TV
Adam Sweeting
She's not quite a household name yet, but Leeds-born Gemma Whelan is heading speedily in that direction. Having started out as a standup comedian, winning the Funny Women Variety Award in 2010, Whelan began notching up film and TV roles, en route to making a significant breakthrough by being cast as Yara Greyjoy in HBO's Game of Thrones. As GoT aficionados will need no reminding, that meant she was the Lady of the Iron Islands and Lady Reaper of Pyke, and last surviving child of Balon Greyjoy. More than that though, Whelan was a regular in BBC Two's cod-Shakespearean comedy Upstart Crow, and Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Crying never solves anything. Be strong.” An admonishment from a stern grandmother haunts this low key first feature film by Alan Yang (Parks and Recreation, Master of None), loosely based on his father’s 1950s immigrant experience of leaving Taiwan and coming to New York City (his father does the voice-over in the film) and on Yang’s own recent trip to Taiwan with his father.No tigers in evidence here, kings, tails or otherwise. It’s a gentle, elegiac Asian-American story of lost love and emotional repression, told, in Mandarin and English, from the perspective of a disappointed middle-aged Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Creating the opening episode of a new comedy series is like flipping pancakes with one hand while playing the Moonlight Sonata with the other. You have to introduce your characters and invent the world they live in, while squeezing in enough plot to keep the action moving.So high-fives to Sophie Willan, the first recipient of the BBC's Caroline Aherne writing bursary, for getting Alma’s Not Normal (BBC Two) off to a flyer. It’s a story of grungy, low-life Bolton, peopled with characters teetering between tragedy and farce. Willan plays Alma, the unemployed and barely educated daughter of drug Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany was liberated by the British 11th Armoured Division on 15 April 1945, the BBC’s reporter Richard Dimbleby was there to record the occasion. It was Dimbleby’s report for BBC radio, describing how he’d been plunged “into the world of a nightmare”, that alerted the wider world to the scale of the horrors which the Nazis had been perpetrating in the camps. The BBC producers in London were so appalled by Dimbleby’s account that they were proposing not to broadcast it, until he threatened to resign if they didn’t.There were Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
While not the most headline-catching show on Netflix, Ozark has been steadily accruing critical accolades (including a couple of Emmys) and a devoted audience. Perhaps this superb third series will mark the tipping point where Ozark crosses over from cliqueishness to mass adulation.It all began back with the first season in 2017, when Marty Byrde’s Chicago-based financial services company fell foul of their client, a Mexican drug cartel. Marty’s partner made the insane blunder of skimming off $8m of the cartel’s funds, which their company were supposed to be laundering. Long story short, a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Mirrors and windows, looking at ourselves or out into the world, reflecting the culture or making it: compare and contrast. This was the subliminal debate in Spies (BBC Four), the latest instalment of Mark Kermode’s essays on the history and trajectory of movie-making, with some mention too of that complementary form of film, the television programme.Spies, espionage, conspiracy, and what you see isn’t necessarily truthful or real – does all this sound and feel familiar? All human behaviour is here, from trust and loyalty to morality, immorality and amorality, the relationships of individuals Read more ...
The Trip to Greece, Series Finale, Sky 1 review - bittersweet swansong for the cantankerous comrades
Adam Sweeting
Could this mock-mythic journey, emulating the trek homewards to Ithaca of Homer’s hero Odysseus, really be the final series of The Trip (Sky 1)? Or will Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon see sense, and realise that they’ll never have as many free lunches as this again?This concluding episode continued the bantering, competitive tone of its predecessors, but director Michael Winterbottom had added some additional portentous wrapping. The opening depicted Coogan voyaging (in Ingmar Bergman-esque monochrome) through a cavern with a mysterious boatman – Charon, the ferryman of Hades, perhaps. Then Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The cringe-making horror of adolescent schooldays is vividly re-lived in this US import (on Sky Comedy), but with a cunning twist. Its supposedly confused and hormonal leads are played by 30-somethings Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, who blend themselves in with a cast of actual 13-year-olds with uncanny skill.The year 2000 setting has been painstakingly crafted through clothes, Teen magazine covers starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and a breezy power-pop soundtrack. Despite the American location and terminology (the girls are just entering 7th grade, which means middle school), the dramas and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
As we are learning each day during lockdown, necessity is the mother of invention. In Channel 4's case, it is learning how the wonders of modern technology can save a situation: to wit, The Steph Show was meant to come live daily from a shiny new studio in Leeds Docks, but yesterday debuted from host Steph McGovern's front room in North Yorkshire. McGovern, despite her self-confessed nerves and an occasional wobble from the technology, played a blinder in what she described as “Yorkshire Big Brother with one contestant” as robotic cameras captured her from various angles in her open Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been saturating the globe with its multi-format superheroes, leaving its DC rival looking clumsy and disorganised by comparison. However, DC’s “Arrowverse” – a roster of TV shows including Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl – is part of its fight-back effort, and now joining its ranks is this new take on the Batwoman character (E4).Kate Kane and her Batwoman alter ego first appeared in comic form in 1956, but this latest reincarnation leaps into the present with its androgynous-looking lesbian heroine, played by Ruby Rose (familiar from Netflix’s Orange is the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Friday night is Amami night” – that was the ad that ran from the 1920s through to the 1950s for a brand of “setting lotion”, a delightfully old-fashioned term. Those were the days when young women stayed home and did their hair, in preparation for a Saturday night out. Perhaps some of the girls (they weren’t yet “chicks”, maybe “birds”) in the late 1950s used the product when they went to Eel Pie Island, one of the country’s legendary music scenes.The nine-acre island in the Thames, just above the river’s only lock, was the subject of BBC Four’s documentary Rock ‘n’ Roll Island: Where Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson’s reputation was much enhanced by the story – never substantiated – that he’d met with the devil one night at a crossroads, and was miraculously taught exquisite guitar licks that astounded his juke-joint audiences and later the world. A pact that – as it goes with such shady deals – led to him succumbing, a few years later, to a violent death. He was also a source of inspiration for many who came after him – electric Chicago blues giants like Muddy Waters and Elmore James, and later, white boys such as Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and others.There’s Read more ...