ITV
Tom Birchenough
The best thing about The Great War: The People’s Story is the variety of intonations and accents that reveal the characters of the individuals whose letters, memoirs and diaries are collected in the programme. Last week’s opening episode caught all the gung-ho excitement that followed the declaration of war as men streamed along to join up. This second one brought us something darker, as we moved forward to 1915, with the “machine of death” already reaping its toll.The People’s Story will run to four episodes, each of which concentrates on four individuals whose stories last as long as their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How amusing is death? When stand-ups fail to get laughs on stage, they call it dying, because the silence is like the grave. When actors laugh when they’re not supposed to on stage or on camera, it’s called corpsing because it kills the scene. They can do birth, marriage, divorce and illness, but death is the one part of the journey a comedian can’t turn into first-person material. Not even Tommy Cooper, who literally died on stage. But if anyone can find the funny side, it is surely Billy Connolly.That at least is the thinking behind his new documentary, which sends him hunting for jokes in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Policeman wrongly accused of murder" is possibly not history's most original story idea, but in Prey, writer (and TV debutant) Chris Lunt has turned it into a platform for a skilfully-controlled thriller that keeps your brow sweaty and your breath coming in short panicky gasps. It's greatly assisted by having John Simm playing the lead role of Manchester-based DS Marcus Farrow, since there's nobody better when you want a bit of earthy-but-sincere, with added soulfulness.Though we first met Farrow in the aftermath of a road accident, when he was trapped in the back of an upside-down police Read more ...
Andy Plaice
She drinks beer, drives a Land Rover and can never remember the names of her sidekick’s wife and daughter: welcome to the offbeat world of Vera Stanhope, deliciously imagined by writer Ann Cleeves and actor Brenda Blethyn. ITV’s Sunday night cop show-by-the sea, Vera, is back with a fourth series which will be welcome news for a loyal few million viewers and for the people who like to sell Northumberland as a tourist attraction.ITV may have forgotten to have given it an interesting title (she could so easily be either a Gwen or a Madge) but in tonight's episode Our Vera was anything but dull Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The last time the whippersnapper Morse was on our screens he was getting (a) orphaned and (b) shot. This double dose of pain seemed a bit punitive, but then when sorrows come they come not single spies. The second series of Endeavour seems determined to stack up yet more agonies. So far Morse has been knocked out cold, sustained an unsightly gash on the bridge of his nose, and cowers every time he hears a loud bang. You could swear he’s walked in off the pages of the Bash Street Kids.The idea, presumably, is to carve out a separate identity for the prequel to a franchise which has already had Read more ...
Andy Plaice
It was something of a relief when the police were finally alerted to the sinister motives of Malcolm Webster in last night’s second episode of The Widower. ITV’s three-part dramatisation of the killer’s exploits (he was convicted in 2011 of murdering his first wife and trying to kill his second) raises interesting questions not only concerning how we tell stories about crimes from real-life, but whether we actually tell them at all.Part One had ended with Webster's first wife dead following the staging of a car crash. Malcolm had miraculously survived as the vehicle started to burn, but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the same week that ITV was rounding up Britain's dangerous dogs, the Beeb aired Louis Theroux's report [****] on the unwanted canines roaming the streets of gang-infested South Los Angeles. LA has six dog pounds (we learned), through which 35,000 ownerless dogs pass annually. A lot of them, even healthy ones, end up being euthanised because it's impossible to find homes for them all.However, Theroux's film suggested that this wasn't for lack of trying on the part of the city's dog-lovers, who appeared in many colourful guises. Louis spent some time riding around the sullen, menacing Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“You can never embarrass politicians by giving them publicity.” Michael Heseltine’s verdict on Spitting Image – he claimed, of course, he never watched it – was surely one of the truer things said in last night's Arena memorial Whatever Happened to Spitting Image?, marking the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the satirical puppet show. It certainly seemed balanced when set alongside an apoplectic Ted Heath, who accused those behind it of being, basically, a bunch of jealous, irresponsible losers.Antony Wall’s film did achieve a nice sense of balance about a programme that went from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thirty years ago this month, the National Coal Board announced the closure of 20 pits that were deemed "uneconomic", a decision which would incur the loss of 20,000 jobs. Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, responded by calling a strike that would become the longest industrial dispute in British history. It was also probably the most bitter, as the recollections of the former miners and their wives assembled for this documentary painfully demonstrated.Even with its furry low-definition quality, the 1980s news footage of the striking miners and their clashes with Read more ...
Andy Plaice
Mothers and their sons provided the framework for the latest story involving DCI Alan Banks, the character on whom ITV is pinning its hopes to fill the vacancy of the nation’s favourite detective now that Frost and Morse are no more. Peter Robinson’s series of novels has been enjoyed for more than 25 years, selling millions in the UK and translated into more than 20 languages, but it took until 2010 to reach our television screens with Stephen Tompkinson in the starring role.In "Wednesday’s Child", based on his 1992 book and the first of six episodes in series three, the focus was on a rough Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
We return to the dramatised Selfridges five years after the opening of the store that changed the face of British shopping - and yet, despite proving those who doomed his enterprise to failure wrong, the smile on its eponymous owner’s face is as false as his moustache is magnificent. Although Harry Selfridge (Jeremy Piven) was able to turn on the charm for visiting journalists in tonight’s series opener, the absence of his wife and daughters - back home in the US where the girls, we are told, were finishing school - cast a shade over the celebrations.Although Rose (Frances O’Connor) did Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
For a drama as committed to the exploration of the changing role of women in post-war Britain, The Bletchley Circle isn’t above a little sleight of hand. The second series of the critically acclaimed whodunnit began with a flashback to 1943 and to Alice Merren (Hattie Morahan), a bright young codebreaker who quickly solves a puzzle that the menfolk have been bamboozled by for the past two days. It’s a three-character shift in the cypher, she says, noting that even if the enemy were to build the most complicated machine in the world, “it would still be run by people”.It’s people and the Read more ...