TV
Adam Sweeting
The mystery remains of why they keep tucking away The Good Fight on More4, as they did with its illustrious predecessor The Good Wife. No disrespect to 4’s ancillary channel – now seemingly the designated last resting place of Grand Designs – but it’s like hanging a sign on the door saying “niche viewing, please knock quietly before entering”.In fact The Good Fight, having hit the ground running in series one, has stormed into series two swinging like a champ. Its finely tuned blend of character and beautifully detailed milieu accompanies a feeling of seamless inevitability in the plotting, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
There is a jaguar in the house. Aged five days, and having been rejected by her mother, Maya has arrived from the wildlife park where she was born for hand-rearing by Giles Clark at his home in Kent. The cub is going to spend her early days with his family, with round-the-clock care from Giles, obsessed as he is with the situation of big cats worldwide.For Maya, it will be an attempt to make sure of her survival, not least as an ambassador for endangered species at the Big Cat Sanctuary nearby, where Clark works as head of cats and conservation. A charity, it houses some 50 big cats from 15 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When ITV scheduled this new series of The Durrells for mid-March, they probably didn’t imagine it would coincide with the return of the Beast from the East, with its blizzards and plummeting temperatures. Under these deep-frozen circumstances, what could be more reassuring than to batten down the hatches and take a trip to the glittering Mediterranean and the mountains, blue skies and historic architecture of Corfu?Profundity is not the ambition of Simon Nye’s dramatisations of Gerald Durrell’s books. In our age of knotty and treacherously-plotted thrillers, full of mutilated corpses and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
To Belgium for the latest continental instalment of murder really rather unpleasant. 13 Commandments, yet another crime drama brought to Channel 4 under the auspices of Walter Presents, began with the grizzliest manner imaginable. A man arrived at an airport, and was greeted reverentially by a driver who ferried him to a terraced house in a run-down street. There two thugs delivered a young woman into his possession. He drove her off to an abandoned house, tied her up, donned gloves and slit her throat. You rather hoped the camera would not show the last detail, but no, it panned just low Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mild controversy hovers over the new film by Alex Garland, the novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director. Garland’s 2015 directing debut, Ex Machina, was a slow-burning hit which found favour with critics and film festival juries. This follow-up, then, should have been Garland’s giant bound into the big (or at least bigger) time, but instead, after a disappointing theatrical debut in the States, it’s now bypassing cinemas and streaming on Netflix for the rest of the world.However, dark rumours of a science fiction masterpiece cruelly abused by a timorous Paramount Studios, who apparently Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They don’t commission many television documentaries like Being Blacker (BBC Two) any more. That is not unconnected to the fact that Molly Dineen downed her camera a decade ago. Dineen began filming in another age, before the arrival of kiss-me-quick multi-channel digiverse, and has kept to the habits she learned back then - to observe and probe her subject over months or even years, wielding her own camera. Those habits are expensive and time-consuming and result in richly detailed films like this which tell an epic story on a miniature canvas.The title refers to Steve Burnett-Martin, better Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Read Adam Sweeting's review of the Below the Surface FinaleAfter recent experiences with the likes of McMafia, Troy and Collateral, mysteriously moribund affairs apparently designed by a committee of box-ticking zombies, many a viewer will turn with relief to another dose of good old Scandi drama. Terrorist thriller Below the Surface isn’t exactly Denmark’s finest hour, but it has enough intrigue and tension to justify its place in BBC Four’s ever-popular Saturday night import slot.In outline, the setup is none too complicated. A group of lethally efficient and heavily-armed terrorists have Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The sheer ambition of the BBC’s new Civilisations is becoming apparent. This second episode, with Mary Beard grasping the presenter baton from Simon Schama, was subtitled “How Do We Look?” and themed around representation of the human image. It moved from the massive memorials of Mexico’s Olmec culture, via some equally sizeable relics in Ancient Egypt, to changing manners of sculptural portraiture in 5th century BCE Athens. After a side-track to China’s terracotta warriors, we were immersed in 18th century European attitudes to classical art, that were themselves reappraised by Beard in a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In a revelatory interview for the Royal Court’s playwright’s podcast series, David Hare admits to a thin skin. In his adversarial worldview, to take issue with him is – his word – to denounce him. He’s quite a denouncer himself, of course. In Collateral (BBC Two), the denunciations were directed at something rotten in the state of, in no particular order, the Church of England, the Labour Party, the British Army, the Fourth Estate, the security services, the body politic, the establishment, old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Somewhere in there there was also a police procedural. This has been a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
By most measures, minimalism is the most successful movement in 20th-century music, certainly orchestral music. The story of its inexorable spread from a tiny offshoot of the 1950s experimentation of John Cage, which was defined and promoted by two maverick visionaries, LaMonte Young and Terry Riley, then launched on a big stage by Steve Reich and Philip Glass, is a resounding vindication of the power a good idea has to defeat received wisdom. So widespread now is the influence of minimalism, with many a MOR-ish piano ensemble aspiring to an inoffensively contemporary wash of sound using Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Lord Clark – “of Civilisation”, as he was nicknamed, not necessarily affectionately – presented the 13 episodes of the eponymous series commissioned by David Attenborough for BBC Two in 1969; it was subtitled “A Personal View”, and encompassed only Western Europe (from which even Spain was excluded). The whole guide, narrated in that upper-class accent, wrapped in bespoke suiting and accompanied by full-scale orchestral throbbing, was the kind of documentary that families stayed home to watch. It proved, said those rightly enthralled by that authoritative patrician presence, that the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Workrate of the Week award goes to Lennie James, who not only stars in this new six-part drama but wrote and executive-produced it as well. James (who starred in the first series of Line of Duty, and has hit it big in The Walking Dead) plays the central character Nelly Rowe, a wily chancer living on a Deptford council estate who suddenly finds his chequered past catching up with him.We soon learn that a little of Nelly can go a long way, not least his slightly laboured geezer-slang – “things are gonna get a touch fuckin’ chronic”, “I dunno why you’re getting all secret squirrel about it” etc Read more ...