BBC One
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
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
Detective Inspector Helen Weeks (MyAnna Buring), having finally cornered a skanky drug-dealer/benefit cheat in a blind alley – and stopped an eager PC from Tasering the woman – is punched in the stomach for her pains. How’s that for a hard-hitting start? Weeks is pregnant – she should be called Eleven Weeks – and it later transpires she’s not sure who’s the daddy.In the Dark, based on the novel by Mark Billingham, may seem like a run-of-the-mill crime drama but soon modulates into something deeper. The pre-title sequence shows someone digging a grave on a dark and stormy night. The identity Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The title gave us the true-life plot: this was a grandson’s filmed narrative of something that will touch us all, through acquaintance, friend, family and perhaps ourselves falling victim to some form of dementia. It's a word that covers a myriad of conditions, all of them affecting the mind.This was not a factual documentary examining the disease, but a specific family story which is not really typical nor stereotyped. The grandson, Dominic Sivyer, showed us affecting family films of himself as a young boy of seven or eight, and how his grandfather Tom had become the most important man in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Catholic Church hasn’t enjoyed a good press on screen lately. Nuns punished Irishwomen for their pregnancies in Philomena. Priests interfered with altar boys in Spotlight. And in The Young Pope a Vatican fixated on conservatism and casuistry elects a pontiff who sees himself as a rock star. Broken was Jimmy McGovern’s agonised absolution for a church in crisis.Over six parts on BBC One, Broken has felt like walking along half a dozen stations of the cross. McGovern’s portrait of a broken priest – and by extension, a broken priesthood – was exceptionally short on levity or solace. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is it always the same bit of Cornish clifftop they gallop along in Poldark? Anyway here it was again, raising the curtain on the third series. As the camera flew in over a gaggle of squawking seagulls spiralling above the foaming surf crashing on the rocks, we could discern a lone horseperson charging across the skyline. But it wasn’t Ross Poldark. It was his former (or is she?) inamorata, Elizabeth Warleggan.From the quasi-orgasmic wailing sounds Elizabeth (Heida Reed) was making as she bounced atop her thundering steed, it was difficult to tell whether this equine excursion was business or Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The latest test of the nation’s perseverance and patience – a snap election called just before the negotiations for Brexit are due to start – seemed like an extraordinary act of hubris at the start. The initial billing of “Strong and stable” vs “Coalition of chaos”, was a statement that implied the Tories’ lead was so big that only by ganging together could the other parties beat it. It also appeared to be an assumption that was probably fair enough.However, a decision for Theresa May to fight the campaign on personalities not policies stumbled upon the realisation that hers is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is Jimmy McGovern, so it’s no surprise to find ourselves up north and feeling grim. The prolific screenwriter’s latest drama series is located in what is described only as “a northern city” (though apparently it’s 60 miles from Sheffield, which would take you to McGovern’s home town of Liverpool as the crow flies).Here, wherever it is, kindly Father Michael Kerrigan (a sotto voce Sean Bean) does his best to minister to his depressed and impoverished flock, who are struggling to make ends meet both physically and spiritually. In particular, we zero in on Christina Fitzsimmons (Anna Friel Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Television dramas about catastrophic events in broken Britain are meant to be cathartic. They knead the collated facts into the shape of drama for millions to absorb and understand. Then we all somehow move on, sadder but slightly wiser. The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. Hillsborough. The Government Inspector. And still they flow onto the screen: only recently there’s been Damilola: Our Loved Boy, The Moorside and Little Boy Blue.Now Three Girls, in which over three nights on BBC One redemption was dealt out with extreme parsimony. You knew it was going to end complicatedly when the guilty Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
EastEnders habituees will be familiar with the colourful past of Alfie and (especially) Kat Moon, who have both been AWOL from the mothership since early last year. But they’ve used the time wisely, preparing busily for this new spin-off drama in which they’ve shipped out to the seaside village of Redwater, County Waterford, to track down Kat’s long-lost son. She gave birth when she was scarcely more than a child herself, and the infant was whisked away from her and taken to a convent.It started quite promisingly. It was the summer of 1994 (or so the caption said), and we saw a pair of small Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Barbara Windsor’s laugh belongs in the National Sound Archive. It’s a birdlike chuckle that wavers between innocence and dirt. We all know Babs’s laugh. But what about her tears? There have been plenty of those too according to Babs, BBC One’s feature-length drama which sifted through the jigsaw pieces of a tumultuous life spent in the public eye.Any fans of EastEnders hoping for a straightforward soup-to-nuts account of Windsor’s story may well have been thrown for a loop by Tony Jordan’s playful, metatextual script. Jordan made his reputation of EastEnders, before going on to flirt with Read more ...