TV
Jasper Rees
So Wanderlust (BBC One) has ceased wandering and its angsty parade of characters have left a sentence unfinished for the last time. In the end, where were we, compared to where we’ve been? The final episode opened with Joy, like King Alfred, burning the pancakes. Seemingly her boats had suffered the same fate, atomised under the centrifugal forces of love and lust, but also a mass break-out of grief. She tried filling the void with muffins.Nick Payne’s six-part drama has sought to test the strength of longstanding relationships and decided to find in favour of the devil you know. Alan’s ( Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Re-casting a beloved character always carries a measure of risk. Solo: A Star Wars Story relied on the willingness of fans to buy in to Alden Ehrenreich as a younger incarnation of Harrison Ford: the film bombed (you know, in Star Wars terms, since it barely made $400 million). New Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall had an even bigger risk on his hands, casting the first northerner in the titular role since Christopher Eccleston in 2005 – but Jodie Whittaker did not disappoint.In fact, by her first “what?” – delivered to half the supporting cast after she dropped through the roof of an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following the runaway success of Bodyguard, Jed Mercurio is no doubt popping more champagne and saying “follow that”. Stepping up to BBC One’s Sunday 9pm slot is The Cry, which transports us from suicide bombs and political intrigue and instead immerses us in the emotional plight of new mother Joanna (Jenna Coleman) and her partner Alistair (Ewen Leslie).Adapted from Helen FitzGerald’s novel, The Cry is going to be a dark and tortured journey into failed relationships, parenthood in crisis, accusations and loss, and this first of four parts set the ball rolling ominously. Screenwriter Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Awesome numbers: over a million miles, the equivalent of 42 times around the globe, have been traversed by Her Majesty the Queen, enabling visits over the past seven decades or so to 117 different countries. No one has reigned longer nor travelled further.For various reasons, obviously co-incident with the death of the British Empire, she has felt a special attachment to the Commonwealth,which (with the recent return of Gambia) includes some 53 countries, some rather surprisingly with no particular history with Britain. Queen Elizabeth pledged her life to the service of the Commonwealth, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
And breathe. Bodyguard – not, as even some careless BBC broadcasters keep calling it, "The Bodyguard" – careered to a conclusion as if hurtling around a booby-trapped assault course. It turned out that, contrary to a popular theory about Jed Mercurio's BBC One thriller, the Home Secretary Julia Montague was not secretly alive and well and hiding round the corner in a crazy Mercurioso twist. Apparently she really was dead and buried, and for much of the pulsating finale the hunter became the hunted as her lover and protector PS David Budd (Richard Madden) was identified as her murderer. And Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Witches, vampires and magicke of all descriptions continue to be big box office, so Sky 1’s new dramatisation of the first book of Deborah Harkness’s All Souls Trilogy should be finding a ready-made audience. Anybody who’s into this kind of stuff will be accomplished in the art of suspending their disbelief, a task made easier by the show’s handsome production values and telegenic cast.The groves of academe lend the proceedings a patina of gravitas, as we’re immersed in the story of visiting American academic Diana Bishop (Teresa Palmer, who’s actually Australian), who we first encounter Read more ...
James Graham
Thank you. It’s an honour to have been asked to speak here today. Although looking at the h100 List this year, I’ve no idea why I’m presumptuously standing here; given the talent, creativity and achievements far surpassing my own within this room. But I’m also excited, and genuinely inspired, to be part of such a group.I don’t know about you, but I find working in the arts often seriously discombobulating in either being a far-too-lonely and private endeavour one minute; an overwhelming public and intensely populated one the next.Those days where the only human contact you have is with the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might consider it odd that a man whose wife spends half the year in Hong Kong without him hasn’t managed to get around to catching a plane from Heathrow to visit her in the Far East, but that is the case with Jonah Mulray, the stressed-out protagonist of Strangers. Jonah’s excuse for his marital negligence is that he’s “scared of flying”.In last week’s opening episode, he was forced to conquer his terror of leaving the ground by the traumatic news that his wife Megan (Dervla Kirwan) had been killed in a road accident. As soon as he arrived in Hong Kong, everything looked exceedingly fishy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It may be a sign of the times that the two lead performances in Killing Eve are female, with Jodie Comer fizzing hyperactively as shape-shifting assassin Villanelle and Sandra Oh (from Grey’s Anatomy) as British intelligence officer Eve Polastri (pictured below). Yet simultaneously, the show has a comic campness and air of fantasy that feels Sixties-like, reminiscent of such timewarp delights as The Avengers or Modesty Blaise. Amazingly, they had female leads back then too.My crystal ball (alias BBC Previews) tells me that the cracks start to show as Killing Eve works its way through its Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Formats are second nature to TV: the BBC and Eagle Rock’s Classic Albums will run and run. Like all formats, there’s always the risk that the medium becomes the message, and content suffers under the weight of form. But Classic Albums at least avoids the BBC’s slavish reliance on presenters, and makes possible programmes that draw the viewer in closer than when everything is mediated by the wall-to wall ego of an expert or celeb.Although we have the trademark moments when the album’s different tracks are teased apart at the mixing desk to reveal the architecture of a recorded song, the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As writer and director, Hugo Blick has brought us two of the twistiest dramas in recent-ish memory (The Shadow Line and The Honourable Woman). Looks like he’s done it again here, if not more so, since the eight-part Black Earth Rising takes as its backdrop the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and the way its repercussions continue to be felt on individual survivors and in the legal chambers of the International Criminal Court at The Hague.In the Blick-esque scheme of things, it will probably turn out that almost everything in this opening episode was a feint or a decoy, but the scope of the piece is Read more ...
Owen Richards
What signals the end of a relationship? The loss of attraction? Infidelity? Or is it, as Wanderlust explores, something more innocuous? The opening episode of BBC One's latest show packed in enough domestic drama to sustain most series, but found its pressure points in unexpected places. This is not a story of betrayal, but an honest conversation on what happens when lust leaves but love remains.When we met Joy and Alan (Toni Collette and Steven Mackintosh, main picture), they're going through the motions. Foreplay consists of a disinterested strip and a mild reassurance of “ready?” This isn’ Read more ...