TV
Adam Sweeting
Christopher Eccleston isn’t the easiest actor to love, because he gives the impression he’ll reach through the screen and grab you by the throat if you don’t appreciate his ferocious thespian intensity, but with the role of Maurice Scott in The A Word (BBC One), he’s found the perfect vehicle for his particular set of skills. Loud, bossy and as subtle as a category 5 hurricane, Maurice is the show’s big-hearted patriarch.For this opener to series 3 of Peter Bowker’s drama about families dealing with autism (and many other things), Maurice seized centre stage as his Lake District home became Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
After a season that sought to redefine what Westworld could become, the finale exposed the confused arc, before limping towards an emotionally weak ending. This season began by recoding itself into something schlockier, more high-octane, and arguably more mainstream than before – somewhere between a Jason Bourne film and The Matrix. Whether a glossy, high budget HBO show (on Sky Atlantic) could ever be classed as anything other than mainstream is a fair question, and the feature-length finale was no different. If Game of Thrones taught us anything, it was Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Back in the day, the weekend started with Ready Steady Go. Now Friday evenings are once more essential viewing, and not just because we’re all locked down. While the endless ToTP reruns are often no more than bad-taste wallpaper, the music documentaries are consistently high quality.This week the camera, or perhaps the spotlight, fell on The Shadows, “the British guitar band that sparked a revolution” as Gina McKee’s voiceover to The Shadows at Sixty informed us with little or no exaggeration. Spoken of in the same breath as Cliff Richard, the original British rock idol whom they backed, The Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
DI John Major (Daniel Mays) has been dead a year, shot in the line of duty, though we’re far from that series in terms of tone. Now he’s back at the London Met, artificially augmented, but not very intelligently. If anything he’s a bit more shit than he was before, as one of those involved in the shooting observes.“Think of me as Oscar Pistorius,” he encourages his wife Kelly (Anna Maxwell Martin) who’s strangely reluctant to welcome the new part-AI him back home, probably because she and his partner DI Roy Carver (Stephen Graham) are in a relationship. In fact on the night he was shot, they’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Veterans of the first series of Blood will be familiar with writer Sophie Petzal’s fondness for leading the viewer up the garden path and round the mulberry bush as the story develops. Get ready to go through it all again.The setting is the rural heart of Ireland, and this sequel resumes the year after the tragic events of its predecessor, as disgraced doctor Jim Hogan (Adrian Dunbar, pictured below) returns to pick up the pieces with his family. It was the death of Jim’s wife Mary that fuelled the drama of the first series, with the truth about Jim’s complicity or guilt kept hanging Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Paul is in Japan to eat,” announced Rebecca Front’s smart-alecky voice-over, introducing this new series for Channel 4, but he was also there to do that very British thing of wallowing in blissful ignorance of foreign customs and traditions. A Very British Travelogue, in fact.Hollywood undertook his Big Continental Road Trip and has made cooking shows in the USA, but this was his first trip to Japan, a country about which he seemed to have made a point of knowing nothing. Perhaps he hasn’t had time to catch up on Giri/Haji, but it isn’t as if Britain is devoid of sushi bars and tempura Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Portmeirion, the Italianate village created by architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis on the River Dwyryd estuary, might have been designed to provide the perfect surreal setting for the 1967 TV series The Prisoner. But though it resembles an opium dream of doll’s houses and fairytale landscapes, Portmeirion has proved remarkably sturdy, and with its selection of hotels and self-catering cottages functions successfully as a holiday destination.This new series will chart a year in the village’s life, and this opening episode was like following the local postman round the houses, and being Read more ...
Normal People, BBC One review – adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel evokes the deep cut of first love
Joseph Walsh
Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, was a psychologically rich, emotive journey into the psyches of two Irish teenagers who fall in love. Only two years on from publication, it has been turned into a 12-part series from the BBC and Hulu. Rooney’s plot was simple. Working-class boy Connell, who’s popular at school, catches the eye of the socially awkward rich girl Marianne, and we follow their on-off relationship from upper-sixth to university. The novel had its detractors, but for most readers the way Rooney elegantly rendered the inner lives of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The national treasure that is Grayson Perry, CBE, RA, is hosting a six-episode national art club on Channel 4 for professional artists, amateur artists and the public. Since Perry came to national attention when he won the Turner Prize he has been happily ubiquitous. He may well be the country’s most effective proponent of the visual arts, as well as its most famous transvestite.Perry has written many books, delivered the Reith Lectures, curated exhibitions including the British Museum’s ground-breaking Tomb of the Unknown Craftsmen, was a bold curatorial innovator for the RA summer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Between 1972-1992 five series of Van der Valk were made for ITV, starring Barry Foster as the eponymous Amsterdam detective. Nearly 30 years later comes this reincarnation with Marc Warren in the title role, no doubt hoping to find a regular home in the juicy two-hour Sunday night slot.Does it work? Well… up to a point, though there’s still that air of artificiality that’s hard to overcome when you set a basically British cop show in a foreign city. Check Kenneth Branagh’s Wallander for further evidence. The recruitment of a sizeable squad of Dutch actors eases this somewhat (they may be Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
In the time since the show’s inception four years ago, arguments have raged as to whether Westworld is a dud or a cult classic. For every dedicated fan, there’s someone out there crying, "The Matrix did it first!" and complaining that the plot didn’t make sense (it did). Whichever side of the argument you fall, the question loomed as to where the show’s creators, Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, could possibly take it next. Two years on from when we last entered Westworld (Sky Atlantic), we can finally find out. The violent delights at the end of Season 2 saw the "hosts" rising up against Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's interesting to note that this Netflix series – the second of Ricky Gervais's study of bereavement, which he writes, directs and stars in – is broadcast during lockdown. We've quickly become used to a different pace of life – slower, less rooted in strict timeframes of work or family routines – so we should, in theory, be able to ease ourselves into the slowness. But there's slow, and there's “nothing much happening here, mate”.The first season of After Life, in which Gervais plays Tony, a journalist on a free local newspaper in the fictional town of Tambury, who lost his wife, Lisa ( Read more ...