TV
Adam Sweeting
Not just the Peter Pan of Pop, but also its very own Houdini. With the aid of shed-loads of money, an illusion-spinning PR machine and the most aggressive lawyers that money could buy, Michael Jackson managed to make it to his premature exit in 2009 without being sent to jail. Dan Reed’s sprawling two-part documentary Leaving Neverland comes to bury Jackson, and to do posthumously what nobody managed to achieve in his lifetime.Reed focuses on the stories of two boys who became, for a time – or perhaps forever, considering the terrible emotional legacy it all left them with – Jackson’s pets. Read more ...
Owen Richards
When Derry Girls premiered on Channel 4 in early 2018, there was little fanfare. But it’s been a whirlwind year for the four girls from Derry (and the wee English lad), capturing British hearts before conquering the US through Netflix. Their return in 2019 heralds a much bigger reaction, with faces plastered on front pages and buildings (including a traditional Derry mural). Can these comic upstarts meet the considerably raised expectations?Well, leave it to the ethereally oblivious Orla to quell any early reservations. Interrupting Erin in the tub as she wistfully imagines Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a super-talented woman Phoebe Waller-Bridge is. Hot on the heels of the success of her adaptation of Killing Eve, she now spoils us with a second series of Fleabag (BBC Three, then BBC One) that opened with an episode so gobsmackingly good that I wanted to give her a standing ovation in my living room when I watched it for the second time. (In fact, like everybody else at a press screening a few weeks ago, I had done just that.)Fleabag began life as a one-woman show (directed by Waller-Bridge's long-time collaborator Vicky Jones) at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013. Waller-Bridge then pulled Read more ...
Tim Cumming
French actor and director Sandrine Bonnaire’s warm, langorous film portrait of la Faithfull may not the first – that accolade goes to Michael Collins’s feature-length Dreaming my Dreams (2000), featuring Mick, Keith, Anita and John Dunbar – but it does feel like a refreshingly deep-focus, specifically female take on her life and mythos, intimate yet kept at a decorous arm’s length by its subject, who by turns seems to want to open up while firmly closing her atelier doors on too much interior revelation. There are several times in the film when she holds her hand up to Bonnaire, asking her, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“It’s never been about the success to me,” says Marc Almond, “It’s always been about the adventure.” It’s a great attitude that’s writ large over the band’s uncompromising flame-out of an early Eighties pop career. Soft Cell: Say Hello, Wave Goodbye was a welcome celebration of this electronic duo, often under-appreciated as 24 carat songwriters, although it sometimes failed to encapsulate the band’s obtuse hedonic outsider dynamic.The pivot on which the hour-long documentary turned was Soft Cell’s one-off, sold-out reunion concert at the O2 last autumn. There was enjoyable footage of Almond Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some things never change. About 60 per cent of this first show in Strike Back’s seventh series consisted of Mac McAllister (Warren Brown) and his intrepid Section 20 squad mowing down members of a Malaysian triad gang with automatic weapons. The triad people didn’t help themselves by all wearing black suits with white shirts and running like lemmings into the line of fire, where they did a funny little jitterbug dance on the spot as they were pumped full of bullets.But that’s the way they like it in Strike Back world, where there isn’t an imminent global catastrophe that can’t be solved by Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“I’ve remained a vital presence on the fringes of TV Land,” argues Alan Partridge in an interview with Radio Times, the man whose latest claim to… well, not fame, but at least he has been presenting Mid Morning Matters on North Norfolk Digital. For this new series, Partridge has been hauled out of the low-rent regional twilight zone where somebody called Jenny does the station’s accounts in an exercise book to provide sickness cover on the anodyne BBC TV magazine show, This Time.On the This Time sofa he’s joined by Jennie Gresham (Susannah Fielding), who keeps the show rolling along with a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Curfew (Sky One) is a new drama that begins as it means to go on, roaring from nought to 60 with a wildly implausible car chase. An electric blue McLaren is haring and weaving through London, with the law in hot pursuit. Forget the computer-generated high-speed U-turn and the armour-plated panda cars. We are clearly in the outer reaches of sci-fi alt reality because the arteries are miraculously unclogged of jams that snarl and belch with white vans and Priuses. Bet they don’t even have the congestion charge.This London, with its gleaming towers, would be paradise if only the eponymous curfew Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s always interesting to see how presenters make their presence known in documentaries. Louis Theroux hovers on the sidelines like an ethereal presence, Stacey Dooley connects immediately on an emotional level, and one-time host Keith Allen handled proceedings like a fight before a Millwall game. Alice Levine wasn’t the most obvious choice to tackle the rise of the far right; she’s best known for her work on Radio 1 and comedy podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno. In her first foray into TV journalism, there was some promising headway but her inexperience ultimately shone through.Levine is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s 1945 and World War Two is nearly over. Somewhere in England, Fiona Symonds (“Feef” to her friends) is training to be a spy and be dropped behind enemy lines. Her training involves such amusements as being woken in the night by having a bucket of water chucked over her, then being interrogated by two fake German officers.But the end of the war in Europe brings Feef’s dreams of covert derring-do to a sudden halt. Wrapped in the arms of her American lover Peter McCormick (Matt Lauria), she wistfully laments that she now won’t be able to parachute into Germany and blow up bridges. Perhaps Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Is there an algorithm for writing this review? There seems to have been one used to create Baptiste, a spin-off from The Missing, and even the staunchest fans of Tchéky Karyo will be struggling not to see the all-too-familiar formula poking through the script. Julien Baptiste is the weary French detective with the hole in his head where a tumour used to be, coaxed out of retirement (just one more time...) by his old flame Marthe (Barbara Sarafian) who just happens to be the Chief of Police. She tells him no-one else has his expertise. We're in Holland (cue dodgy Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When the third series ended with a car crash, I did wonder whether Catastrophe (Channel 4) should maybe think about calling it a day. The previous half-dozen episodes had gone to a dark place in their exploration of alcoholism, but stealthily, as if the script didn’t quite know whether it was meant to be funny or a gut-wrenching purgative. Well it’s always good to be proved resoundingly wrong. Catastrophe, written by and starring Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, returned for a fourth turn of the wheel with the filthy smile restored to its face.The scripts have been to some awkward and icky Read more ...