TV
Jasper Rees
Four years ago the BBC dramatised the story of the Lucans. Rory Kinnear donned the forthright moustache and Catherine McCormack played his spouse Veronica as a brittle victim of mental cruelty. The script speculated about the murder of the nanny Sandra Rivett using all the known sources. A year later Laura Thompson’s book A Different Class of Murder was published and last year the vanished earl’s death certificate was issued. That might have been thought to be that. But since 1974 Lucan’s widow – whose official name is Veronica, Dowager Countess of Lucan - stayed mainly silent. In this Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The second episode of Bruce Miller’s brilliant dramatisation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale on Channel 4 finds Offred (the wonderful Elisabeth Moss) being penetrated by Commander Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes, looking conflicted). Of course, his barren wife Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) is there too, lying on the bed with Offred’s head bouncing in her lap. Offred tries to take her mind off this no-fun threesome with thoughts of blue things from the time before. Her blue car, "Tangled up in Blue", Blue Oyster Cult – how alien the words sound. Especially as handmaids only wear red Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the triumphant vindication of the Beatles' decision to quit touring and instead exploit the possibilities of the recording studio. Could there be anything new to say about an album so thoroughly analysed, anatomised, eulogised and mythologised?Eager to answer that question with a resounding “yes” came Howard Goodall, bounding eagerly into the studio to tell us why, exactly, Sgt Pepper is so blinking marvellous and how it blew open the doors to a limitless new Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is Jimmy McGovern, so it’s no surprise to find ourselves up north and feeling grim. The prolific screenwriter’s latest drama series is located in what is described only as “a northern city” (though apparently it’s 60 miles from Sheffield, which would take you to McGovern’s home town of Liverpool as the crow flies).Here, wherever it is, kindly Father Michael Kerrigan (a sotto voce Sean Bean) does his best to minister to his depressed and impoverished flock, who are struggling to make ends meet both physically and spiritually. In particular, we zero in on Christina Fitzsimmons (Anna Friel Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Playwrights have long migrated to the small screen in search of better pay and room to manoeuvre. Most don’t leave it as long as Conor McPherson, who was perhaps cushioned from necessity by the global success of The Weir. A quarter of a century after his stage debut, Paula (BBC Two) is his first go at television drama. In order not to frighten the horses, it features some conventional post-watershed thrillerish tropes: an extramarital affair, a psychopath, a murder, a police investigation.But some things never change: frightening the horses is a McPherson speciality. Tom Hughes plays white Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the dog-eat-dog world of White Gold it’s 1983, when greed was about to become good and (as the show’s creator Damon Beesley puts it) “a time when having double-glazed patio doors installed meant you were winning at life”. The streets were full of sludge-coloured cars from British Leyland, and Duran Duran and Bonnie Tyler ruled the charts.Beesley (of Flight of the Conchords and The Inbetweeners fame) served time as an Essex Man in his youth, and this pungently-flavoured opener dripped with closely-observed ambition and ruthless one-upmanship. Our protagonist and narrator Vincent Swan ( Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Television dramas about catastrophic events in broken Britain are meant to be cathartic. They knead the collated facts into the shape of drama for millions to absorb and understand. Then we all somehow move on, sadder but slightly wiser. The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. Hillsborough. The Government Inspector. And still they flow onto the screen: only recently there’s been Damilola: Our Loved Boy, The Moorside and Little Boy Blue.Now Three Girls, in which over three nights on BBC One redemption was dealt out with extreme parsimony. You knew it was going to end complicatedly when the guilty Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
EastEnders habituees will be familiar with the colourful past of Alfie and (especially) Kat Moon, who have both been AWOL from the mothership since early last year. But they’ve used the time wisely, preparing busily for this new spin-off drama in which they’ve shipped out to the seaside village of Redwater, County Waterford, to track down Kat’s long-lost son. She gave birth when she was scarcely more than a child herself, and the infant was whisked away from her and taken to a convent.It started quite promisingly. It was the summer of 1994 (or so the caption said), and we saw a pair of small Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Imagine a doctor has just told you that you have only a year to live. What would you do? Learn to sky dive, spend every last penny you have, be brutally honest with anyone who has crossed you, or curl up in a ball and wait for the inevitable? Producer and director Sue Bourne decided to talk to people who have indeed been told they have only a little time left, and A Time to Live on BBC Two is the remarkable result.“This is a film about living,” her voiceover told us at the beginning of the hour-long documentary, and it turned out to be the case. One after another, the 12 participants – people Read more ...
Sue Bourne
Do you ever wonder what you’d do if you were given a terminal diagnosis and told you may only have months to live? That question is what my latest film is all about. It may sound maudlin and sad but I can assure you it isn’t. And the reason for that is that the people I set out to find may have been terminally ill but they’d all chosen to make the most of the time they have left. The film is honest, uplifting, thought-provoking and, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, it’s also pretty remarkable.It’s not like other films I‘ve seen about death and dying because in essence it’s a film about Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Was it just a coincidence that budding serial killer Sam attended Ripley Heath High? Probably not. Born to Kill, written by Tracey Malone and Kate Ashfield, was keenly aware that it followed in the bloody footsteps of both real sociopaths such as Harold Shipman and fictional ones such as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. And what a dance it led us!Over the past four weeks on Channel 4 we have seen the schoolboy move from the edge of things – a diving board, a wooded hollow where he hid his trophy tin, a birthday party for his only friend’s father – to the centre of a full-blown psychotic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Actor Oliver Chris, who plays William in Mike Bartlett’s ingeniously-crafted play about the monarchy, was doing some pre-transmission fire-fighting by going round telling interviewers he couldn’t see what anybody (eg the Daily Mail) could find to get upset about. Why would they? King Charles III only depicts the ghost of Diana speaking with forked tongue, a political and constitutional crisis, and an internal putsch within the Royal Family. There’s even a jibe about Harry’s paternity. And all this after having buried the Queen.To be sure, the piece has already enjoyed a lavishly-acclaimed run Read more ...