TV
Marina Vaizey
Drums away: Stewart Copeland, drummer with The Police and a score of other groups, composer for films, video games and operas, now beams enthusiastically at us from the small screen. He’s writer and presenter of this three-part Adventures in Music series for BBC Four, which has as its thesis his view that music is what made us human, differentiated us from the Neanderthal and was our earliest form of communication. Sounds came before words. Copeland was imprinted early. He remembered sitting in a dark room aged seven, listening to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, and recognising in some way Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We hear plenty of debate about climate change and its disastrous potential, but the ballooning growth of the world’s population may be the most critical issue facing humankind. Chris Packham thinks so (“it’s undeniably the elephant in the room,” he says, though lack of elephants is one of its many alarming symptoms) and in this documentary for BBC Two he criss-crossed the planet to show us the evidence.The earth’s population is about 7.7 billion now and is predicted to reach 10 billion by 2050. Packham touched down in Sao Paolo, Brazil, where the population is five times greater than London’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The race continues to create the most ridiculous cooking programme on TV. Channel 4’s new brainchild, Crazy Delicious, finds the culinary nutty professor Heston Blumenthal teaming up with fellow-judges Carla Hall and Niklas Ekstedt to become the “Gods of Food”.Each week, three amateur contestants turn up on a studio set which supposedly represents some kind of mythical garden or bosky glade from classical mythology (though with its warped scenery and funny-coloured foliage, it mostly looks like something out of an ancient episode of Star Trek), where they can find an exotic array of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stephen King’s novels have generated an impressive lineage of successful adaptations. This HBO treatment (on Sky Atlantic) of his 2018 novel The Outsider, developed by Richard Price and featuring screenwriting input from Dennis Lehane, is shaping up as one of the best TV incarnations. If the first two episodes established an atmosphere of pervasive horror and dread, this third one began to lure the realistically-drawn world of Cherokee City, Georgia further into King’s familiar supernatural territory.It’s a town metaphorically shot in black and white, where nothing cheerful ever looks likely Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If nothing else, you’d want to tune in to Cobra (Sky 1) for its cast. Robert Carlyle is steely and decisive as Prime Minister Robert Sutherland, his indispensable fixer Anna Marshall is played by Victoria “Queen Mother” Hamilton, and David Haig oozes bullying malevolence as Home Secretary Archie Glover-Morgan. Solid support from Lucy Cohu and Richard Dormer adds up to a substantial thespathon.Whether the story, penned by Spooks and The Tunnel writer Ben Richards, will carry us convincingly to the finishing tape remains to be seen, but this opener was an amusing blend of political knife- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s an intriguing question. If a new Messiah appeared today, what kind of reception could he (if it was a he) expect? Possibly something similar to the one which greeted Jesus, according to Netflix’s new series Messiah.Created by Michael Petroni, it stars Mehdi Debhi in the role of Al-Masih, a man who never makes explicit claims for his divine powers, but who is accompanied by a trail of miraculous phenomena as he travels around the world. Al-Masih resembles a Christ-figure as imagined by a painter from the Italian Renaissance, and radiates a charismatic aura which compels people to follow Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sky Atlantic is usually where you go for big-hitting dramas, so this quartet of observational documentaries is an unexpected development. Each film follows a single family over three years, and each family faces particular challenges.In this opener, director Clare Richards went to Newport in south Wales to follow the progress of Tony Borg and his wife-to-be Emma, due to marry in May 2018. Both of them had a fair amount of baggage to bring to the party. Tony, an ex-boxer turned successful boxing coach, had eight children, and Emma had four. Indeed, by the end of the film, Tony had acknowledged Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Filmmaker Tom Costello’s opening question in this quixotic but fascinating documentary for Channel 4 deftly skewered the journey he was about to take us on. Was making change or finding fame more important? he asked, and by the end of the story it was crystal clear where the main protagonists stood.Costello’s subject was the passionate, sometimes demented-looking conviction with which committed vegans advance their cause, in particular the way vegan activists are exploiting the potential of online channels including Instagram and YouTube. The likes of Earthling Ed and Earth Angel Jacqueline Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
An idyllic Scottish classroom full of happy children making sponge paintings of flowers with two enthusiastic young teachers – clearly, doom is in the air. Here comes that sense of dread again a little later at a ceilidh in a village hall, with everyone trying a little too hard to look happy. And it’s soon confirmed in a flash-forward to a pathologist wiping down an autopsy table.The first of the four episodes of C4's Deadwater Fell, written and created by Daisy Coulam (Humans, Grantchester) and directed by Lynsey Miller, is gripping and disturbing, with a strong cast, though some of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's the smallest lies that can bring you down. When he is asked by a detective how he got on with his family, who have just been murdered in a mass shooting at their Essex farm, Jeremy Bamber (Freddie Fox) says: “Really well. We were friends.” A quizzical look briefly scutters across the face of his cousin Ann Eaton (Gemma Whelan) who overhears. As this six-part series unfolds, we will see that it was pointless mistruths like that that would help bring about Bamber's eventual undoing.It was one of many subtle moments of doubt dropped into ITV's White House Farm, which tells the story of how Read more ...
Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle, BBC Four review - meticulous account of a haunting American tragedy
Adam Sweeting
It happened 42 years ago, but the mass suicide of 900 people at the Jonestown settlement in Guyana is still an event that freezes the blood. They were members of the Peoples Temple, the semi-totalitarian cult founded by Jim Jones, who began as a mere egomaniac but morphed into a bullying dictator convinced of his own God-like powers.This was the first of two 80-minute Storyville films (on BBC Four) but the length paid off, allowing director Shan Nicholson to assemble a meticulously detailed portrait of the way Jones built up his “Temple” and persuaded ostensibly rational people to follow him Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Series about fishing have become a durable mini-genre, including the likes of Deadliest Catch and Saltwater Heroes. However, this new six-parter on BBC Two brings us much closer to home than Alaska or Tasmania, and probes into the lives of the fishing families of the Cornish village of Mevagissey.Unlike many other British ports, Mevagissey is enjoying a comparative boom in its fishing business, with 74 active boats in its harbour, but that doesn’t mean that fishing the Cornish coastal waters is a licence to print money. Frequently, the fishermen are only one bad season from bankruptcy, and Read more ...