TV
Jasper Rees
“Why should I go out and kill somebody I never knew? There was no reason at all in it in my way of thinking.” Britain’s very last Tommy was Harry Patch, born in 1898, conscripted in 1916 and still alive on his 111th birthday in 2009. He was one of the witnesses in The Last Tommies, BBC Four’s remarkable work of oral history.The centrepiece of the BBC’s centenary commemoration of the Armistice unspooled over three nights, collating interviews made over 30 years. Its impact may be slightly occluded by Peter Jackson’s unmissable They Shall Not Grow Old this coming Sunday 11 November, which takes Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not to be confused with Nineties supernatural sitcom Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Netflix’s new incarnation of the high-schooler with infernal powers is a ghoulish thrill-ride which boldly surfs the dark side, with a pronounced feminist and gay slant. It’s the story of the titular Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka, who played Don and Betty Draper’s daughter Sally in Mad Men) as she struggles to reconcile the half of her which is a human teenager with the supernatural lineage of her warlock father Edward.As her 16th birthday looms, Sabrina prepares for her “dark baptism”, when she must sign Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Mark Kidel has made a beautiful, ethereal film projecting his version of Cary Grant and as such it’s destined to be picked over by the actor’s legions of fans, each of whom will have a different version. But what would the man himself have thought if he’d lived to see Becoming Cary Grant? Notoriously protective and ambivalent about his image, one can only hope that he’d approve of the documentary's sympathetic, melancholic tone.One of the biggest stars in Hollywood’s golden age, Grant appeared in over 70 films before retiring at 62. Kidel makes generous and judicious use of scenes from his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After seeming to spend an interminable amount of time wandering around in a daze and blundering up blind alleys, Strangers finally gathered its wits and cantered towards the finishing tape with a renewed sense of purpose in the final two episodes. One couldn’t feeling that if two or three of its eight instalments had been surreptitiously hidden behind the dustbins round the back of ITV Mansions, few would have been any the wiser.In the end, university professor Jonah Mulray (John Simm, revealing an aptitude for morbid dullness which he’d previously kept to himself) got most of the answers he’ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When after six novels John Le Carré turned away from the Cold War, he turned towards another simmering post-war conflict, between Israel and Islam. The Little Drummer Girl was published in 1983, and filmed a year later with Diane Keaton and Klaus Kinski. As the novel becomes the latest Le Carré to be adapted for BBC One it remains just as current. With the Palestinian question no nearer to resolution, there is nothing opportunistic about this revival.Inevitably a Sunday-night six-parter from the same production company is going to be measured against The Night Manager, which gripped like a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s eight years since Richard Armitage’s character Lucas North died in Spooks, but now Armitage is back undercover as CIA agent Daniel Miller in Berlin Station. Mind you, it’s already been touch and go – Miller was shot in in Berlin’s Potzdamer Platz in a flash-forward opening sequence, but apparently not fatally.Miller has arrived in Berlin from his previous job in Panama, where his assiduous online detective work had unearthed telltale clues about the activities of Thomas Shaw, a Snowden-style whistle-blower who’s been leaking CIA secrets to the German press. Miller reckoned he’d Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
It’s been a whirlwind year for Tracey Emin, CBE, RA. Her pink neon sign, “I want my time with you”, greets passengers at St Pancras station, she’s installed bronze birds all over Sydney city centre, she’s making a derelict print works in Margate into a living-space/studio that’s going to be like Rodin’s in Paris but “slightly bigger”, and she’s got married. To a large stone in her garden in the south of France. This was an empowering, really good, healthy thing, apparently. And she’s had Alan Yentob tailing her for 12 months for Imagine (BBC One).You might think that we already know Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What do you do after playing Doctor Who, the dream dad of the nation, quirky and compassionate, the adult who every child knows will be fun? Does it seem like a good idea to play the beleaguered father of a child with special needs? It must do, because David Tennant has now followed Christopher Ecclestone, who played the grandfather of an autistic boy in The A Word.In There She Goes Tennnant plays Simon, a writer who seems to spend most of his working hours in the pub exchanging insults with his colleagues. Simon is married to an academic researcher Emily (Jessica Hynes), and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thanks heavens not all police officers spend their time trying to find “hate crime” on Twitter, or not going to the assistance of colleagues in peril. Take Gabe Waters, for instance, the central character in BBC One’s new undercover-policier.Gabe (played with grey-whiskered world-weariness by Paddy Considine) is an anti-terrorist officer, and spends long hours driving round greater London, squeezing his network of shadowy contacts and informers for tips and clues, and ceaselessly trying to recruit new ones. One of these turns out to be Raza Shar, who lives on a council estate with his Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
You had to keep your eyes skinned. Was that Iris Murdoch or AS Byatt, Kingsley Amis or John Banville, Margaret Atwood or Val McDermid – maybe, even, Joanna Lumley? Tables as far as the eye can see, dressed with white tablecloths and crowded with wine glasses. A glittering banquet with oceans of booze, it seems, mostly champagne, lots of hugging, kissing, shouting and clouds of gossip, all accompanied by television cameras.Barneys, Books and Bust Ups was a vastly entertaining documentary of the (Man) Booker Prize’s first 50 years, narrated in the soothing tones of Kirsty Wark. We witnessed Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s difficult to tell whether Press (BBC One) came to praise newspapers or to bury them. The slugfest between preachy liberal do-goodery and mucky market-led skulduggery ended in a score draw, with the main protagonists living to fight another day and speak to their ever more polarised silos. Any sensible viewer might have concluded that the plot was stark-raving amphetamine-enriched baloney. You don’t, for example, need the omniscient snooping of Resonance to know that no woman would ever leave her handbag lying around in a bar as she popped off to the ladies. It was scarcely credible from Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Write about what you know, every nascent novelist is told. So you can't fault writer/director/actor Desiree Akhavan, Iranian-American creator of Appropriate Behaviour (2015) and The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018), which explore divergent sexuality and who has now written (with Cecilia Frugiuele), directs and stars in The Bisexual – about a lesbian woman who decides she wants to try out men for the first time.Akhavan is Leila, a lesbian in a 10-year relationship with Sadie (Maxine Peake), who is also her business partner in a fashion company. Their romance hits a snag when Read more ...