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Reckoning with the Jimmy Savile legacy - Steve Coogan stars in BBC One's four-part 'factual drama'

Adam Sweeting Monday, 09 October 2023

Dramatisations of real-life crime have become all the rage on TV, as screenwriter Neil McKay and producer Jeff Pope are well aware. Their history of morbid collaborations includes See No Evil: The Moors Murders, the saga of serial killers Fred and Rosemary West in Appropriate Adult, and, in Four Lives, the story of serial killer Stephen Port.

A different angle on the Anne Frank story in 'A Small Light'

Adam Sweeting Wednesday, 03 May 2023

The Diary of Anne Frank became a Broadway play and has formed the basis of a lengthy catalogue of films and TV series, but the name of Miep Gies is rather less well-known. Yet without Gies the Anne Frank story might never have reached the wider world, since it was she who helped the Frank family, along with four other Dutch Jews, to remain in hiding and evade capture by the Germans from July 1942 until their luck ran out in August 1944.

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Leslie Phillips: 'I can be recognised by my voice alone'

Jasper Rees Thursday, 10 November 2022

Leslie Phillips would have known for half a century that at his death, which was announced yesterday, the obituaries would lead with one thing only. However much serious work he did in the theatre and on screen, he is forever handcuffed to the skirt-chaser he gave us in sundry Carry Ons and Doctor films and London bus movies.

Helen McCrory: 'If there's one interesting thing about acting it's trying to lose your ego'

Jasper Rees Monday, 19 April 2021

Each generation is given an actress who can do everything – be intimate with the camera but also coat a back wall in honey from 100 paces. There was Judi Dench, and then there was Imelda Staunton, both loved by all.

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Larry Kramer: 'I think anger is a wonderful useful emotion'

Jasper Rees Thursday, 28 May 2020

Larry Kramer, who has died at the age of 84, was the Solzhenitsyn of AIDS who indomitably reported from the gay gulags of Manhattan’s quarantined wards and revolving-door hospices. “I felt very much like a journalist who realises that he has been given the story of his life,” he told me when I met him.

Power, politics and Peaky Blinders - the Shelby family return for Series 5

Adam Sweeting Thursday, 22 August 2019

This is how Steven Knight pictured Peaky Blinders when he first set about creating it. “I was very keen not to do a traditional British period drama, especially where it comes to depictions of working class people.

On making The Left Behind: 'We've plugged into the mains'

Joseph Bullman Tuesday, 09 July 2019

The Left Behind is a television drama marinated in real-world research. It tells the story of a young man unable to break free from his bullshit job, zero-hour existence, thrown out of his family home when the council decide that as a single man with no dependents he isn’t a housing priority.

Franco Zeffirelli: 'I had this feeling that I was special'

Jasper Rees Saturday, 15 June 2019

"I am amazed to be still alive. Two hours of medieval torment.” Franco Zeffirelli - who has died at the age of 96 - had spent the day having a lumbar injection to treat a sciatic nerve. You could hear the bafflement in his heavily accented English.

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Bob Dylan Special - Rolling Thunder Revue, Netflix

Tim Cumming Tuesday, 11 June 2019

Tomorrow, Martin Scorsese delivers, via Netflix, two hours and 22 minutes of screen time devoted to Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, following on from the release last week of the latest Bootleg Series boxed set, 14...

For Folk's Sake: 'I owe my very existence to Morris dancing'

Richard Macer Monday, 01 April 2019

Halfway through filming For Folk’s Sake, a documentary for BBC Four about Morris dancing, I received a package in the post that would dramatically change the course of the programme. It was from my mother.