TV
David Benedict
It’s costume drama meets adventure story, it’s got smouldering manhood and heaving-bosomed women with sex, swordfights, politicking and even beautifully lit Prague doubling for 17th-century Paris, but the question hanging over the BBC’s lavish new Sunday-night primetime series The Musketeers is: what exactly is it? And then Hugo Speer’s Captain Treville loses patience and barks: “You three, my office, NOW!” and it hits you: this is Charlie’s Angels in thigh-length boots.Okay, we’re not in Seventies LA but there’s almost as much product on the (artfully arranged) hair of our three heroes who Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If it ain't broke don't fix it, and writer Heidi Thomas obviously has no intention of tinkering with the Call the Midwife formula. Virtually nothing has changed, except that there's a new character, Sister Winifred, while Chummy (Miranda Hart) is now living with her husband PC Noakes (Ben Caplan) and has a baby son. However, you can't keep a born midwife down, and Chummy's return to the Nonnatus House mothership by the end of the episode was a foregone conclusion.To be fair, the scenery has been altered slightly, because the nuns and midwives have moved out of the old Nonnatus House into a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Well, that was a shock. I can’t remember seeing many crows around on the Caribbean island of Saint-Marie that is the location of Death in Paradise, but assuming there are some they should by now be appropriately stoned. (Of course, they may have been stoned already, but that would have been because of a certain relaxing something in the air rather than anything like the locals casting a first one.) This is as peaceful place as you’re likely to find anywhere – unless you’re arriving there as a visitor that is, in which case your likelihood of being bumped off must rank disproportionately high Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer's fans recall with huge affection their previous collaborations – among them Big Night Out and The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, two wonderfully anarchic shows. Now comes their first traditional, one-room (well two actually) sitcom House of Fools, which, true to form, is a mix of physical comedy, bawdy humour, surreal sight gags and utter nonsense.As in another project, Shooting Stars, Bob (Mortimer) is the straight man, who has his house constantly invaded by a succession of eejits – chief among them his lodger Vic (Reeves), a lothario friend and neighbour (Matt Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A week ago the first episode of Benefits Street crashlanded on Channel 4. It visited the eponymous area of Birmingham where most residents are on some form of social security. Housing benefit, child benefit, disability benefit: you name it, they were in IDS's crosshairs. Channel 4’s regular payload of viewers shot off the chart: 4.3 million was higher than the ratings for any of its programmes last year. Many of them have apparently taken to visiting James Turner Street, where the luckless and mostly likeable stars live. This must be what people mean by a hot-button issue, the button being on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock reached the end of its latest brief span, Timeshift [****] surveyed the history of dramatic interpretations of Baker Street's finest with a wry eye, in a narrative sprinkled with nutritious facts and anecdotes. The account by Margaret Robinson from the Hammer Films art department of how she designed the latex horror mask for The Hound of the Baskervilles (the title role was played by a Great Dane called Colonel) was notably priceless.Aided by zesty interviews with Christopher Lee, Tim Pigott-Smith, PD James and more, and pinned together by an outrageously Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If you’re a channel trying to prove that there is life in a tired old format, it’s hard to think of a more effective way than signing up Kylie Minogue. It’s tough for a telly talent show to make an impact in those early weeks, before the audience has warmed enough to the contestants to begin rooting for them or otherwise, but the prospect of will.i.am serenading the diminutive diva during the judges’ opening medley of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” and “I Predict a Riot” was reason enough to tune in to the third series of The Voice.The contestants were almost exclusively pale, skinny Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having brought us to the end of Homeland, Channel 4 are hoping lightning will strike twice by introducing another American series based on an Israeli original. Where Homeland was the American version of Hatufim, Hostages is derived from Bnei Aruba, made by Israel's Channel 10, who sold the format to CBS before the original had even been completed.Not that this is another war-on-terror saga, unless a theme of that nature should happen to pop up later in the series. This time, the plot revolves around an elite surgeon, Dr Ellen Sanders (Toni Collette), and her family. As the first episode opens Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
How come there is always a free parking space right outside the police station’s front door as Saga Norén draws up? If she has malodourous armpits, what must her manky leather trousers smell like? What does her partner in investigation Martin Rohde do to distract himself from her personal hygiene issues? Wouldn’t he do better to downsize his expensive car and use the money saved on renting an apartment rather than kipping in a hotel? All burning questions raised by the second series of the Danish-Swedish co-production The Bridge, currently being aired by BBC Four.It was the same with the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Take two television formats and blend in mixer, then serve on one platter. The Taste is essentially Mastervoice, fusing Masterchef’s wannabe kitchen creatives and The Voice’s blind auditions. An early tasting suggests that the stand-out ingredient is Nigella Lawson in the court of public opinion.The Taste has come along at exactly the right time for Channel 4’s PR department. There’s seemingly always room in the television schedules for yet another show about cooking, but how to stand out in the heat of the kitchen? This latest concoction has enjoyed a massive boost in pre-publicity thanks to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There are times us northerners watch your typical London-set big-budget BBC drama and think, well, this really is another world. Whether it’s the two-hour commutes or the estate agencies where there is so much business that nobody has time to sit and watch cat videos on YouTube, there’s little about the world of The 7.39 familiar to those of us lacking three-bedroom semi-detached suburbia and a job in the City.That said, there’s probably little about David Nicholls’ vision of London that seems familiar to those who live and work in the capital either. As in the screenwriter’s novel-turned- Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
For a drama as committed to the exploration of the changing role of women in post-war Britain, The Bletchley Circle isn’t above a little sleight of hand. The second series of the critically acclaimed whodunnit began with a flashback to 1943 and to Alice Merren (Hattie Morahan), a bright young codebreaker who quickly solves a puzzle that the menfolk have been bamboozled by for the past two days. It’s a three-character shift in the cypher, she says, noting that even if the enemy were to build the most complicated machine in the world, “it would still be run by people”.It’s people and the Read more ...