TV
Florence Hallett
It’s no surprise that 30 years on, the individuals most closely connected to the world’s biggest art heist are showing their age. Anne Hawley was a young woman just months into her directorship of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston when thieves made off with 13 works of art, including a Chinese vase and drawings by Degas, a Vermeer and Rembrandt’s only seascape.Speaking to the press soon afterwards, Hawley (main picture) was visibly shellshocked, desperation and disbelief mingled painfully in her comment that “I have to operate under the assumption that we are going to get these Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Channel 5 is rather partial to its four-night dramas, though recent effort The Drowning seemed to have sneaked unseen past the quality control department on its way to the screen. It pulled in the viewers though, and Intruder will probably do the same.Written and directed by Gareth Tunley (creator of 2016’s psychological thriller The Ghoul), it’s about what happens when a pair of youths break into the luxurious country home of Sam and Rebecca Hickey (Tom Meeten and Elaine Cassidy). They disturb Sam as they blunder clumsily around the house, and as one of them (Syed) tries to escape through a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director of the Courtauld Institute, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and a particular expert on the art of Poussin, Sir Anthony Blunt spent decades at the epicentre of the royal family and the British Establishment. He was, as the so-called “Fourth Man” of the Cambridge espionage ring, also a spy for the Russians who handed over countless documents and nuggets of top secret information during and after World War Two, including super-sensitive details about the D-Day landings.The Blunt story, in all its murky fascination, has long gripped writers, historians, documentary-makers and The Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Well, it wasn’t quite Messiah, but it was a source of joy. In ENO’s end-of-lockdown staging, BBC Two’s transmission of Handel’s resurrection song delivered a scant 54 minutes of music from the Coliseum on Easter Saturday. In contrast, two ancient Poirot movies, staples of Bank Holiday line-ups roughly since the Pleistocene Era, had hogged fully four hours of the channel’s afternoon schedule. Miserly, timid, cheese-paring, grudging: the Proms partially excepted, BBC TV’s default attitude to classical music never fails to disappoint – even when the oratorio in question has been a beloved pillar Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After arriving with a bang in 2018, Keeping Faith (BBC One) disappointed many (though not all) of its fans with 2019’s second series. It’s had a bit of a breather before this third – and final – series, first seen in its Welsh version Un Bore Mercher on S4C last November. So, how is it shaping up?While the ravishing Welsh scenery of Laugharne and Carmarthenshire is almost reason enough to watch the show, the story has moved on, with Faith Howells (Eve Myles) now running her own law firm, while still trying to work out divorce and child-custody arrangements with disgraced husband and ex- Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I get to see all these beautiful places and look passengers right in the eye and say the word trash.” Meet Cassie Bowden (the excellent Kaley Cuoco), flight attendant on Imperial Atlantic Airways. In firm denial about her alcohol problem, she knocks back myriads of vodka miniatures onboard, parties hard in cities the world over, has one-night stands after black-out benders (“Thank you for the effort. Good job,” she says to one man, unclear as to who he is or what he’s doing in bed in her New York apartment) but still makes the JFK to Bangkok flight by the skin of her teeth, looking fresh as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jed Mercurio’s tangly police corruption thriller Line of Duty has become one of the jewels in the BBC’s drama crown, and this sixth (and possibly last) series has finally arrived on BBC One after a steadily growing crescendo of pre-publicity. Can it live up to the hype?Experience teaches that trying to judge a series by the opening episode is often a fool’s errand, and the wily Mercurio knows his game intricately. Was episode one brilliant? Possibly, though not necessarily – but it was crammed with clues, feints, intimations of doubt and a variety of threats and warnings, as if to soften up Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Nick Broomfield made his first film 50 years ago, and his career over those five decades (and some three dozen works) has been as distinctive, and distinguished as that of any British documentary maker. It has ranged from early films on British social themes, through overseas journeys, often around America and more extreme subjects such as penal incarceration (1982’s Tattooed Tears, his first work outside England, and his studies of serial killer Aileen Wuornos on death row) but also his including his remarkable 1991 The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife about the white South African Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 2020 Formula One season was all set to start in Australia last March when it was derailed by the Covid emergency. The F1 organisers insisted that they’d get the racing back on track somehow, and what sounded like foolhardy bravado was justified when they successfully staged a 17-race championship between July and December.It proved to be a surprisingly exciting and often emotional season, with all kinds of human and political dramas woven through the action, and Netflix’s ubiquitous Drive to Survive crew was there to catch all the nuances. F1 had an advantage over most other sports Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Readers of John Marrs’s 2017 novel The One should probably look away now, since Netflix’s dramatisation of the story bears scant resemblance to the book. The basic premise – that a corporation has invented a method of DNA testing which can match individuals with their perfect partner who “you are genetically guaranteed to fall in love with”– remains, along with a group of characters who experience the repercussions of this techno-dating app, but their identities and storylines have all been reinvented for the TV incarnation.By and large, this is not a good thing. The One has a chilly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We last saw John Simm on ITV in 2018’s Hong Kong-based murder mystery Strangers, a product from the Jack and Harry Williams script factory which wasted its exotic backdrops with a plot which mooched about in a dispirited fashion before dozing off entirely. This new two-hour detective drama, adapted from Peter James’s novel Dead Simple, starred Simm as Detective Superintendent Roy Grace. No doubt the hope is that Grace will blossom into a hardy perennial destined eventually for permanent rotation alongside Poirot, Morse, Foyle and the rest of ITV3’s roster of indestructible ‘tecs.It's by no Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There comes a time when every successful formula can do with an overhaul, and that particular bell may be tolling for Unforgotten (ITV). Regular viewers will be familiar with writer Chris Lang’s modus operandi – a corpse (usually grotesque and of indeterminate age) is discovered, and before you can say “autopsy” cold case experts Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and Sunny Khan (Sajeev Bhaskar) are poking around in the innards. Then they track down a network of potential suspects who were connected with the deceased.This latest case adheres to the blueprint with unswerving exactitude, though it’s Read more ...