TV
Veronica Lee
ITV's drama department is in overdrive at the moment, with a seemingly endless release of series with high production values and stellar casts, and the latest is The Trouble With Maggie Cole. It's a six-parter based on an idea by Dawn French (who also stars) and is written by Mark Brotherhood.It's set in Thurlbury, a fictional coastal community in the West Country, where everybody knows everybody else. Self-appointed “local historian” Maggie Cole (French), who has a museum cum gift shop at the town's ancient keep, minds everyone's business but her own, and is flattered when a local radio Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In this aptly-titled series (BBC One), four British 20-somethings visit the USA to investigate the inner workings of the beauty industry. Perhaps not surprisingly, they discover that it’s a hotbed of greed and exploitation.Their first stop was the Beautycon exhibition in Los Angeles, a must-see gathering of 30,000 “beauty fans” and (ghastly neologism alert) online “influencers”. The latter included the glittering Kenneth Senegal, who can earn $14,000 by mentioning a cosmetic product in one of his videos. Chloe (a Belfast-based beauty blogger) and Casey (a fastidiously made-up gay man from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan have been taking their bickering TV trips for a decade, beginning in the north of England in 2010 before working their way around Italy, Spain and now Greece (on Sky 1). They say this will be the last time, but believe that at your peril.Coogan has estimated that the characters they play in The Trip are about 30 per cent real and 70 per cent fictionalised, and part of the show’s allure is trying to spot the join between the two. No doubt this was the plan when director Michael Winterbottom (who has helmed all four series) originally sold it to them, perhaps not Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of Liar, one of many thrillers from the fertile keyboards of Jack and Harry Williams, was on ITV back in 2017, so you may have forgotten the somewhat labyrinthine details. In a nutshell, smarmy surgeon and serial rapist Andrew Earlham (Ioan Gruffudd) had been unmasked by the dogged (and sometimes illegal) methods of one of his 19 victims, schoolteacher Laura Nielson (Joanne Froggatt). However, before the police could arrest him, his dead body was found in the marshes on the Kent coast, with its throat cut. End of series one.An early revelation in this new season was that DI Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The rage and bitterness surrounding the Brexit brouhaha have made it immune to comedy and satire, but perhaps change is in the wind. Channel 4’s bogus royal family is back after a two-year gap, charged (as an introductory voice-over explained) by Her Majesty’s government with cheering up the divided nation.The timing is exquisite – or, I suppose, horrific if you’re a member of the real-life royals – since the air is still echoing with the fall-out from Harry and Meghan’s great escape and Prince Andrew’s “interesting” private life. Andrew was played by Tim Wallers like an obnoxious fund Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since Back in Time for Dinner in 2015, this BBC Two social history strand in which families travel into a recreated past to experience ways in which society, leisure and lifestyles have changed has proved a robust perennial. Its latest iteration, Back in Time for The Corner Shop, whisked us away to a Sheffield corner shop in 1897, where the local Ardern family threw themselves into the rigours of late-Victorian retailing with commendable joie de vivre.Sara Cox played presenter and sergeant-major, chivvying the Arderns along in their unfamiliar new roles, and filling in some factual history Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Everybody lies," says property developer Tony to his PA and secret lover Natalie. “Even your mum probably.” And of course he’s not wrong.Sarah Williams’s drama, showing over four consecutive nights on ITV, is an easy-to-digest and deftly-wrought piece of work, using an unspecified accident which has left somebody in hospital – Williams has bent over backwards to avoid revealing the victim’s identity until the final episode – to prise open the secrets and lies of Vivien (Francesca Annis) and her family. Vivien, who's turning 70, has been living on the Sussex coast for the past 40 years, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The comic book of Locke and Key, written by Joe Hill (son of horror writer Stephen King) and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez, was first published in 2008, and its mix of multi-generational family drama and supernatural creepiness made it a cult hit. Various film and TV companies have spent the last decade making desultory efforts to bring it to the screen, and now Netflix have finally managed it.Whether or not it's what aficionados would have dreamed of, being familiar with the comics would certainly give you a leg up in getting to grips with the TV show. It’s slow to pick up momentum, as if Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apparently network executives initially reacted with alarm to the premise of Hunters, Amazon’s new big-ticket series chiefly (though by no means entirely) notable for hosting Al Pacino’s first full-scale television role. Its story of Jewish Nazi-hunters tracking down Nazis living in the USA in the 1970s is told with cartoon-ish brio, treating borderline-taboo subject matter with throwaway insouciance. Comparisons with Quentin Tarantino’s buccaneering approach to good taste and historical reality have already been made, and they’re not too wide of the mark.Creator David Weil throws down the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With prison overcrowding reaching chronic proportions, police in County Durham have developed the Checkpoint programme to try to keep offenders out of jail with rehabilitation in the community. It’s like Felons Anonymous – candidates have to sign a contract confessing their crimes and stipulating that they won’t reoffend. They get one chance, and if they break the pledge they’ll end up behind bars.Some find it easier than others to kick their criminal habits, but according to statistics we were shown, prisoners released from jail were more than twice as likely to reoffend as Checkpoint “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps somebody at BBC Four has had a quiet word with Lucy Worsley, because in this first of a new three-part series she did hardly did any of her usual irritating dressing up. There had to be a bit, though. She appeared briefly as a monk carrying a blazing torch, and then got herself made over as a version of Anne Boleyn (pictured below) as she was described by the 16th Century Catholic priest and polemicist Nicholas Sander. Seeing Boleyn as an influential advocate of the Protestant cause, the vengeful Sander depicted her as a witch with bad teeth and an extra finger on her right hand. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It’s all in the timing. Here was David Baddiel beginning a stand-up turn at a gig in Finchley. A Holocaust survivor gets to heaven, and God asks for a Holocaust joke. God says that his joke isn't funny, and the survivor replies “Well, I guess you had to be there.” Baddiel believes there is nothing that is impervious to a joke.Thus his shocking introduction to his fascinating tour exploring the phenomenon of those who deny the Holocaust ever happened (for BBC Two). It was unabashedly and appealingly personal. His grandparents escaped to Britain from Germany just before the war and to them Read more ...