TV drama
Jasper Rees
Trust Me made an eponymous plea to the audience. Its implausible premise – that a nurse might steal a doctor’s identity and land a job in A&E – called for your credulity. Around the broadcast of the drama's first episode on BBC One, sundry articles sprang up in the media offering supportive evidence that just such scenarios often come to pass for real.And yet in this medical case there was a kicker. Most impostors are motivated by some form of psychological flaw: grandiosity, narcissism, deep denial. Trust Me took a different tack: its fake doctor (played by Jodie Whittaker) was so Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a new ‘tec in town. Cormoran Strike may look like one of life’s losers – he’s on the edge of bankruptcy, sleeps in the office, and what passes for a personal life is a right mess – but in Tom Burke’s portrayal I suspect he’s going to be winning audiences in a big way. He’s the creation, of course, of JK Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith – the author’s chosen anonymity lasted barely three months – and her debut in crime writing is now a satisfyingly stylish BBC adaptation. Following on directly from these three episodes of The Cuckoo’s Calling come two based on its sequel, The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a burning question of western civilisation: what persuades young people brought up among us to walk out on their lives and join the cult of murderous fanatics who call themselves Islamic State? If any dramatist could attempt a coherent answer it’s Peter Kosminsky, who for more than three decades has been telling minutely researched stories – in documentary, drama and a fusion of both – about the big moments of modern British social and political history. His last three films in particular - The Government Inspector, Britz and The Promise – have all had some bearing on Britain’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The first thing to say is that this wasn’t the actual end. BBC Four scheduled I Know Who You Are to run two episodes a night over five Saturdays. The innocent punter might have assumed that after 10 x 70 minutes of the Spanish import, we’d arrive at some sort of terminus. With only a few minutes still to run, who wasn’t thinking, crikey, still quite a tick list of bows to tie up? Was Juan Elías, whom we now know is a killer (only not of Ana Saura), going to be shopped by Alicia, and would she secure immunity from prosecution beforehand? Or would Eva Durán get there first? Would someone spring Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Even the canniest scheduler at BBC One couldn’t have arranged things so propitiously. Jodie Whittaker was already filming the medical drama Trust Me when she was cast as you know Who. Trolls unhappy at a female i/c the Tardis will have their quips ready: spot the difference between a woman who passes herself as a doctor and a woman who passes herself off as a Doctor.Trust Me, among other things, is a timely shop window for Whittaker’s abilities. The plot requires her to play her own private game of doctors and nurses. At the start she’s Cath Hardacre, a ballsy ward sister who makes the Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
“This is a true story. This is a story…” The self-referential nature of Noah Hawley’s baroque narrative arc was one of the great joys of the third season of Fargo. Over the past 10 weeks its constant invention, cinematic tricks and award-worthy performances have come together to produce the best drama of the year (so far).The story it tells is an old one: Cain slays Abel. Or rather Emmit kills Ray (Ewan McGregor in both roles). As someone who shall be nameless sang a long time ago: “Two little boys had two little toys”. In this case a stamp collection and a cherry-red Corvette. The Stussy Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
As chat-up lines go, “I can’t do my fly up single-handed” is pretty full on – even if it is true. Thomas March (James McArdle) is speaking to James Berryman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who not only went to the same public school but has also just saved his life on the Italian front during World War Two. Furthermore, the come-on works. The wounded soldiers are soon sucking face.Man in an Orange Shirt is Patrick Gale’s first TV screenplay. He’s a master of middle-class misery whose novels read like Alan Hollinghurst for beginners. Think pink potboilers, albeit very well written ones, that explore Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Come awards time, it’s inevitable that Elisabeth Moss will be collecting a few for her portrayal of Offred, the endlessly-suffering lead character in The Handmaid’s Tale (her real name is June). But I reckon the real stars of the show are cinematographer Colin Watkinson plus the production design and art direction teams. What made Handmaid grip from the start was its photography and its balefully beautiful colour palette.There were those post-Puritan white and maroon outfits worn by Offred and her fellow-handmaids, often choreographed en masse in muted, wintry New England landscapes, and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Part of the BBC's Gay Britannia season, here was a programme fulfilling what it said on the tin: prominent LGBTQ (when will all these expanding acronyms cease to confuse us all) figures narrating, examining, discussing, analysing, letting it all hang out about LGBTQ folk and the arts during the past half-century. The usual suspects were interviewed, from Maggi Hambling – her smoking more shocking than anything else on the programme – to Stephen Fry, Sandy Toksvig and David Hockney, although there was no Alan Bennett or Grayson Perry.In the 1960s before the act that partially Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the riveting first series of Top of the Lake, it was personal for Down Under detective Robin Griffin. She headed to a hilly corner of New Zealand to be around for the death of her mother while looking into the disappearance of a young girl. There she fell in love with the estranged son of a local villain but had to pull out upon learning that he was in fact her half-brother. A last-minute denial of paternity by the villain left her with something to smile about, especially as she also exposed a paedophile ring and shot its facilitator.Spool forward to the second series on BBC Two, and the Read more ...
David Benedict
The thing almost no one remembers about the great Nora Ephron/Rob Reiner 1989 romcom When Harry Met Sally is that the love story is intercut with real couples talking to camera about the mechanics and longevity of their true-life loves. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Remarkably, Fergus O’Brien’s deeply moving BBC film Against the Law, armed with far darker material, pulls off the self-same trick. Surprising though that may sound – this is a drama about fear and loathing in 1950s Britain – it is also highly appropriate since it is, in so many ways, a story about love.Unless you’re up to speed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was a coup by ITV to get Homeland writer Patrick Harbinson to pen this paranoid-conspiracy series, and rather droll to get Helen McCrory (wife of Homeland’s Damian Lewis) to play the lead. Yet even though the story of high-minded human rights lawyer Emma Banville had obvious potential in this era of terror plots and ubiquitous surveillance, the eventual solution was neither particularly surprising nor very satisfying.Throughout the series, McCrory had sunk herself into the role with steely-eyed determination and pursed lips, but it became increasingly hard to find her convincing as her Read more ...