TV
Adam Sweeting
When business and politics collide, the result may very well be corruption. Such is the case in this taut, streamlined thriller from Norway, one of many gems from the Walter Presents stable.Ida Waage (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, pictured below) is the Chief Financial Officer at Oslo law firm Biermann & Gude. A diligent wife and mother and a level-headed professional, she seems the perfect fit for this seemingly exemplary and prestigious outfit. However, when she’s asked to pay an invoice for 450,000 kroner to a company called Klant Consulting, which supposedly Biermann & Gude don’t do any Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“Will they never learn?” people must have been screaming as they watched the opening episode of the 16th series of The Apprentice – I certainly was. After all these years, the hopefuls vying to take Lord Sugar's £250,000 to invest in their business idea seem blissfully unaware of how daft they look with their strutting boasts. I know it's a competition, but not in how to sound the most foolish.So we had the usual bombast bingo list. “I'm the complete package”, “I would compare myself to a Ferrari”, “Failure is not an option” and “I'm so confident to the point people think I'm deluded”. Bless Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This latest outing from the astonishingly prolific Jack and Harry Williams (The Missing, Baptiste, The Widow, Strangers etc) gives itself a huge leg-up by exploiting the epic lonely spaces of the Australian Outback.The opening sequence of episode one was a blinder, a self-contained mini-drama about a motorist stopping at a decrepit service station to use the facilities, then finding himself pursued by a malevolent articulated truck, looming ever larger in his rearview mirror as he sings along to "Bette Davis Eyes" on the car radio.The cat-and-mouse pursuit was shot with filmic grandeur, as Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's so much stuff on TV, in all its many multi-streaming hats, that I somehow haven't got around to watching Succession. Apparently it's the best TV show ever made.Oh well, there's bound to be another one along in a minute. Theartsdesk's eagle-eyed reviewers have found plenty to amuse themseves with elsewhere during 2021, and we parade our particular predilections below. Adam SweetingIt's a Sin, Channel 4 When I reviewed the first two episodes of Russell T Davies's shattering, but also where appropriate very funny, take on how the AIDS crisis hit Londin in the 1980s, I could have Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title might provoke a quick double-take. Wasn’t A Very British Scandal that series about Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott, starring Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw?Duh, of course not! That was A Very English Scandal (though both of them are produced by Blueprint Pictures). But was it really a great idea to tag this plushly-produced, starrily-cast, historically-based three-parter as though it’s just the latest product to trundle off a televisual production line? We look forward to the box set where it’s bundled in with A Very English Education, A Very British Brothel, A Very British Hotel Chain Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Friday night was Mark Gatiss night. His new version of Antonia Barber’s novel The Ghosts (filmed as The Amazing Mr Blunden in 1972 by Lionel Jeffries and similarly titled here) sprawled across two hours on Sky, while his adaptation of M R James’s ghost story The Mezzotint was awarded a mere 30 minutes on BBC Two. The latter won hands down.Gatiss’s Mr Blunden (★★) stuck faithfully enough to the original story of a modern-day family being visited by a ghostly solicitor, the titular Mr Blunden (played here by the fruitily thespian Simon Callow as though he’d just popped in one from one of his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Would you be willing to play the guinea pig in a designer-superhome created by a deranged architect? That is one question posed by this four-part drama (adapted by JP Delaney from his own novel), a kind of haunted house mystery underpinned by the damaged psychological states of its protagonists.David Oleyowo plays Edward Monkford, the architect in question, whose minimalistic and futuristic creation at One Folgate Street becomes the setting in which themes of compulsion, obsession and deception are played out in an atmosphere of steadily-gathering menace. Orbiting around Edward and his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In 2014, Susan and Christopher Edwards were jailed for a minimum of 25 years for the killing of Susan’s parents, William and Patricia Wycherley. They’d been shot dead in 1998, and lay buried in their garden at 2 Blenheim Close, Mansfield for 15 years.Susan and Christopher had successfully maintained the fiction that the Wycherleys were still alive, but taking extended holidays, by writing greeting cards to relatives or keeping in touch with their GP’s surgery on their behalf. The killings might never have come to light had the Department for Work and Pensions not written to William Wycherley Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I sympathised with the prosecuting barrister when she put it to the court that the accused, a man called Hero (Samuel Adewunmi), was “using his closing speech to construct a work of fiction”.This was a crafty meta-joke. You Don’t Know Me itself is a dramatic fiction adapted from the novel by Imran Mahmood, and Hero’s decision to defend himself at his own murder trial found him standing up in court and giving an actorly rendition of his own version of the plot.I liked it better than the prosecution’s version – is the law really just a story-telling contest? – even though Hero seemed to be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Netflix is sometimes criticised for bringing too much of everything to its online feast, but the way it’s opening up previously under-exposed territories is becoming seriously impressive. Suddenly, South Korea is beginning to look like a powerhouse in the making, with consecutive big ratings hits with Squid Game and now Hellbound.Directed by Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan), Hellbound is derived from the “webtoon” series he created with cartoonist Choi Gyuseok. It depicts a nightmarish society where “sinners” are picked out seemingly at random by a mysterious “angel” and informed that they will Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A caption tells us that while filming the Beatles at Twickenham Film Studios in January 1969 for a planned TV broadcast, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg and his crew amassed 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio recordings. Some of it was seen in the 1970 film Let It Be, but the bulk of it has remained locked in the vaults ever since. Until now. Sometimes, watching Peter Jackson’s vast three-part documentary series Get Back, it feels like we’re having to sit through every second of all of it.Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) spent four years editing and restoring the footage, and could only Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the absolute highpoints of new writing in the past couple of years has been the Death of England trilogy. Written by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, these three brilliant monologues have not only explored vital questions of race and racism, identity and belonging, but have also provided a record of theatre-going before, during and after the pandemic lockdown.From the first episode, which was staged live at the National Theatre in January 2020, to the second which only had one performance but was then streamed in October 2020, to this final part, which is a film, the story of fractious Read more ...