TV
Markie Robson-Scott
“Get those worksheets in by Monday or I will Brexit the lot of you,” says turbo-charged teacher Aine (Aisling Bea: The Fall, Gap Year) to her London TEFL class. Her students have just enjoyed a stimulating lesson built around the Kardashian family tree. “Kim is the…” Aine waits for the answer. “Yes, well done, the second eldest. And Khloé is the…yes, the middle one. She was the youngest until along came Kendall and Kylie.”Aisling Bea’s lovable new six-part comedy drama, co-starring Sharon Horgan as Aine’s older sister Shona (the two have worked together before, but this is the first script of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the final instalment of Dominic Savage’s trilogy of stand-alone dramas for Channel 4, Gemma Chan took the title role of a single woman in her mid-thirties, struggling with awkward choices about motherhood, relationships and settling down. Her mother, despairing of ever having grandchildren, was urging Hannah to “make a plan and stick to it.”That’s all very well, but how? Hannah experimented with online dating, but she felt like a fish out of water and it only confirmed her worst fears. One guy made it plain that he only wanted one thing, and he had no time for Hannah’s ditherings. “I don’t Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Being a teenager used to be fun, allegedly, but for the young cast of HBO’s controversial new hit series Euphoria it looks more like a nightmare ride through a theme park of bad trips. Filmed in various Los Angeles locations, Euphoria (showing on Sky Atlantic) follows the interconnected stories of a group of teens battling with issues including drugs, sex, gender and family breakdown.Anyone expecting lightweight escapism should look away now. Euphoria pulls no punches in its depiction of drug abuse, and its graphic, brutal sex sequences (episode one even shows an erect penis) have already Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A sad story of lonely men, Simon Rawles's atmospheric and beautifully shot documentary has no narration, apart from the occasional faint, off-camera question from the interviewer. This makes everything more depressing. We’re alone on a nightmare ride, starting with Catfishman. “I catfish females. I’m a legend in the community, a hero.” He is living somewhere snowy and motionless in north America, we’re not told where, and spends his days constructing fake online profiles, targeting women. His mindset is grim. “I pose as a male model, good-looking and attractive, and I set up dates. I reel Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
While a spot of home cooking can be a relaxing experience with a nice meal at the end of it, signing up to this culinary campaign with Michelin-starred mega-chef Jason Atherton is like being sent off to join the Foreign Legion. The plan is that Atherton and his trusted advisers Dale and Andy pick a squad of young, untried chefs from around Britain, then take them to top restaurants across Europe to see if they can beat the locals at their own recipes.They began in Puglia, southern Italy, at a restaurant called Osteria Origano, where they were greeted by the cheerful proprietor Alfredo and his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s been nearly a decade since the sixth and final series of Lost, JJ Abrams’s baffling odyssey of time-travelling air crash survivors, but judging by Manifest, its influence still hovers over TV-land. Produced by (among others) film director Robert Zemeckis, Manifest is another mystical thriller that might make you think twice about boarding that holiday flight.This first episode began with vacationers gathering at the airport in Montego Bay, Jamaica for their flight home to New York. We zoomed in on the Stone family, comprising Ben, his wife Grace and two children, his sister Michaela and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This episode of the celebrity genealogy show began with footage of Naomie Harris at Ian Fleming's former home in Jamaica, where she was helping launch Bond 25 (to be released next year), in which she is playing Moneypenny for the third time. It was a fitting location, as Harris’s folks hail from the Caribbean; her mother was born in Jamaica and her father's family are from Trinidad via Grenada.But, unusually for a subject of this consistently engaging show, Harris told us she was never interested in her origins. It was a strange admission – what really, no interest at all? – but one that a Read more ...
Tom Baily
Cindy Sherman predicted the selfie, so goes the claim. From our current standpoint, it is all too easy to analyse her many hundreds of photographic self-portraits made since the late 1970s as cultural forebears of the digital medium. What this BBC Arena film opens up, alongside that bold claim, is a question about the mystery of Sherman as a person: who is she and why has she done what she’s done? Always reclusive, refusing public appearances, and elusive about her work, Sherman seems to have designed the enigmatic tone with which she is publicly discussed. Here, a small but rewarding effort Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was a year ago that BBC One scored a smash hit with the first series of Keeping Faith, but as series two opens 18 months have passed since Faith Howells’s husband Evan (Bradley Freegard) disappeared and triggered a traumatic chain reaction of events. Apparently the patriarch of a close and loving family, with himself and Faith both working in the family law firm, Evan had become embroiled in all sorts of murky stuff (bribery, corruption, perverting the course of justice etc). Was this really the devoted husband and father that Faith had known?All will be revealed across these six new Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s a bold idea by director Dominic Savage, to create three improvised dramas for Channel 4 depicting women confronting different forms of crisis. To make it work he needed brave and powerful performers, and this first one starred Vicky McClure (the remaining two will feature Samantha Morton and Gemma Chan).McClure’s Nicola was a hairdresser, caught in a deteriorating relationship with her partner Adam (Perry Fitzpatrick, pictured below with McClure), and she was reaching her wits’ end trying to find a solution. The piece was mostly shot in the couple’s suburban home, the claustrophobic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was on 16 July 1969 that Apollo 11 lifted off from Florida en route for the Moon, and exactly 50 years later, as we nervously anticipate the dawn of commercial flights into space, the event resonates louder than ever. Here, Professor Brian Cox called it “the greatest achievement in the history of civilisation.” According to veteran broadcaster Sir Trevor McDonald, it was “the most magnificent thing that ever happened.”The TV networks have been saturating us in moon-shot memorabilia, and in the cinema we’ve had Todd Douglas Miller’s imposing feature-length documentary Apollo 11, but this Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not everybody is on Facebook, yet. So far, Mark Zuckerberg’s social media monolith has only managed to scrape together about 2.3 billion users, roughly one-third of the planet. But as this fascinating documentary revealed, Facebook’s plans are huge and its ambitions boundless.The title alluded to recent problems at Facebook, including the massive 2018 data breach in which the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica acquired information from 87 million Facebook users, and its struggles against online hate crime. These crises temporarily knocked 20 per cent off Facebook’s share price, and Read more ...