TV
Adam Sweeting
Anna Friel’s unstable detective Marcella Backland has been on the brink of existential burn-out ever since her first appearance on ITV in 2016, but it seems audiences have a perverse desire to see what psychological black holes she might plummet down next. Devised by Hans Rosenfeldt, the macabre maestro behind Scandiland’s The Bridge, this third series might be the darkest and nastiest yet.Slightly disorientatingly, the whole caboodle has now been shunted out of London and across to Belfast. That’s also where Line of Duty is filmed, but whereas Jed Mercurio’s labyrinthine creation carefully Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Polly Walker's character in Netflix's sumptuous new Regency romance, Bridgerton, could've easily been little more than a villainous Mrs Bennet. We meet Lady Featherington as she's forcing one of her daughters into a tiny corset, muttering about how she could fit her waist "into the size of an orange and a half" when she was the same age. But Walker finds the tragedy amid the comedy, creating a character you can't help but sympathise with, as she's done before in State of Play and Line of Duty. With a second outing pretty much in the bag, Walker discusses what makes Bridgerton Read more ...
David Nice
Finally, it seems, the time is right for a major British TV drama about how the AIDS crisis hit the early 1980s London gay scene. We’ve come a long way even since the audacious launch of Russell T Davies’s triumphant Queer As Folk, also on Channel 4, in 1989: RuPaul’s Drag Race would have been inconceivable on mainstream television then, but here’s the second and much more creative UK series on BBC Two. It’s A Sin has much to celebrate, too, but also much to warn about and mourn, and in the midst of a different kind of virus ravaging the world, it offers unexpected resonances.Davies rose to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sad to report, this fourth series of Call My Agent! (Netflix) will be the final outing for this caustically addictive saga of actors and their agents. The show’s unique trademark has been its success in attracting an impressive roster of A-list French actors and getting them to behave in outlandish and ridiculous ways, but maybe they’re just running out of suitably recognisable names.Episode 5 of this new batch shows what could have been a possible way ahead by reaching across the Atlantic to pluck Sigourney Weaver (pictured below) out of La-La Land and plonk her in the fabulously expensive Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What a television programme gets called is not always the choice of the people making it, but it certainly is the choice of its broadcaster. In the case of Silenced: The Hidden Story of Disabled Britain, the relevant people at the BBC may come to regret giving an otherwise decent documentary that title. Over an hour, Cerrie Burnell, an actor born with the lower part of her right arm missing, explored in detail the history and present day discriminations against people with physical disabilities in the UK. She interviewed disabled people and several wheelchair-using campaigners, who Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The oeuvre of M Night Shyamalan has tended to veer between unsettling creepiness and sometimes hilarious misfires, but, working as Executive Producer with screenwriter Tony Basgallop, he’s hit the spot with this unnerving series for Apple TV +. Just back for its second season, Servant homes in on the fraught and freaky lives of Sean and Dorothy Turner. He’s a so-called “consulting chef”, she’s a high-profile news journalist on Philadelphia’s 8 News TV network, and there’s a huge smouldering crater where their home life used to be.Apart from the pair of them being self-obsessed narcissists, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Or, What The Durrells Did Next. Writer Simon Nye, writer/director Roger Goldby and star Keeley Hawes are all veterans of ITV’s Corfu-based fantasy, and while Finding Alice superficially resembles a thriller, like its predecessor it’s more of an undemanding family melodrama once you’ve peeled away the wrapping.Nonetheless, this opening episode (of six) radiated a distinctly whodunnit-ish aura. Our story began (after a brief flash-forward) with Alice Dillon (Keeley), daughter Charlotte (Isabella Papas) and Alice’s partner Harry (Jason Merrells) visiting the brand new house that property Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The discovery of a grotesque murder is the traditional way to begin a new series of Spiral, and this time around the cadaver belonged to a young Moroccan boy, nicknamed Shkun. He’d been beaten to death with an iron bar and stuffed into a laundromat washing machine. Of course, this was only the end of a piece of string leading Captain Laure Berthaud and her team into a labyrinth of organised crime and drug-smuggling.This is Spiral’s eighth and final series (on BBC Four), which is perhaps why the mood feels even more dour and downbeat than usual. This is not least because it opened with Gilou ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The motor racing passion of movie star Steve McQueen is well documented, from his motorcycling exploits in The Great Escape to the rubber-burning car chase around San Francisco in Bullitt to his weird but mesmeric sports car odyssey Le Mans. Less widely known, however, was his plan to shoot a movie about Formula One during the mid-Sixties.This would have been called Day of the Champion, was to be built around specially-shot footage from races in the European F1 season, and would be based on photojournalist Robert Daley’s book The Cruel Sport (1963), which probed the dark side of a glamorous Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
History ain’t what it used to be, not on television at any rate. Recently we’ve witnessed the ongoing furore about the factual accuracy or otherwise of The Crown, while Bridgerton has cheekily galloped bareback over the conventional cliches of telly costume dramas. Now here’s The Great (Channel 4), which sort-of purports to tell the story of Catherine the Great, although writer Tony McNamara has given himself plenty of room for whimsy and invention.Each episode is prefaced with the caption “An occasionally true story” (a precaution some other programme-makers might like to consider), and Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“They’re only rich assholes.They don’t merit your concern,” serial killer and psychopath Charles Sobhraj (Tahar Rahim, A Prophet, Heal the Living), aka rich French gem-dealer Alain Gautier, tells his girlfriend Marie-Andrée in The Serpent as he steals passports and money from a couple of unconscious tourists he’s just drugged on a beach in Thailand in the mid-Seventies.“Free your mind from bourgeois sentiments. You’re above all this,” he encourages her. This is the first time that she begins to realise what she’s got herself into, having left Quebec for Asia and the love of a not-so-good Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) has a simple routine: she gets up at the same time every day, tramps out for her allotted hour of exercise, and spends the rest of the day staring out of the window, yearning for freedom. Sound familiar? That’s a bit worrying, she’s in prison. Covid doesn’t exist in the Doctor Who universe, going blissfully unmentioned in this festive special allegedly set on 1 January 2021. The 13th Doctor has been banged up for various unclear misdemeanours – maybe pulling off a bob too well? – leaving mates Yaz (Mandip Gill), Ryan (Tosin Cole), and Graham (Bradley Walsh) Read more ...