TV
Adam Sweeting
After leaving school at 14, Tom Davis spent 10 years working as a scaffolder on building sites, while always harbouring what he thought was the impossible dream of getting into comedy. Hailing from Sutton in south London, he had a go at standup and for a time found himself in drag, singing Disney songs. His luck changed when his childhood friend James De Frond got a job on Leigh Francis’s sketch show Bo’ Selecta. The two of them shot some of their own sketches, and impressed Francis enough to prompt him to invite Davis to appear on the show.He progressed through spots on series such as Bad Read more ...
Tom Teodorczuk
Opposite the playhouse where the sometimes-wild royal comedy The Windsors: Endgame has just opened is the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company seafood restaurant. The eatery is of course inspired by Robert Zemeckis's hit 1994 film Forrest Gump, and watching The Windsors brought to mind the autistic savant's celebrated aphorism derived from his mother: "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.”The Windsors is based on the Channel 4 comedy series that has been running since 2016, satirising the shenanigans of Prince Charles and other Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Producer to the stars and creator of the monstrously successful “Uptown Funk”, Mark Ronson knows a thing or two about making noises. He has combined this know-how with a laid-back knack for presenting to make this six-parter for Apple TV+, delving into the history of how developing technology has driven innovation in the music business.It’s an almost infinitely sprawling subject, but Ronson has drawn up a deluxe list of contributors to give him a hand. For instance, an eager Paul McCartney pops up in the episode about sampling to describe how the Beatles experimented with tape loops in “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This opener to the second series of Dominic Savage’s I Am… dramas starred Suranne Jones as the titular Victoria, an ultra-driven career woman surrounded by the trappings of material success but spinning into a dark vortex of depression. Jones’s intense performance is winning her showers of plaudits, but the film’s improvisational approach and the absence of structure or context meant that her efforts were partially wasted. The jerky, close-up shots focusing relentlessly on every twitch, grimace, or flash of panic on her face eventually induced a kind of seasickness.We were shown the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Some people perfected their banana loaf or sourdough bread during lockdown. Others tried to learn a new language or how to play an instrument. Bo Burnham produced this masterpiece.He is listed as the sole performer, writer, camera operator, editor and director of Inside. It was shot at his home studio in Los Angeles, his growing straggly hair and beard marking the passage of time (though it often jumps between timeframes). It's a tour de force of original songs, stand-up comedy (with a laughter track), straight-to-camera-confessionals, music videos and special effects.It starts playfully, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
ITV’s new detective mystery, Professor T, is an adaptation of a Belgian series of the same name, and was filmed in Belgium and Cambridge. Which is a bit weird since all the action supposedly happens in Cambridge.Anyway, the title role of Professor of Criminology Jasper Tempest is ably filled by Ben Miller, who underplays it so drily that at times he threatens to vanish altogether, and he gets excellent support from a squad of flavourful character actors. Sarah Woodward shines waspishly as the Prof’s much put-upon assistant Ingrid Snares (pictured below), who somehow keeps his life functioning Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“My worst fear? What am I scared of?” Amy Winehouse ponders. She pauses thoughtfully: “Myself.”Ten years to the day since she died, Reclaiming Amy, Marina Parker’s documentary, remembers and celebrates the singer, revealing the truth as her parents see it of her short life and tragic death. The world has heard a lot from Mitch, her father (pictured below), but nothing really from her mother, Janis, speaking now because she knows MS will ultimately deprive her of her memories.“Truth” is subjective of course, and we all inevitably forget the inconvenient truths. But there was a real sense that Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Earlier this year, Steve McQueen addressed the forgotten history of black British people through the Small Axe dramas he made for the BBC. Now McQueen has turned to documentary for Uprising. It airs over three successive nights and was co-directed with documentarist James Rogan; this viewer found it far more gripping than the dramas.In the small hours of Sunday 18th January 1981, a fire ripped through a house in New Cross, south London. Thirteen young people died, many more were left with life-changing injuries. They had been enjoying a birthday party for two teenage girls; Yvonne Ruddock was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Baptiste (BBC One) has two powerful weapons in its armoury, in the shape of its stars – Tchéky Karyo as the titular French ‘tec, and Fiona Shaw as the central character in this second series. Both of them are astonishingly persuasive at conveying unfathomable depths of pain and loss, and it looks like they’ll have plenty of opportunities to prove it across these six episodes.Products from the Harry and Jack Williams thriller factory can be erratic in quality (remember The Widow?), but this one gripped with steely fingers right from the off. Emma Chambers (Shaw), the British ambassador to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A joint production between Channel 5 and Australia’s Network 10, the four-part mystery Lie With Me didn’t do itself many favours by kicking off with its least persuasive episode. However, if you stuck with it, hidden layers began to reveal themselves, and the final instalment delivered a satisfyingly malevolent twist.Channel 5’s press pack for journalists supplied some background detail about the characters which wasn’t seen on screen and would have added some helpful light and shade to the story, so maybe it was originally planned as a longer series. There were also a couple of characters, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The extraordinary story of motor industry executive Carlos Ghosn is a heady combination of power, money, corruption and international politics, with a Mission: Impossible-style ending that carries it over the finishing tape in dramatic style. It might be considered a cautionary tale, except that Ghosn’s experiences and personality were so unique that a repeat performance could never happen.Nick Green’s Storyville film tells Ghosn’s story with the pace and punch of a thriller, illustrated with interviews with various key participants and observers, its disturbing atmosphere enhanced by eerie Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Has Netflix succeeded in reshaping Mills & Boon for the YouPorn era? Though situated in a contemporary New York where empowered women run investment companies, earn doctorates in psychology from Columbia University, and deliver forceful lectures on race and gender roles, Sex/Life is the story of Billie, whose emotional stability is being blown to pieces by her inability to choose between two hunky men.Billie (Sarah Shahi) has abandoned her PhD studies, where she’s been working on a revolutionary thesis about how commitment and monogamy are the best route to a sensational sex life, to Read more ...