TV
Adam Sweeting
Ah, Benidorm… sea, sun, sand, sex, sangria and chips. In 5’s new six-part comedy drama, masterminded by Ian Jarvis, the popular Costa Blanca resort becomes the setting for a series of murders which are amusing brain-teasers in themselves, while the show also has a lot of fun with the various species of visitors who EasyJet themselves to Spain’s Mediterranean coast to pick up a nice dose of sunburn. Given the prevailing UK weather conditions they could probably have made this in Margate, despite its lack of Miami-style skyscrapers, but that needn’t detain us now.At the centre of the action is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The return of Taylor Sheridan’s all-female CIA special ops unit finds the war on terror cutting uncomfortably close to the bone, with team boss Joe McNamara (Zoe Saldaña) targeted by a bunch of thuggish Russians in her own home in Virginia. Scenes of Joe being violently manhandled and strip-searched by her attackers as they search for the locator device they know is concealed somewhere on, or in, her body make for pretty gruelling viewing, even in a show that doesn’t shrink from graphic violence.However, even that pales into insignificance by comparison to the combat scenes in the opening Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is this the near-future? The premise of Ann Droid is that in place of our over-stretched social services, before long we may find ourselves being helped out around the home by robot assistants. This is what happens to our protagonist Sue (Sue Johnston), devastated by the death of her husband Dave two years earlier and fearful of growing progressively older and lonelier. She also suffers from low blood pressure and is liable to collapse without warning.It’s her son Michael (Paul Ready, pictured below with Johnston) who acquires a second-hand – or, if you will, “pre-loved” – droid at a bargain Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on the novel by Marissa Stapley and telly-ised by screenwriter/creator Jonathan Tropper, Lucky is a rip-roaring tale of dysfunctional criminal families, enlivened by a batch of splendid performances from an excellent cast. Front and centre is Lucky herself (full name Luciana Armstrong), a compulsive thief and skilled con artist, played quite brilliantly by Anya Taylor-Joy.As it happens, Lucky is the daughter of another inveterate criminal, her father John Armstrong, and as we see in various flashbacks, she was (as Joni Mitchell put it) raised on robbery. As she admits, her situation is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The “hiding in plain sight” technique has proved appallingly effective for a list of notorious sex offenders. When in doubt, get yourself a prominent slot on the BBC and hang out with royalty, and you can get away with almost anything.The newsreader Huw Edwards is the latest in this roll-call of infamy, though he has vowed to challenge “misleading or fabricated claims” made about him, but Edwards seems like a mere amateur when compared with Rolf Harris. As we learn in this Australian-made two-part documentary, Harris hailed from the Perth suburb of Bassingdean, came to London in 1952, studied Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One sometimes finds oneself wondering whether Harlan Coben is an author or a set of AI procedures designed to manufacture plots of ludicrous twistiness. Whatever he or it is, it’s managed to infatuate Netflix and Prime Video, who can’t stop turning this stuff into TV wallpaper (The Stranger, The Woods, Shelter etc). Richard Armitage quite often stars in them.Armitage isn’t in I Will Find You, but most of the usual Coben-esque traits are in evidence. There are frequent enigmatic flashbacks to past events which have paved the way for the present-day action, there are missing persons and altered Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might think the spy thriller is a genre which has been worn out and abused to death, but this second series of The Agency is here to tell you otherwise. Once again penned by the prolific Butterworth brothers Jez and John-Henry, it brings us back to the CIA London station helmed by the laconic Bosko (Richard Gere) and his morose and curmudgeonly deputy Henry Ogletree (Jeffrey Wright).The star turn among their agents is the man codenamed Martian (Michael Fassbender), who remains haunted by his love affair with Sudanese anthropologist Sami Zahir (Jodie Turner-Swift, pictured below with Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
How much more can Jeremy Clarkson’s body take? The fifth season of his reality show about his Oxfordshire spread, Diddly Squat Farm and pendant pub, could have been borrowed from the Book of Job.Neatly winding up season four with an impending heart attack, this time, as headlines have announced, he calmly reveals to his team that he also has aggressive prostate cancer to tackle. But not until his drought-addled crops have been harvested, of course.The sheer fortitude of the man is compelling. As each sunny day prompts him to tot up his blessings, you just know a big “but” is coming, delivered Read more ...
theartsdesk Q&A: actor Damien Molony on 'Bergerac', 'Two Weeks in August' and returning to the stage
Pamela Jahn
Everyone knows Bergerac, or so you'd think. "I didn't", says Damien Molony. "I knew of the series, but it was only after I got the job that it dawned on me how big it was. I was at a wedding and people said to me, 'Damien, the car, the leather jacket, Jersey.'" Not least, John Nettles who, over the course of ten years, made the original archetypal "maverick cop" so iconic. The series ran successfully from 1981 until the early 1990s.Since Toby Whithouse's reboot of Bergerac in 2025, Molony has made the character of Jim Bergerac his very own. Season two launched in April this year, and although Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Can you remember what you were doing on 23 June 2016? You might well have been out to cast your vote in the EU referendum, which has thrown its interminable shadow over our benighted country ever since.Or maybe you just stayed in bed, which wouldn’t have been a bad choice because after all the shouting, campaigning, anger and bitterness, nobody got what they wanted. Remainers failed to remain, and Brexiteers didn’t get anything they considered worthy of the name “Brexit”. President Obama had theatrically flown in to warn us to remain or else, but he must have been disappointed when nobody Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Aptly scheduled for our Great British Heatwave, writer Catherine Shepherd’s eight-part drama whisks us away to a remote Greek island, where a band of friends (four of them having been at university together) have rented an aesthetically pleasing but somewhat decrepit house for the titular fortnight. Their Greek housekeeper patiently explains that the plumbing is dangerously ancient and would they please put used toilet paper in the bin rather than trying to flush it, which prompts a few aghast sideways glances. Oh, and whatever you do, don’t drink the water.History tells us that fictional Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Screenwriter Neil Forsyth earned kudos a-plenty with his two BBC One series of The Gold, a dramatisation of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat bullion robbery and its aftermath. Now he’s stepped aboard the good ship Netflix for this story of heroin-pushing gangs in London and Liverpool, set in the dying days of the Thatcher government at the turn of the Nineties.Again the story is rooted in fact, and explores how a group of fairly lowly customs officers were recruited to infiltrate and destroy a multi-million pound heroin racket that was wreaking havoc with both poor kids in Northern housing estates as Read more ...