BBC One
Adam Sweeting
The first series of James Graham’s Sherwood, shown in June 2022, introduced us to the Nottinghamshire town of Ashfield, a former mining community devastated by pit closures and the miserable aftermath of the 1984 miners’ strike. The town was torn by personal and political feuds, and the murder of former miner Gary Jackson was like throwing gasoline on long-smouldering embers.As this second series opens, we find a few things have changed. DCS Ian St Clair (David Morrissey) has now stepped aside from the police to head the new Violence Intervention Team, which aims to provide support networks Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems cricketer-turned-TV star Freddie Flintoff was lucky to survive his crash in a Morgan three-wheeled roadster in December 2022, and his recuperation has been painful and traumatic. As he explained in the opening episode of his second Field of Dreams series, the accident, which occurred during filming for Top Gear, is going to have long-term consequences. “I struggle with anxiety. I have nightmares, I have flashbacks. It’s been so hard to cope with.”He also had to undergo a series of operations, and didn’t appear in public for many months. But he was determined to continue with his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Lucie Shorthouse is enjoying some high-profile TV action with her roles in Channel 4’s We Are Lady Parts, about the adventures of an all-woman Muslim punk band, and in BBC One’s reincarnated Rebus. In the former, she plays the band’s niqab-clad manager Momtaz, while the latter casts her as rookie cop DC Siobhan Clarke, trying to cope with the maverick behaviour of the titular John Rebus, played by Richard Rankin. Both shows have enjoyed a surge of critical acclaim and have pulled healthy audiences, which must surely have got the phones ringing in the office of Shorthouse’s agent. And that’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The previous incarnation of Ian Rankin’s Scottish detective on ITV starred, in their contrasting styles, John Hannah and Ken Stott. For this Rebus redux, arriving nearly 25 years after the original first series began, screenwriter Gregory Burke has reworked the character as a younger Detective Sergeant, drawing on the spirit of Rankin’s original novels but with the author’s blessing to take the character somewhere new.Richard Rankin (no relation to the writer) is an excellent choice for Rebus. Rough, tough, scruffy and not to be trusted around a bottle of whisky, he comes equipped with the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The first season of Blue Nights was so close to police procedural perfection, it would be hard for season two to reach the same heights. Overall, it doesn’t, though there are still special moments.After an exhilarating start, its multiple narrative strands thrash around like eels in a tank. We are back at the response unit in the old Belfast nick, though with a new recruit and a couple of old faces unexpectedly returning. [Spoiler alert for those who didn’t watch season one and ought to.] But the tightness of the writers’ grip has slackened.It’s a year on, and the rookie cops have bedded in. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Industrious screenwriter Steven Knight has brought us (among many other things) Peaky Blinders, SAS: Rogue Heroes and even Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, but This Town may not be remembered as one of his finest hours. Here, we find Knight revisiting his Midlands background for a story that begins in 1981, during Margaret Thatcher’s first term as Prime Minister. There’s rioting on the streets, unemployment is soaring and Bobby Sands is on hunger strike in Belfast. Ska and Two Tone music are all the rage, and the soundtrack is littered with old faves like “The Tide is High”, “Pressure Drop”, “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This three-part drama arrives trailing clouds of big-byline glory. Michael Sheen directed and produced it (as well as making fleeting appearances on screen), James Graham wrote it and documentary-maker Adam Curtis co-produced it.But what is it? Part social commentary, part Welsh myth and part travelogue, it tells the story of a family from Port Talbot, the Driscolls, who get caught up in a cataclysmic industrial dispute at the steelworks and end up going on the run. In an ironic and not very subtle inversion of the never-ending saga of Channel boat crossings, they flee across the Welsh border Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The end of the first series of Kin found Dublin’s Kinsella crime family ridding themselves of bloodsucking drug baron Eamon Cunningham, but this was not an unalloyed blessing. As this second series opens, the Kinsellas are having to make new arrangements with the Batuks, the Turkish family who are the source of all the local drug supplies. Snag is, the Turks want the Kinsellas to repay Cunningham’s outstanding debt to them of €70m. Oh, and another thing – they want the head of Michael Kinsella (Charlie Cox), since he killed a senior member of the Batuk clan.Difficult decisions have to be made Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was barely a month ago that screenwriters Jack and Harry Williams astounded viewers with Boat Story. Now they’re back with a sequel (or maybe just a continuation) of The Tourist, which debuted a year ago with its mind-bending story of the amnesiac Elliot Stanley (Jamie Dornan), who found himself all at sea in the Australian outback.Now, Elliot is travelling the world with girlfriend Helen (Danielle Macdonald), but they’re diverted from a railway journey to Cambodia by a mysterious letter, which prompts them to travel to Elliot’s native Ireland in search of his real identity. Of which, so Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
TV viewers can hardly complain about a lack of choice these days, though they might baulk at funding an ever-lengthening list of subscriptions.There are some who argue, for example, that it’s worth paying for Apple TV+ solely to gain access to the excellent Slow Horses, whose third series has just concluded. Others may contend that you should stump up for Disney+ to see Only Murders in the Building, a delicious flashback to old Broadway and elegant Forties-style film comedies.Despite all that, you could still have spent the year enjoying a selection of admirable dramas from good old BBC One. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Well at least they haven’t changed the identity of the killer this time around, but the BBC’s new version of Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel has been modified in other ways. Screenwriter Siân Ejiwunmi-Le Berre and director Meenu Gaur have opted to move the story into the mid-1950s, introducing themes of racism, class prejudice and capitalist exploitation. And you thought it was just a tidy little whodunnit.Labouring under this narrative burden is the protagonist Luke Fitzwilliam, who Christie wrote as a retired colonial policeman. Here, he’s reborn as a regional attache from Nigeria who’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In its first series in 2021, Vigil delivered a claustrophobic though frequently absurd tale of murder and Russian spies aboard a British nuclear submarine. This time around it’s the RAF under the spotlight, though its name has mysteriously been changed to the British Air Force.Is this a sly attempt to erase the monarchy, or perhaps a legal tactic to avoid problems with depicting the real air force? Specifically, we’re dealing here with the drone operations of the BAF (as nobody refers to it), both in Scotland and at its Al Shawka base in the little-known Middle Eastern country of Wudyan. Read more ...