BBC One
Pamela Jahn
Lindsay Duncan, CBE, might be British acting royalty, yet her character as gangster matriarch in Charlotte Regan’s BBC-drama series Mint is anything but noble. Being flamboyant, firry and unapologetic even in her Seventies, her character Ollie's certainly not your typical granny either, as her granddaughter Shannon (Emma Laird) has come to realise a long time ago. The series centres around Shannon, who is the daughter of the new Godfather of Grangemouth, Dylan (Sam Riley), Ollie's son. He now runs the dark and dirty family business that his ruthless father Andy (Clive Russell) once built Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The writer of the edgy TV drama The Responder, Tony Schumacher, is back with an equally edgy but surprisingly warm-hearted story of people down on their luck in Liverpool. On paper, The Cage sounds like another run-through of the clichés of casino dramas, but it regularly confounds expectations.The setup is simple: two casino employees are, separately, skimming the takings, one to save her family from potential homelessness, the other to pay off loan-shark debts. Then it gets complicated. Their paths inevitably are on a collision course, both with each other and with the police and the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Filmmaker Charlotte Regan has been moving steadily up the creative ladder with music videos, short films and her 2023 feature debut Scrapper, which made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival. Now she takes a crack at a major drama for the BBC with Mint, whose eight 30-minute episodes describe a tale of young love, family dysfunction and gang violence.At its core is the Glasgow crime dynasty headed by Dylan (Sam Riley), who has been maintaining the thuggish legacy of his appalling father Andy (Clive Russell), but now seems to be wearying of the struggle to keep the operation afloat. Andy, now Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fans of Call the Midwife (which is currently “taking a break” after the conclusion of Series 15) will no doubt recall, with a nostalgic tear, Ella Bruccoleri’s performance as Sister Frances, which she sustained from 2018-2022. Some said she was nuts to walk away from such a well-loved show, but Ms Bruccoleri sensed that it was time to strike out for pastures new.She has also previously appeared in The Last Kingdom, Bridgerton, Bookish, Down Cemetery Road and Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, but her career is about to go up a gear or two. Viewers will be able to see why when she appears in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Time flies. It’s 10 years since the first iteration of The Night Manager landed on BBC One (shortly before its star Tom Hiddleston had a fling with Taylor Swift, trivia fans). John le Carré, author of the Night Manager novel, died in 2020. He was apparently pleased with the first series, as was his son – and custodian of his father’s estate – Simon, which helped to inspire screenwriter David Farr to create this follow-up.By his own account, the germ of series two came to Farr in a dream. “I had a very clear image one night of a black car driving over the hills in Colombia, towards a boy,” he Read more ...
theartsdesk
Analysts tell us that the UK’s top-rated TV show this Christmas was the King’s speech, with the Strictly Christmas special coming in a mere third. If this means anything at all, perhaps it’s just indicative of the bafflingly-expanding TV universe where it’s becoming impossible to keep tabs on everything that’s out there on a seemingly countless number of channels (and who on earth decided that “U&Drama” was a name to titillate the punters?). Even newspaper TV critics can’t seem to agree on what’s worth reviewing.But on the subject of U&Drama, they at least deserve a tip of the hat for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Why isn’t Eve Myles a superstar? Though well known for her appearances in the likes of Torchwood, Broadchurch and the brilliant Keeping Faith, you’d imagine that by now she’d have been snapped up for some mega-budget extravaganza on Amazon or Apple TV or be romping around with Tom Cruise.But she obviously likes to keep close to her Welsh roots, as she does in The Guest, and it helps her deliver a power and authenticity that might be lost in the jungle of corporate streamer-land. She plays Fran Sharp, a wealthy businesswoman who lives in a splendid house in the country near Cardiff with her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In this strangely dreary recreation of 11th century history, it’s not just grim oop north, it’s grim everywhere. King & Conqueror purports to be the story of how the Norman monarch William (the titular Conqueror) and England’s King Harold found themselves locked in a battle to the death at Hastings, each having negotiated a fearsome labyrinth of plots, treachery, ambition and murder in order to become top dog on either side of the English Channel.But somehow, despite its rather distinguished cast, the drama obstinately refuses to catch fire. Where The Last Kingdom brilliantly evoked the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The appalling destruction of Pan Am’s flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 was put under the spotlight in January this year in Sky Atlantic’s Lockerbie: A Search for Truth. This focused on the dogged and agonising search for truth by Jim Swire (played by Colin Firth), whose daughter Flora was killed in the attack, and raised a host of possibilities and theories about who did it and why.The BBC’s new six-part series takes a different tack. While it explores the investigation into who planted the bomb on the plane and the ensuing trial of two Libyan suspects, one of its prime concerns is to make Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Maybe it was the timing, even though most of the action takes place in bright sunlight, that made The Split’s two-parter uncharacteristically soft-centred. This was a Christmas-but-filmed-last-summer special, often a guarantee of a mushy mash-up. And indeed, it was as if writer Abi Morgan had started channelling Richard Curtis. The opening scene was Four Weddings by way of Mamma Mia!, as the tribe of Defoe women, led by divorced Hannah (Nicola Walker) and accompanied by her ex-husband Nathan (Stephen Mangan, pictured below, with Annabel Scholey) though not his new wife, descended on Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The most hyped special of the season came to a cosy comedy ending with pairings accomplished, evil witch Sonia and her coven dispatched and the usual everyday chaos reinstated. Tidy.Except that I almost wanted Ruth Jones and James Corden to put a bomb under their famous creation and blow it apart with key expectations unmet, Nessa (Jones) literally at sea, Smithy (Coren) rebuffed and big questions left unanswered. It worked for Gone with the Wind, after all. But even with the feelgood factor on overdrive, it was a hilarious, satisfying last outing.Not that it’s a really big question, but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though Death in Paradise is an Anglo-French production filmed in Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies, the Frenchness seems to have mysteriously leaked away. Where Sara Martins was a long-standing regular as DS Camille Bordey, and other French actors have rotated through the cast, the only glimmer of Gallicness remaining in this seasonal special was the vestigial presence of Elizabeth Bourgine as Catherine Bordey (Camille’s mum, pictured below with Danny John-Jules as Dwayne Myers). Otherwise we might have been on Jamaica or Barbados or St Lucia, such was the general lack of any trace of the Read more ...