TV
Jasper Rees
Drama is all about secrets revealed, discoveries unfurled. Black Work was straight into that territory from the first scene. A man and a woman sat in a car, taking the solace from each other that they couldn’t find at home. As ever in such a scenario, you promptly wondered if or when they’d be caught in the act. This was especially so given that the woman was played by Sheridan Smith, who starred in just such an adultery drama not that long ago.She sounded keener on rescuing her marriage to a mostly absent husband. But the next time he went out to work he failed to come back. The sight of a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Verdi's La Traviata has become one of the best-loved and most-performed works in the operatic repertoire, but this is no thanks to sections of the English press. In this entertaining romp through the opera's history, presenters Tom Service and Amanda Vickery drooled over the juiciest bits from some of the reviews from La Traviata's London debut in 1856 – for instance The Times of London deplored "an exhibition of harlotry upon the public stage", adding that this was "the poetry of the brothel" – before splitting up to examine the musical and historical background of the piece.Once you'd got Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Sunday afternoon at Glastonbury is an odd time. For some it means carrying on carrying on, trying to wring the very last drops out of the weekend and putting off the inevitable, stomach-churning lurch that will signal a nosedive into a colossal comedown. For others, it’s simply a day to be a bit more sensible: after all there’s a long drive tomorrow… Whichever, there seems to be a clamour for the familiar, something to cling to while you take the edge off with more booze or think about A-road alternatives to avoid congestion. This is where the faded glory of the "once-greats" comes in: mid- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The young casualty of genius fires imaginations and fills coffers. Last year Dylan Thomas’s centenary was vastly celebrated. The Amy Winehouse industry is still shifting units. The spell cast by Sylvia Plath seems not to diminish. A Janis Joplin biopic project is staggering through the law courts. And then there are Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all the sundry other singers and poets who, by accident or design, cut themselves down in their prime. But in the beginning, the first to die in a lonely garret of a drug overdose, was 17-year-old poet-forger Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
New sci-fi series aren't exactly a dime a dozen on British TV, awash as it usually is with serial killers, cops and costume dramas, so the fact that Humans not only exists but is also bold and fresh-looking triggers instant brownie points. It doubtless helps that it's a collaboration between Channel 4 and America's AMC, home of Mad Men and The Walking Dead. It pitches us into a contemporary London which looks superficially unchanged, but has been rendered utterly alien by the new boom in synthetic humans, or "synths".It seems the Smart TV, the Apple Watch and Mr Dyson's latest dust-sucking Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This was the story of a remarkable man, Henry Cecil, a genius with horses and 10 times Champion Trainer. He was felled by tabloid scandal but rose again to train one of the greatest racehorses in history, Frankel. This wholly absorbing programme was not a tale of everyday folk, but of horse racing, told through its human and equine characters, looking into a rarefied bubble inhabited by some of the richest and most powerful people in the world – and the finest thoroughbreds of the animal variety. You don’t have to follow racing to have heard of Frankel, said to be the finest racehorse Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When TFI Friday first assaulted our screens (nearly) 20 years ago, things were very different. An untucked checked shirt passed for sartorial elegance, magazines sold in big numbers and, within their pages, women were routinely objectified, but ironically and in front of a paper-thin façade of equality.This incongruous disconnect with society's current state – belt tightened, media fragmented and feminism back on the agenda - didn't bode well for the return, which, in order to succeed, would have to rely heavily on writer Danny Baker's unrivalled facility for inventive absurdism and ability Read more ...
Matthew Wright
A young man, in trouble with drunk or drugs, returns to his Scottish family riven by dark secrets? Of course, it’s a new Iain Banks dramatisation, the first since the author’s death two years ago. This version of his 2012 novel Stonemouth attempts to recreate the success the BBC enjoyed with its 1996 adaptation of Banks’s Crow Road. Compressing a near-400 pages of fiction into two hours’ television requires a thicket of flashbacks that tests the viewer’s recall, and piles coincidence a little high in places, though enjoyable lead performances, and Banks’ gripping, if familiar, preoccupations Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is irresistible to watch Andrew Roberts, the ambitious historian of one of history's most ambitious figures, narrating a three-part account of his hero’s life and times. He is giving us a superb analysis of Napoleon Bonaparte’s gifts, flaws, insecurities and achievements. The first instalment opened with a glorious sunset over the South Atlantic, and several views of the dramatic scenery of the volcanic island of St Helena where the exiled Napoleon was held for six years, 4,000 miles from home, as the prisoner of the British, until his death in 1821 at the age of 51. We saw pivotal Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Interceptor began as it didn’t mean to go on. A young boy of mixed race walked home through an estate and saw two men in a violent altercation. One, who was white, shot the other, who was black, presumably dead. “Dad!” called the boy. The murderer pointed the gun, realised he was aiming at his son, and scarpered.Spool forward a couple of decades. The boy, now an adult, had moved out of a gritty tragedy and into a trigger-happy comedy. Ash (OT Fagbenle) was a customs cop on the hunt for small fry in tandem with his buddy Tommy (Robert Lonsdale). Their first chase across a crowded Waterloo Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is supposed to be a major five-part documentary series probing into the innards of the Metropolitan Police, but it felt suspiciously like W1A in uniform. Was it the muted but insistently ominous background music, always trying to tell us that something really significant was happening when we were just watching yet another slab of b-roll footage? Or the dry, earnest voice-over, intoning that "this is a force under pressure"?Above all, maybe it was the way that gatherings of high-level officers might equally have a been a BBC strategy meeting. When the Met's Head of Communications started Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Teeth. Who’d have them? This documentary about the state of the nation’s gnashers came along at a timely moment for your reviewer. Earlier in the week I suffered my first ever extraction. Didn’t feel a jot of pain, of course, but by Christ you know all about it when the dentist is fiddling about inside your mouth, attempting with a variety of utensils to pluck out the culprit.I now see I had it easy. Meet Angela, a dog-walker from Cheshire. Her teeth were in a state of rococo disrepair. The camera went in for a snoop and it was like a cross between a motorway pile-up and a binful of rotting Read more ...