fri 01/11/2024

tv

The Great British Bake Off, Series 10 finale, Channel 4 review - bittersweet end to a divisive series

Jill Chuah Masters

And that’s a wrap: last night concluded 10 years of The Great British Bake Off. This show is the nation’s TV equivalent of comfort food. In the past, it has stuck to a well-worn recipe — the result was fun to fight over but easy to love.

Read more...

Guilt, BBC Two review - dark Scottish comedy starring Mark Bonnar and Jamie Sives

Markie Robson-Scott

“He was dying slowly. We just made it quick.” This is sharp-faced, menacing Max (Mark Bonnar: Catastrophe, Unforgotten, Line of Duty) to his sensitive brother Jake (Jamie Sives: Chernobyl, Game of Thrones, The James Plays). Jake is driving Max’s car on their way back from a wedding in Fife – Max is beside him, swigging champagne - and accidentally runs into and kills an old man in an Edinburgh suburb.

Read more...

Love and Hate Crime, BBC One review - Abel Cedeno was a killer, but was he also a victim?

Adam Sweeting

This series examines murders in the USA “with elements of love and passion as well as prejudice”, and the second season opened (on BBC One) with "Killing in the Classroom", the story of the fatal stabbing of New York school student Matthew McCree by bisexual teenager Abel Cedeno.

Read more...

Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild, Series 10, Channel 5 review - living off your wits and below the radar in Sweden

Adam Sweeting

“I think we all dream of simplifying our lives and reconnecting with nature,” reckons Ben Fogle, and since this was the start of the tenth series of this show, he must have struck a chord with viewers. His first subject was 24-year-old Italian woman Annalisa Vitale, who’d dropped out of university in Italy despite her obvious academic potential and set out to build a life of self-reliance.

Read more...

Pose, Series 2, BBC Two review - satisfying return for one of TV's most triumphant dramas

Jill Chuah Masters

Pose offers something that is really rare in the TV world: it’s a show that manages to be both darkly sombre and completely uplifting.

Read more...

The Accident, Channel 4 review - Sarah Lancashire leads another bleak but gripping drama

Jill Chuah Masters

I wouldn’t want to live in Jack Thorne’s head. Nor Sarah Lancashire’s, for that matter.

Read more...

The Troubles: A Secret History, BBC Four, finale review - peace at last, but at what price?

Adam Sweeting

This terrifying but gripping BBC Four series about Northern Ireland’s savage sectarian war reached its conclusion with a meticulously detailed account of how hostilities were eventually brought to a close by the Good...

Read more...

The British Tribe Next Door, Channel 4 review - risible culture-clash farrago

Adam Sweeting

What’s the most ridiculous programme that Channel 4 has ever made? Sex Box? The Execution of Gary Glitter? Extreme Celebrity Detox? Whatever, The British Tribe Next Door is up there vying for supremacy.

Read more...

Spiral, Series 7, BBC Four review - hard-hitting return of our favourite French cop show

Adam Sweeting

And welcome back to our favourite French cop show – perhaps our favourite cop show from anywhere, in fact – which has raced into its seventh series (on BBC Four) with some typically grimy storylines about death and lowlife in a very de-romanticised Paris.

Read more...

Giri/Haji, BBC Two review - inspired Anglo-Japanese thriller makes compulsive viewing

Adam Sweeting

Well here’s an interesting one. We’ve been up to our eyebrows in Eurocops for the past few years, but this Anglo-Japanese fusion from BBC Two (the title translates as "Duty / Shame") feels strikingly fresh and different.

Read more...

Pages

 

latest in today

Guards at the Taj, Orange Tree Theatre review - miniature ma...

It’s 1648 in Agra, and an excitable young guardsman has come up with an idea: a giant flying platform that he calls an “aeroplat”. As...

Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Disney+...

Director Thom Zimny has become the audio-visual Boswell to Bruce Springsteen’s Samuel Johnson, having made...

Blitz review - racism persists as bombs batter London

Blitz, set on a vast CGI canvas in September 1941, is an improbable boy’s adventure tale that depicts the misery and terror that was...

The Buddha of Suburbia, Barbican Theatre review - farcical f...

Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia begins like this: “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost...

Small Things Like These review - less is more in stirring Ir...

There’s much to note and commend about Small Things Like These, a sensitive, gorgeously shot and moving adaptation of Claire Keegan’...

Anora review - life lesson for a kick-ass sex worker

Anora has had so much hype since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May that it doesn’t really need another reviewer weighing in. Sean...

Album: Willie Nelson - Last Leaf on the Tree

Well, seems like only yesterday when I reviewed Willie Nelson’s last album, Borderline, an excellent set from the man’s ninth decade, and...

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Rigoletto, English National Opera review - another hit for M...

How we used to mock those stuck-in-the-mud opera houses that wheeled out the same moth-eaten production of some box-office favourite decade after...

How To Survive Your Mother, King's Head Theatre review...

It is unsurprising to learn in the post-show Q&A that each audience receives Jonathan Maitland’s new play based on his 2006...