TV
Adam Sweeting
This eight-part mystery from Netflix is based on the titular novel by American writer Harlan Coben, who has formed a production company with Rochdale’s own Nicola Schindler, the production brains behind Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax and many more. The action has been transposed from New Jersey to Manchester – the one in England, not Massachusetts – and a strong and varied British cast does the heavy lifting, but there’s something in the mix that never quite feels right. Maybe it’s that things that seem par for the course in America’s moronic inferno can look hilarious in a homely Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Roland Orzabal, co-founder and lead guitarist of Tears for Fears, laughs to himself often during this documentary — the latest in the BBC’s often-excellent, always-forensic Classic Albums series. “I agree, I agree, it sounds great,” says Orzabal. He’s listening to “Shout,” the band’s 1984 Billboard No. 1 hit. “There’s something about it,” he chuckles, “I believed it.” The documentary focuses on Orzabal and Curt Smith, Tears for Fears’ founders and frontmen, and the development of their album-topping record Songs From The Big Chair (1985). It tells the somewhat unlikely tale of how a cathartic Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Netflix’s Sex Education has returned to our screens and streams. The show made waves last year for its refreshing take on the teen comedy-drama. It took on abortion, consent and female pleasure — subjects strikingly absent from our actual high school educations. The result was a show that was always bingeable, sometimes educative, and oozing with sex-positive delights. Not everyone liked it. But those of us who did — teenagers all over again — could not stop talking about it. These are high expectations for a show going into its sophomore season. But thank God and thank Laurie Nunn: this is a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The return of screenwriter Abi Morgan’s series about a largely-female London law firm is no doubt in tune with our gender and equality-conscious times, but that doesn’t mean it’s great television. Its legal storylines are counterpointed against episodes of sentimentality and self-congratulation, as if it wanted to be The Good Wife but ended up as Doctors. It’s the kind of show where a character might notice an old photo on the mantelpiece and drift off in a sentimental reverie, encouraged by insipid singer-songwriter balladry.The best news is Nicola Walker, who clothes herself in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You could sometimes begin to believe that the notion of original TV drama is dying out, replaced by an interminable stream of adaptations and remakes. Did somebody mention Dracula? Screenwriter Sarah Phelps is currently the BBC’s go-to specialist for makeovers of Agatha Christie, having adapted The Witness for the Prosecution, And Then There Were None, The ABC Murders, and Ordeal by Innocence.She’s unapologetic about the extensive changes she wreaks upon Christie’s source material (in Ordeal by Innocence, she notoriously changed the identity of the killer). “Have I changed a load of stuff? Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The nation’s public attics – museums – hold a huge jumble of objects collected and used in all sorts of ways to tell us stories of past and present. In this BBC Two film, we went behind the visible face of the Victoria and Albert, with its holdings of more than two million objects, to visit a complementary hidden world staffed by technicians, conservators and curators tending to their charges.The breadth and depth of the collections were truly startling. Bethnal Green’s Museum of Childhood, a branch of the V&A held the biggest collection in Britain of children’s toys. We met the deeply Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The L Word originally ran for six seasons between 2004 and 2009, and its then-revolutionary depiction of the lives of a group of lesbians in Los Angeles won it both a fanatical audience and acclaim for its game-changing content, exploring such topics as same-sex marriage, gay adoption and female sexuality which weren't being seen elsewhere on TV. But more than a decade later, how will this revamped version (on Sky Atlantic) fare?Whereas the prototype landed in a TV environment where viewers needed extra-sensory perception to detect a lesbian (let alone trans) character, that now feels like Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The benefits system is feared for its resemblance to a vast poisonous swamp, from whose clutches many travellers fail to return. Universal Credit began to be rolled out in 2013, having been announced in 2010 by Conservative work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, and was supposed to bulldoze a path through the welfare jungle. However, it remains mired in controversy.Critics claim the system is complicated to navigate, and causes delays in payment which can drive claimants into homelessness or force them to rely on food banks. Only this week it was announced that the full implementation Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Inspector Muhsin al-Khafaji of the Iraqi police may be set to become one of those classically dog-eared, depressed and down-at-heel detectives who have proliferated in crime fiction. He could join a lineage that includes Martin Cruz Smith’s battered Russian sleuth Arkady Renko, or Bernie Gunther, anti-hero of Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy. Or he may create his own category of one.Like the aforementioned, Khafaji finds himself battling for survival against a hostile regime (or at least the chaotic and combustible remains of one, as the heavy-handed Americans impose themselves on a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Are you a fan of oysters or Marmite? Mary Beard is not to everybody’s taste, but love her or loathe her she is not only a distinguished academic but a ubiquitous writer and presenter of classical histories, connected travels, and ruminations on societal problems. She is enthusiastic, staggeringly energetic, erudite, profoundly knowledgable, the antithesis of fashionable in both opinion and appearance.Surprisingly, this survey (on BBC Two) of representations of the nude in Western art was unusually bland, at times banal, even though our presenter obviously set out to be provoking. There are a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz reminds us once again of the unfathomable horror of the Holocaust. The revival of anti-semitism in our own country and elsewhere is why it’s worth telling these terrible stories again and again.Belsen: Our Story (BBC Two) gathered together a small group of survivors – all looking remarkably healthy, considering their age and their experiences – to knit together the saga of the Belsen-Bergen camp in northern Germany. Originally an internment camp for prisoners of war, it was only later redesignated a concentration camp, and became steadily Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Journalist Sunny Hundal has a long track record as a writer and blogger concerned with issues of race, politics and ethnicity. He’s also the brother of the late Jagraj Singh, an influential preacher who encouraged a dramatic upsurge of interest in the Sikh faith among young people, not least through his hugely successful YouTube channel. The determinedly non-religious Sunny used to argue bitterly with his brother, so much so that they didn’t speak to each other for years.Perhaps they would eventually have come to a reconciliation had Jagrav not died of cancer (aged 38) in 2017, but Sunny will Read more ...