TV
Adam Sweeting
New sci-fi series aren't exactly a dime a dozen on British TV, awash as it usually is with serial killers, cops and costume dramas, so the fact that Humans not only exists but is also bold and fresh-looking triggers instant brownie points. It doubtless helps that it's a collaboration between Channel 4 and America's AMC, home of Mad Men and The Walking Dead. It pitches us into a contemporary London which looks superficially unchanged, but has been rendered utterly alien by the new boom in synthetic humans, or "synths".It seems the Smart TV, the Apple Watch and Mr Dyson's latest dust-sucking Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This was the story of a remarkable man, Henry Cecil, a genius with horses and 10 times Champion Trainer. He was felled by tabloid scandal but rose again to train one of the greatest racehorses in history, Frankel. This wholly absorbing programme was not a tale of everyday folk, but of horse racing, told through its human and equine characters, looking into a rarefied bubble inhabited by some of the richest and most powerful people in the world – and the finest thoroughbreds of the animal variety. You don’t have to follow racing to have heard of Frankel, said to be the finest racehorse Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When TFI Friday first assaulted our screens (nearly) 20 years ago, things were very different. An untucked checked shirt passed for sartorial elegance, magazines sold in big numbers and, within their pages, women were routinely objectified, but ironically and in front of a paper-thin façade of equality.This incongruous disconnect with society's current state – belt tightened, media fragmented and feminism back on the agenda - didn't bode well for the return, which, in order to succeed, would have to rely heavily on writer Danny Baker's unrivalled facility for inventive absurdism and ability Read more ...
Matthew Wright
A young man, in trouble with drunk or drugs, returns to his Scottish family riven by dark secrets? Of course, it’s a new Iain Banks dramatisation, the first since the author’s death two years ago. This version of his 2012 novel Stonemouth attempts to recreate the success the BBC enjoyed with its 1996 adaptation of Banks’s Crow Road. Compressing a near-400 pages of fiction into two hours’ television requires a thicket of flashbacks that tests the viewer’s recall, and piles coincidence a little high in places, though enjoyable lead performances, and Banks’ gripping, if familiar, preoccupations Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is irresistible to watch Andrew Roberts, the ambitious historian of one of history's most ambitious figures, narrating a three-part account of his hero’s life and times. He is giving us a superb analysis of Napoleon Bonaparte’s gifts, flaws, insecurities and achievements. The first instalment opened with a glorious sunset over the South Atlantic, and several views of the dramatic scenery of the volcanic island of St Helena where the exiled Napoleon was held for six years, 4,000 miles from home, as the prisoner of the British, until his death in 1821 at the age of 51. We saw pivotal Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Interceptor began as it didn’t mean to go on. A young boy of mixed race walked home through an estate and saw two men in a violent altercation. One, who was white, shot the other, who was black, presumably dead. “Dad!” called the boy. The murderer pointed the gun, realised he was aiming at his son, and scarpered.Spool forward a couple of decades. The boy, now an adult, had moved out of a gritty tragedy and into a trigger-happy comedy. Ash (OT Fagbenle) was a customs cop on the hunt for small fry in tandem with his buddy Tommy (Robert Lonsdale). Their first chase across a crowded Waterloo Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is supposed to be a major five-part documentary series probing into the innards of the Metropolitan Police, but it felt suspiciously like W1A in uniform. Was it the muted but insistently ominous background music, always trying to tell us that something really significant was happening when we were just watching yet another slab of b-roll footage? Or the dry, earnest voice-over, intoning that "this is a force under pressure"?Above all, maybe it was the way that gatherings of high-level officers might equally have a been a BBC strategy meeting. When the Met's Head of Communications started Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Teeth. Who’d have them? This documentary about the state of the nation’s gnashers came along at a timely moment for your reviewer. Earlier in the week I suffered my first ever extraction. Didn’t feel a jot of pain, of course, but by Christ you know all about it when the dentist is fiddling about inside your mouth, attempting with a variety of utensils to pluck out the culprit.I now see I had it easy. Meet Angela, a dog-walker from Cheshire. Her teeth were in a state of rococo disrepair. The camera went in for a snoop and it was like a cross between a motorway pile-up and a binful of rotting Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The fifth, and supposedly final, series depicting the adventures of the covert-action tough guys of Section 20 won't surprise anyone, but it won't disappoint its devotees either. Fast, brutal and violent, Strike Back is a slick mix of movie-like production values and infinitesimal demands on the viewer's intellect, a winning commercial formula if ever there was one.The action opened in the steamy heat of Thailand, where English girl Chloe Foster thought she was about to have a quick leg-over with a handsome local boy, but instead found herself kidnapped by a thuggish gang of bandits. Turned Read more ...
Barney Harsent
A third series for Kay Mellor’s rags-to-riches series can herald few real surprises. We know, roughly speaking, what we’ll be getting: a cautionary tale – be careful what you wish for – populated by warm, well-drawn and big-hearted characters who are believably flawed and hiding secrets of the sort that fill the time and mouths of garden fence gossips across the country. That, and the reliable, solid ensemble cast that Mellor’s track record (Band of Gold, Fat Friends, In the Club) can command.What we might not have been expecting (had we managed to avoid the pre-transmission press) was for Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A long time ago I went out into the field to research a feature about the three ages of obsessive fandom. At the entry level was a bog-standard legion of young teenage girls who simply hung around outside the mansion block in Maida Vale where one or possibly both of the Gosses (of Bros) lived. I also met three young women who had access to Jason Donovan’s diary and were traipsing around town in the hope of glimpse. Donovan’s star had waned but they hadn’t moved on. Most tragic was my dinner in Soho with a Boy George lookalike, a dolled-up marionette who gave himself airs and got chauffeured Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Gravelly, Winstone-esque banter about the trauma of putting down the sawn-off and having to stop for red lights. Poor taste in swimwear and the chunkier kind of jewellery. We know what to expect from a sitcom about life on the Costa, on the run. Which makes SunTrap, BBC One’s new take on the genre, highly adventurous. Unfortunately, having torn up the rulebook, what we’re left with is not a brilliant new approach, but a fistful of fragments, albeit highly coloured and diverting in patches. As fugitive tabloid reporters (the series’ title tips the wink about who’s in the Beeb’s sights here) Read more ...