TV
graeme.thomson
There have been some highly unlikely couplings in the long history of television comedy, but the one between Debbie from The Archers and Joey from Friends in the first series of Episodes ranked somewhere near the top of the list. If the viewers struggled to be convinced by that oddly implausible tryst, at least we weren’t alone. It turns out Tamsin Greig’s character Beverly Lincoln can’t quite believe it happened either.It is Bev’s bout of improbable (and – as it transpired – unjustified) revenge sex which is destined to hang like a smoggy sky over series two of Episodes, the Golden Globe- Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Street of dreams? The people who lived in the real-life inspiration and location for Coronation Street, Archie Street in Salford, hand-picked by the soap’s begetter Tony Warren, would be flummoxed and flabbergasted to hear it called that. I walked down Archie Street several times when the TV soap started. The two-up, two down, back-to-back terraced houses, separated by a three-foot alleyway, had no baths, no hot water, no inside lavatories and were dubbed “a disgrace to society”. But the people who lived in them when the TV version started on 9 December 1960 were genuine enough folk. One of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is, as you may have heard, the Israeli TV series which provided the inspiration for Homeland, smartly snapped up by Sky Arts to plug the gap left by the latter after last weekend's finale. And guess what - it may be even better than its Hollywood spin-off.Written and directed with auteur-ish panache by Gideon Raff (who also exec-produced on Homeland), Prisoners of War - or Hatufim in Hebrew - is less the labyrinthine thriller, more a skilful and probing analysis of loss and separation. Where Homeland's central theme was whether or not rescued US Marine Nick Brody had been turned by his Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a funny old game. Sport rewards the talented when they are young and their bodies responsive. A profession which requires the reflexes to work in instant harmony with the brain means that beyond a certain age, the gifted become instantly unemployable the moment they lose their magic powers. A case of they don’t think it’s all over: it is now. Michael Vaughan, the England cricket captain whose body decided to retire before he did, embarked here on a thoughtful trawl through the sporting world to ask a poignant question: how do you cope when the crowd has stopped applauding, the accolades Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's always a pleasure to watch comics first seen and enjoyed playing a tiny room at the Edinburgh Fringe make their television debut; it's an even greater pleasure to see two immensely talented comics make such an accomplished entrée as Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns did last night. But then they have a track record: in 2006 the duo (then performing as a threesome with Sophie Black as Fat Tongue) were nominated for best newcomer in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards.Their sketch comedy is mostly spoofs of instantly recognisable TV tropes that lend themselves to parody, but here given a neat Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
The course of the serialised drama finale never did run smooth, particularly in the case of a show like Homeland, which has structured its entire run around a slow-building sense of queasy, paranoid dread with, thus far, very little real payoff.The penultimate episode ended with both series leads fulfilling their long-awaited narrative destinies - rescued prisoner of war Brody (Damian Lewis) was indeed the brainwashed terrorist that CIA analyst Carrie (Claire Danes) had always suspected him to be, while Carrie herself had fallen into the manic state of psychosis she’d long been skirting the Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Even in this age of desperate reality TV, you have to have doubts about any show that tries to convert “celebrities” into serious contenders in an alien field. Is it serious or a padded-out joke? To an extent we’ve been here, or close by, before. Can it be four years since the first Maestro came to our screens, featuring eight celebrity contestants vying for the chance to wield the baton at the Proms and, eventually, launching the winner, Sue Perkins (narrator this time), on a new career as a comedy conductor?On the basis that if it worked once as a novelty, it might work again given a decent Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Try this for high concept. Following a fatal car accident involving his family, LA cop Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs) gains access to two parallel realities. Every time he goes to sleep, he crosses between the two – in one, his wife survived the crash while his son died; in the other, he’s a widower but his son lived. The two realities parallel one another in every respect: in each he has a different therapist, a different stereotypical sidekick, and a different murder to solve.The procedural element is the least successful aspect of what’s otherwise a compelling pilot with a unique emotional Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
Francesco da Mosto’s two-parter is ostensibly about the Bard and his fascination with the TV historian’s native Italy. In reality, it’s a film about da Mosto and his apparently God-given, below-the-belt hotness. Given the camera’s ceaseless drooling at the presenter, a more honest title would have been “Ladies! Get a load of this!”There’s something about da Mosto that makes TV producers come over all unnecessary. In their view there is no one more ruggedly handsome and intrinsically Italian than he. Thus, in Shakespeare in Italy, if he wasn’t captured driving his red Alfa Romeo down country Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The first series of the French cops gone-to-pot drama ended with Lieutenant Eddy Caplan about to blow the head off his nemesis Serge Lemoine. Offing him was supposed to solve all Caplan and his team’s problems. Unfortunately, Lemoine was fitted with a wire and things didn’t go to plan. Series two began in the immediate aftermath with Caplan, his in do-do colleagues and Lemoine caged in the back of police van. As it rattled along, their on-the-run compadre Théo Vachewski was being hunted down.After a brief recap of the previous series, the episode was off and running. Braquo's Read more ...