TV
Adam Sweeting
If you should happen to be loitering in London’s Knightsbridge at 4am, don’t panic if you find yourself surrounded by the massed horsemen of the Household Cavalry. When they need to rehearse for great occasions like the Queen’s birthday, they can only do it in the middle of the night when there’s no traffic on the roads.This was one of many factoids packed into this new ITV documentary series. Other gems included the news that the regiment’s horses produce 6,000 tons of “royal poo” every year, which the lucky troopers have to shovel down the “dung tunnel”, while the horses have their faces Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Chernobyl (Sky Atlantic) is the most unmissable show on TV. Perhaps it’s because the Soviet nuclear catastrophe in 1986 was so blood-freezingly horrific that the filmmakers didn’t need to fictionalise or exaggerate.This penultimate episode was bad news for animal lovers. It opened with an elderly woman trying to milk a cow, only to be ordered at gunpoint to leave her home right away, because of the morbid threat of radiation. She reeled off a litany of historical famines, wars and invasions that she’d lived through, and concluded that she’d be damned if she was going to leave because of some Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Professor Brian Cox, still looking cheekily boy-band-ish at the age of 51, has made himself a child of the universe. His day job is professor of particle physics at Manchester University, but turn him loose with a camera crew and an unfeasibly large budget and he turns into a starry-eyed cosmic hippy.In his new series for BBC Two, the Prof is taking a survey of Earth and the other seven planets which make up our solar system. His thesis is that each of these – Mercury, Venus, Mars and the rest – experienced a period when they enjoyed conditions in which life could develop, but for various Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hallelujah! At last the BBC have commissioned a Stephen Poliakoff series that makes you want to come back for episode two (and hopefully all six), thanks to a powerful cast making the most of some perceptively-written roles.His most recent efforts, Dancing on the Edge and Close to the Enemy, were distinguished only by their contorted implausibility and woefully unconvincing characters. This time, he has drawn deeply on personal experiences of himself and his family, which seems to have helped him create rounded individuals it’s possible to identify with, amid a persuasive depiction of the way Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Persistent depression is debilitating and terrifying, as Alastair Campbell illustrated vividly in this punchily-argued film. We first saw him looking like a disturbed, miserable ghost, as he described in his video diary a sudden plunge into depression at New Year, 2018. He seemed to be ebbing away before our eyes.Campbell is shrewd and perceptive, but not easy to like. The former bellicose henchman of Tony Blair (and presumed model for Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It), Campbell was closely involved in the process leading to the 2003 Iraq invasion, and his arrogance and aggression often Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s remarkable that this meandering observational documentary about the five square mile airport west of London has stretched to a fifth series. Heathrow may have 77,000 staff and expect 80 million passengers to pass through this year, but that doesn’t mean everything they do is interesting.For instance, a slender storyline about Thai Airways passengers stranded without a seat when the airline replaced a double-decker Airbus A380 with a much smaller Boeing failed to fizz when none of the passengers became violent or unreasonable. In fact they were delighted to be paid £535 compensation per Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Have we passed peak Hatton Garden? It’s now four years since a gang of old lags pulled off the biggest heist of them all. They penetrated a basement next door to a safe-deposit company, drilled through the wall, and made off with many millions quids’ worth in diamonds, cash and the like. All but one of them ended up in prison, where they will probably see out their days, being all of them well past pensionable age.Owing to the age of the criminals, the story had immense appeal to that section of the British film industry that rushes to glamorise London gangsters. The burglary triggered a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Is there some tongue-in-cheek irony in BBC Two starting a five-part biographical documentary on Margaret Thatcher this Monday? Mrs Thatcher was Britain’s first female Prime Minister, Conservative to boot, and regardless of gender her years of leadership were among the most forceful and controversial ever. And it may be just days – May ends in June, as one headline put it – before the second Conservative female Prime Minister bows out amidst Brexit chaos and the potential implosion of the Conservative Party as a capable political force.In this first episode, Making Margaret, we heard from Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
WARNING - CONTAINS SPOILERS! And so it’s over. Eight years of thrilling, fantastical, often emotionally devastating, in some senses ground-breaking television, has reached the moment of truth with two questions, one fictional, one real. Who would, finally, sit on the Iron Throne? And after alienating fans and critics alike with an erratic final season, would showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss – who both wrote and directed this final episode – rediscover their mojo at the last? The answer to the second, considering the many pieces at play in HBO’s epic saga, has to be a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In 2010, Maxine Peake starred in The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, but this new dramatisation of Lister’s life has been gestating in Sally Wainwright’s brain for 20 years, and finally arrives under the auspices of the BBC and HBO. Hugely entertaining it is too, not least its rollicking folkabilly theme tune, and its story of a buccaneering polymath, adventurer, businesswoman and pioneer of lesbian liberation now finds itself fortuitously timely.Suranne Jones steps boldly to the plate in the title role (“Gentleman Jack” was a mocking nickname), blowing through the staid social world of Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
This year, Cannes has been adamantly defending traditional cinema, with more than a few jibes at Netflix (who remain persona non grata at the festival), but that hasn’t stopped them screening two episodes of Nicolas Winding Refn’s new Amazon TV series, Too Old To Die Young. Refn has gone on record stating that his latest project is still cinema — a 13-hour film that shows all the verve and ambition you’d expect from the Danish auteur. If these two episodes are anything to go by, his argument is more than believable.Episodes four and five might seem an odd choice to screen at the world- Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is a toothsome treat for Sunday nights and one of those rare occasions when the BBC has got hold of the kind of nifty comedy series that Netflix usually pumps out. What We Do in the Shadows started out as a New Zealand vampire flick in 2014. Two Kiwi friends, comedian Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi (who went on to helm The Hunt for the Wilderpeople and most recently Thor Ragnarok), created it. Their affectionate portrait of the every-night life of a house occupied by squabbling vampires living in downtown Wellington became something of a cult hit.Now comes the spin-off tv series Read more ...