What a super-talented woman Phoebe Waller-Bridge is. Hot on the heels of the success of her adaptation of Killing Eve, she now spoils us with a second series of Fleabag (BBC Three, then BBC One) that opened with an episode so gobsmackingly good that I wanted to give her a standing ovation in my living room when I watched it for the second time.
French actor and director Sandrine Bonnaire’s warm, langorous film portrait of la Faithfull may not the first – that accolade goes to Michael Collins’s feature-length Dreaming my Dreams (2000), featuring Mick, Keith, Anita and John Dunbar – but it does feel like a refreshingly deep-focus, specifically female take on her life and mythos, intimate yet kept at a decorous ar
Some things never change. About 60 per cent of this first show in Strike Back’s seventh series consisted of Mac McAllister (Warren Brown) and his intrepid Section 20 squad mowing down members of a Malaysian triad gang with automatic weapons.
“I’ve remained a vital presence on the fringes of TV Land,” argues Alan Partridge in an interview with Radio Times, the man whose latest claim to… well, not fame, but at least he has been presenting Mid Morning Matters on North Norfolk Digital.
Curfew (Sky One) is a new drama that begins as it means to go on, roaring from nought to 60 with a wildly implausible car chase. An electric blue McLaren is haring and weaving through London, with the law in hot pursuit. Forget the computer-generated high-speed U-turn and the armour-plated panda cars.
It’s always interesting to see how presenters make their presence known in documentaries. Louis Theroux hovers on the sidelines like an ethereal presence, Stacey Dooley connects immediately on an emotional level, and one-time host Keith Allen handled proceedings like a fight before a Millwall game.
It’s 1945 and World War Two is nearly over. Somewhere in England, Fiona Symonds (“Feef” to her friends) is training to be a spy and be dropped behind enemy lines. Her training involves such amusements as being woken in the night by having a bucket of water chucked over her, then being interrogated by two fake German officers.
Is there an algorithm for writing this review? There seems to have been one used to create Baptiste, a spin-off from The Missing, and even the staunchest fans of Tchéky Karyo will be struggling not to see the all-too-familiar formula poking through the script.
When the third series ended with a car crash, I did wonder whether Catastrophe (Channel 4) should maybe think about calling it a day. The previous half-dozen episodes had gone to a dark place in their exploration of alcoholism, but stealthily, as if the script didn’t quite know whether it was meant to be funny or a gut-wrenching purgative. Well it’s always good to be proved resoundingly wrong.