government, led by Prime Minister Jesper Berg (Henrik Mestad), has decided – for climate-aware ecological reasons – to cut off the nation's production of oil Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
“Finding the Light”, the second episode of this four-part series, took us to the period when Scottish intellectuals led the world in innovative and revolutionary thinking, Edinburgh’s neo-classical architecture in the leafy streets of the New Town made for new standards of civic architecture, and Scottish education could be of the highest quality.The exceptionally enthusiastic narrator is the Scottish representational artist Lachlan Goudie, who rather disarmingly sketches as he goes, particularly in the city and galleries of Rome where Scots of the Enlightenment went for even further Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tracey Ullman is, I suspect, virtually unknown to anybody who either wasn’t around in the 1980s or isn’t a student of that decade’s comedy. For those in either camp, she was a very big name in British television before she left the UK to live and work in the United States – where, incidentally, she became part The Simpsons story (its creators worked on one of the shows she did in America).Now she’s back on British TV, and with a bang. Last night’s opener didn’t just have some of her pitch-perfect impressions, but also her keen-eyed observations of British life today. Clearly her long sojourn 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 ...
Veronica Lee
Walter Presents, Channel 4's clever and welcome strand of foreign, subtitled drama for broadcast both on television and online, is already throwing up some interesting titles. It launched with the Cold War-set Deutschland 83, and now second in the series to be given a broadcast run is Spin, first seen on French television in 2012 under the title Les hommes de l'ombre (The Shadow Men).Like many French serials (including the fantastic police procedural Spiral), Spin likes to take its time. By mistake (All 4's or mine, I don't know which) I watched the second episode first and then the opener; 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 ...
Tom Birchenough
So, Andrew Davies has bitten off the big one. It may have come as a surprise to some that the master of adapting the British classics for television hadn’t read Tolstoy’s classic-to-end-all-classics until the BBC mooted the idea of a new screen version, but this first episode (of six) boded very well all the same.It was Davies adeptly laying out the domestic ground (battlefields, too), and introducing the characters. For anyone intimidated by the length of the original novel – not to mention the heavy accretions of philosophy and history that Tolstoy loaded onto it – the surprise may have 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 ...