Netflix’s fly-on-the-pitwall series has rapidly established itself as a vital ingredient in the tapestry of Formula One coverage, and is credited with giving the sport a huge boost in visibility and popularity, not least in the USA. This fourth outing (now featuring even more undeleted expletives than ever) takes a look back at 2021’s dramatic racing season, which ended in uproar and controversy in Abu Dhabi last December.
Tragically, Shane Warne’s sudden death at age 52 means that Amazon’s new documentary about him has suddenly become an obituary as much as a celebration.
Sidney J Furie’s 1965 film The Ipcress File is a much-loved benchmark of its period. Stylish, sinister, witty and depicting a determinedly un-swinging London, it was conceived as the flipside to the absurdly glamorous James Bond movies and pulled it off with panache. It also had Michael Caine playing the lead role of Harry Palmer, and a superb John Barry soundtrack famously featuring that mysterious instrument, the cimbalom.
“I’ve killed so many people. I don’t want to do it any more, any of it.” So said Villanelle (Jodie Comer) to Eve (Sandra Oh) in the last episode of the third series of Killing Eve, soon after she’d pushed Rhian Bevan, an assassin hired by the Twelve, under a train. Yeah, right, you may have thought, yawning cynically.
They say this will be the final series of Peaky Blinders (BBC One) and its documenting of the tumultuous progress of the Shelby family, though creator Steven Knight promises there’s a feature film in the works.
Suddenly bogus-identity stories are all the rage. Netflix has been scoring big with Inventing Anna, the story of fake heiress Anna Delvey, as well as the The Tinder Swindler, a cautionary tale about a high-rolling conman who scams money from women he meets online.
Con artists in film or TV need to be clever, charming, mysterious or at least entertaining (for instance Leo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can or Michelle Dockery in the much-underrated Good Behaviour). Bafflingly, Anna Delvey, the notorious fake heiress whose story has been fictionalised by Shonda Rhimes’s Shondaland company in Inventing Anna (Netflix), is none of these things.
Painful more often than funny, this is not This Is Going To Hurt, the laugh-one-moment-rage-the-next book by obstetrician turned comedian Adam Kay. He’s written the script so essential truths remain. But the on-screen Adam Kay, national treasure Ben Whishaw – how happy Kay must have been about that – does relatively few lines to camera and what was essentially a diary has been shaped into a seven-part drama.
It just about manages to balance horrors with human warmth and springs a few shocks even on those who’ve read the book or seen Kay’s show.
The transformation of Lily James, demure star of Yesterday, Cinderella and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, into smokin’ beach babe Pamela Anderson is the most memorable thing about Disney+'s uneven eight-part drama.
Having had her own problems with alcohol and anxiety, Sheridan Smith no doubt felt some kinship with Jenna Garvey, the central character she plays in The Teacher. Evidently a talented educator who inspires loyalty and enthusiasm in her pupils, Jenna is also partial to a hectic night’s clubbing fuelled by reckless quantities of drink.