TV drama
Jasper Rees
There was a ruthless logic to the scheduling of The Long Song (BBC One). Broadcast over three consecutive nights, this fleet-footed adaptation of Andrea Levy’s novel set during the era of abolition in 19th-century Jamaica swiftly gathered momentum and proceeded at pace towards (praise be) a charming denouement. But why Christmas?In fact the season to be jolly came up twice. In the opening episode there were the Christmas riots of 1831 in which rebellious slaves were subjected to a horrific pogrom. And then in the final episode, they greeted their freedom as the opportunity to down tools and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You wouldn’t turn to Jimmy McGovern for a drawing-room comedy, but there’s no doubting his gift for seizing big issues and turning into them raw, bleeding chunks of drama. You’re either for him or against him, but if you’re against him he’d love to grab you by the throat and shake you into seeing it his way.In Care, McGovern (with co-writer Gillian Juckes, whose first-hand experiences inspired the story) took aim at the way the NHS and social services treat the elderly and the incapacitated. The set-up was simple but devastating. Mary (Alison Steadman) had been taking her two granddaughters Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Was The Little Drummer Girl commissioned by algorithm? Those who liked The Night Manager might reasonably have been supposed to enjoy another le Carré adaptation. The two dramas had DNA in common. Both steered away from the Cold War, and told of a rogue spy adopting a role to infiltrate a network and bring it down from within. There the overlap ended. Where The Night Manager exerted a vice-like grip, The Little Drummer Girl has caused much scratching of heads. Twitter's one-word review was “Huh?”So there was much audience depletion. By halfway through the series had haemorrhaged more than 40 Read more ...
Owen Richards
There’s no one right way to grieve. It cuts through everyone differently, whether reverting to childhood traits or out-of-character impulses. The person you lose might mean one thing to you, and something completely different to someone else; it can hit you both differently, and equally hard. In Sky Atlantic’s new import Kidding, Jim Carrey blurs the line between reality and fiction as his character Mr. Pickles deals with bereavement the only way he knows how: through television.Mr. Jeff Pickles is a TV national treasure, a cross between Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street. For 30 years, he and his Read more ...
Jasper Rees
And now for something completely different from The Fall. The nerve-shredding drama from Northern Ireland was written by Allan Cubitt and featured, as its resident psychopathic hottie, Jamie Dornan (pictured below). It seems the two couldn’t get enough of each other because here they are again in Death and Nightingales (BBC Two), adapted from Eugene McCabe’s 2002 novel. The setting is rural County Fermanagh and to blend in Dornan has cultivated some exuberant shrubbery about that chiselled jaw.The year is 1883, when on the occasion of her 23rd birthday young Beth Winters (Ann Skelly) plans to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Destiny is all. The first two series of The Last Kingdom debuted on BBC Two, but for series three it has been fully embraced by Netflix. Global domination surely looms, since these latest exploits of Uhtred, the warrior who was born a Saxon but raised by Vikings, find the show hitting new peaks of throat-slitting, skull-crushing action and intense personal drama.Mostly penned by lead writer Stephen Butchard from Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories, the action again takes us to a bleak and chilled ninth-century England (it’s shot in Hungary). It’s a land of mud, snow and woodland seemingly in the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This opening episode of My Brilliant Friend was a stunning symphony in grey. For any viewers concerned that HBO’s long-awaited Elena Ferrante adaptation might be tempted to sweeten the visual experience of the writer’s impoverished 1950s Naples world to suit the expectations of an international television audience, the sheer subtlety of colouring here was the first sign that everything was going to be right.Director Saverio Costanzo will be receiving a whole range of plaudits for his work with the wide ensemble cast (including many non-professionals) that surrounds his two remarkable young Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After seeming to spend an interminable amount of time wandering around in a daze and blundering up blind alleys, Strangers finally gathered its wits and cantered towards the finishing tape with a renewed sense of purpose in the final two episodes. One couldn’t feeling that if two or three of its eight instalments had been surreptitiously hidden behind the dustbins round the back of ITV Mansions, few would have been any the wiser.In the end, university professor Jonah Mulray (John Simm, revealing an aptitude for morbid dullness which he’d previously kept to himself) got most of the answers he’ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When after six novels John Le Carré turned away from the Cold War, he turned towards another simmering post-war conflict, between Israel and Islam. The Little Drummer Girl was published in 1983, and filmed a year later with Diane Keaton and Klaus Kinski. As the novel becomes the latest Le Carré to be adapted for BBC One it remains just as current. With the Palestinian question no nearer to resolution, there is nothing opportunistic about this revival.Inevitably a Sunday-night six-parter from the same production company is going to be measured against The Night Manager, which gripped like a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What do you do after playing Doctor Who, the dream dad of the nation, quirky and compassionate, the adult who every child knows will be fun? Does it seem like a good idea to play the beleaguered father of a child with special needs? It must do, because David Tennant has now followed Christopher Ecclestone, who played the grandfather of an autistic boy in The A Word.In There She Goes Tennnant plays Simon, a writer who seems to spend most of his working hours in the pub exchanging insults with his colleagues. Simon is married to an academic researcher Emily (Jessica Hynes), and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thanks heavens not all police officers spend their time trying to find “hate crime” on Twitter, or not going to the assistance of colleagues in peril. Take Gabe Waters, for instance, the central character in BBC One’s new undercover-policier.Gabe (played with grey-whiskered world-weariness by Paddy Considine) is an anti-terrorist officer, and spends long hours driving round greater London, squeezing his network of shadowy contacts and informers for tips and clues, and ceaselessly trying to recruit new ones. One of these turns out to be Raza Shar, who lives on a council estate with his Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s difficult to tell whether Press (BBC One) came to praise newspapers or to bury them. The slugfest between preachy liberal do-goodery and mucky market-led skulduggery ended in a score draw, with the main protagonists living to fight another day and speak to their ever more polarised silos. Any sensible viewer might have concluded that the plot was stark-raving amphetamine-enriched baloney. You don’t, for example, need the omniscient snooping of Resonance to know that no woman would ever leave her handbag lying around in a bar as she popped off to the ladies. It was scarcely credible from Read more ...