TV
Adam Sweeting
This three-part series by historian Lisa Hilton is a follow-up to her previous effort from last July, Charles I: Downfall of a King (BBC Four). That examined his disastrous fall from power, and this first new programme opened just before Christmas 1648, with the melancholy monarch incarcerated in Windsor Castle, separated from his wife and children and with only his dogs for company.In his previous confinement at Carisbrooke, he’d been permitted to engage the services of a mistress, but now the mirthless Puritan grip had tightened around both the king and the nation. Meanwhile in London, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Christmas and Agatha Christie are a very good fit – how better to spend time with your loved ones than sitting down to watch some murder and intrigue together? So Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar was an early festive treat, another enjoyable melding of fact and fiction (mostly fiction, it should be said) from husband-and-wife producer team Tom and Emily Dalton, whose Agatha and the Truth of Murder was a hit for Channel 5 last year.We were in Ur, southern Iraq in 1928 where a team of British archaeologists led by Leonard Woolley (Jack Deam) and his assistants Max (Jonah Hauer-King) and Pearl ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alibi is usually your one-stop shop for re-runs of Father Brown or Death in Paradise, so well done them for commissioning this new murder mystery. It comes with a glittering pedigree, having been created by actor-turned-writer Amelia Bullmore (Scott & Bailey etc) and bestselling crime novelist Val McDermid, but despite a cracking cast it struggles to pass the credibility test.Emma Hedges (Molly Windsor) is an aspiring young lab technician who’s landed herself a prestigious job with the Scottish Institute for Forensic Science and Anatomy (SIFA) in Dundee, where she works under the auspices Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The appalling fate of the allegedly unsinkable liner Titanic in 1912 has fuelled endless feature films and documentaries, not to mention a dismal drama series by Julian Fellowes (there was also a proposed Titanic II vessel which would have been built in China, but which remains mysteriously un-launched). However, it’s difficult to see why this film has appeared 107 and a half years after she sank.Part of an intermittent series called Great British Ships, it was presented by Rob Bell (pictured below), who ends every sentence with at least three imaginary exclamation marks. I lost count of how Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
In films, as in life, unreliable narrators are not hard to find. But there is something remarkable about the unreliable narrator of Elizabeth is Missing, BBC One’s newest feature-length drama. Its protagonist, Maud (Glenda Jackson), is unreliable in the extreme – confused, forgetful and emotionally wounded. Yet unlike most unreliable narrators, we never fear that Maud is trying to sell us a false story. She is so clearly fighting to understand the truth.Here’s the thing: Maud has advancing dementia. She’s a strong-willed 80-something, trying to remain independent as the disease wreaks havoc Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Happily, Joe Barton’s tinglingly original thriller (BBC Two) finished as smartly as it began, not by any humdrum tying-up of loose ends but by giving free rein to the story’s ambiguities and impossible choices. If indeed they really were choices. Earlier in the series, Kelly Macdonald’s Sarah delivered a philosophical manifesto which suggested that we exist in an infinite time-loop – “Everything is controlled by a mad conductor… everything we do is an echo of what we’ve done before.”The question might be, if we keep doing it, do we do it better? One of Giri/Haji’s underlying themes was the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Restorative Justice Practitioner” sounds like a euphemism for a Mad Max-style lone avenger, but in director Anna Hall's devastating film for Channel 4, it was a woman called Kate whose job was to bring together conflicting parties and help find a resolution. Cameras and microphones eavesdropped with pitiless intimacy as Kate brokered a meeting between 30-something Kath and the man who’d raped and abused her when she was seven. The worst of it was that he was her older brother, Robert.Kath had guarded her secret from the rest of her family ever since, as it mercilessly eroded her sense of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Who can explain the mystery of the solitary wolf who has taken up residence on an archipelago off Vancouver Island – the Discovery and Chatham Islands to be precise – and has developed his own unique hunting methods while patrolling his self-contained personal turf? His behaviour runs totally contrary to the close family bonding typical of wolves, but if anybody can shed some light it’s wildlife photographer and environmentalist Cheryl Alexander, who (as we saw in this BBC Four film) has been carefully studying Takaya (it means “wolf” in the language of the indigenous Songhees people) for the Read more ...
Tom Baily
Boris Pahor is the oldest known survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. In this program, the 106-year-old recounts his experiences as a political refugee and prisoner to the Nazis during their rule in his native Slovenia. As a study of one individual, The Man Who Saw Too Much is a graceful attempt to itemise the totality of the Holocaust by viewing it through an especially enlightening lens.Pahor was captive at the Natzweiler camp, which was a comparatively small concentration camp located in the Vosges mountains in Alsace. Its site was chosen because of its proximity to a granite quarry Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s claimed that the current world tour of Tutankhamun’s extraordinary treasures will be the last, but they said that about Frank Sinatra too. Whatever, the boy-pharaoh’s life and legend will retain their unprecedented mystique, but no thanks to this first of three programmes fronted by pop-historian Dan Snow.Obviously Channel 5 doesn’t want to vanish down a black hole of academic obscurity, but cluttering up the scenery with three ill-matched presenters treading on each other’s feet while burbling inanities was not the perfect solution. Snow always has an invisible bubble over his head Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Beware the asteroid Horus! It’s 60km wide and it’s hurtling towards Earth at incalculable speed. Scientists say, with unfeasible precision, that the impact point will be La Rochelle in France, and it’s going to destroy all of western Europe.It’s terrifying, so it’s strange that this new series from Sky Deutschland (showing on Sky Atlantic) is so flat and uninvolving. The eight days of the title is the time left until armageddon arrives, and the story concerns a group of people (whose interconnections are gradually revealed) and how they respond to imminent extinction.The Steiner family have Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of The Sinner in 2017 starred Jessica Biel as a disturbed woman who seemingly inexplicably stabbed a man to death on a beach, then could remember nothing about the crime. This second season on BBC Four finds Biel on board as executive producer, but this time the story is of a young boy who seemingly inexplicably poisons a couple, and admits to doing it.The common thread is detective Harry Ambrose, who’s called in to help out on the new case by Heather Novack (Natalie Paul), the daughter of Harry’s old police buddy Jack Novack (Tracy Letts). Last time around we saw Harry Read more ...