TV
Adam Sweeting
Thing is, a lot of this unpleasantness could have been avoided if DI Jimmy Perez had just watched the second series of The Missing. From this he could have deduced that there was every chance that Derek Riddell (who plays Chris Brooks in Shetland (BBC One), and was sinister kidnapper Adam Gettrick in The Missing) was a thoroughly bad egg, and cut to the chase a good deal sooner than he eventually did.However, Perez’s sleuthing instincts had been severely blunted by his growing entanglement with Brooks’s wife Alice (Catherine Walker), and as a couple they seemed potentially to have quite a lot Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ask most people what a showband is and they’ll give you a blank look. But ask any Irish person (or those born in the Irish diaspora) who is north of 50 and they will probably look misty-eyed. For between the late 1950s and 1980s showbands were a huge Irish cultural phenomenon, and Ardal O’Hanlon was our amiable guide through this brief but illuminating history of them.Taking a break from his Caribbean sojourn in Death in Paradise, in Showbands: How Ireland Learned to Party O'Hanlon explained that Ireland in the 1960s was very different to the young, outward-looking country it is now – poor, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As fans of Inspector Morse are well aware, there are plenty of snakes lurking in the grass at our premier seats of learning. In place of Morse’s Oxford, Cheat brings us leafy, picturesque Cambridge, presented here as an agreeable haven of historic quadrangles, relaxing riverside bistros and alluringly wooded suburbs.However, for university lecturer Dr Leah Dale (Katherine Kelly), her enjoyment of this fenland idyll is being eroded by one of her students, Rose Vaughan (Molly Windsor). A sullen, monosyllabic grump who turns up late to seminars and never makes any oral contributions, Rose Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The limitless goodwill generated by The Office earned Ricky Gervais the right to do and say as he pleased. Thus, hosting the Golden Globes, he was toweringly rude to Hollywood royalty. In Extras he gleefully portrayed celebrities as vain and ghastly. In The Invention of Lying he explored the logical consequence of a world in which people say what they really think. Add to that the brisk frankness of his stand-up shows, in which he insulted the religious and derided the overweight. Speaking the truth was his self-styled superpower.His misanthropy arrives at a logical terminus in After Life ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not just the Peter Pan of Pop, but also its very own Houdini. With the aid of shed-loads of money, an illusion-spinning PR machine and the most aggressive lawyers that money could buy, Michael Jackson managed to make it to his premature exit in 2009 without being sent to jail. Dan Reed’s sprawling two-part documentary Leaving Neverland comes to bury Jackson, and to do posthumously what nobody managed to achieve in his lifetime.Reed focuses on the stories of two boys who became, for a time – or perhaps forever, considering the terrible emotional legacy it all left them with – Jackson’s pets. Read more ...
Owen Richards
When Derry Girls premiered on Channel 4 in early 2018, there was little fanfare. But it’s been a whirlwind year for the four girls from Derry (and the wee English lad), capturing British hearts before conquering the US through Netflix. Their return in 2019 heralds a much bigger reaction, with faces plastered on front pages and buildings (including a traditional Derry mural). Can these comic upstarts meet the considerably raised expectations?Well, leave it to the ethereally oblivious Orla to quell any early reservations. Interrupting Erin in the tub as she wistfully imagines Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a super-talented woman Phoebe Waller-Bridge is. Hot on the heels of the success of her adaptation of Killing Eve, she now spoils us with a second series of Fleabag (BBC Three, then BBC One) that opened with an episode so gobsmackingly good that I wanted to give her a standing ovation in my living room when I watched it for the second time. (In fact, like everybody else at a press screening a few weeks ago, I had done just that.)Fleabag began life as a one-woman show (directed by Waller-Bridge's long-time collaborator Vicky Jones) at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013. Waller-Bridge then pulled Read more ...
Tim Cumming
French actor and director Sandrine Bonnaire’s warm, langorous film portrait of la Faithfull may not the first – that accolade goes to Michael Collins’s feature-length Dreaming my Dreams (2000), featuring Mick, Keith, Anita and John Dunbar – but it does feel like a refreshingly deep-focus, specifically female take on her life and mythos, intimate yet kept at a decorous arm’s length by its subject, who by turns seems to want to open up while firmly closing her atelier doors on too much interior revelation. There are several times in the film when she holds her hand up to Bonnaire, asking her, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“It’s never been about the success to me,” says Marc Almond, “It’s always been about the adventure.” It’s a great attitude that’s writ large over the band’s uncompromising flame-out of an early Eighties pop career. Soft Cell: Say Hello, Wave Goodbye was a welcome celebration of this electronic duo, often under-appreciated as 24 carat songwriters, although it sometimes failed to encapsulate the band’s obtuse hedonic outsider dynamic.The pivot on which the hour-long documentary turned was Soft Cell’s one-off, sold-out reunion concert at the O2 last autumn. There was enjoyable footage of Almond Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some things never change. About 60 per cent of this first show in Strike Back’s seventh series consisted of Mac McAllister (Warren Brown) and his intrepid Section 20 squad mowing down members of a Malaysian triad gang with automatic weapons. The triad people didn’t help themselves by all wearing black suits with white shirts and running like lemmings into the line of fire, where they did a funny little jitterbug dance on the spot as they were pumped full of bullets.But that’s the way they like it in Strike Back world, where there isn’t an imminent global catastrophe that can’t be solved by Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“I’ve remained a vital presence on the fringes of TV Land,” argues Alan Partridge in an interview with Radio Times, the man whose latest claim to… well, not fame, but at least he has been presenting Mid Morning Matters on North Norfolk Digital. For this new series, Partridge has been hauled out of the low-rent regional twilight zone where somebody called Jenny does the station’s accounts in an exercise book to provide sickness cover on the anodyne BBC TV magazine show, This Time.On the This Time sofa he’s joined by Jennie Gresham (Susannah Fielding), who keeps the show rolling along with a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Curfew (Sky One) is a new drama that begins as it means to go on, roaring from nought to 60 with a wildly implausible car chase. An electric blue McLaren is haring and weaving through London, with the law in hot pursuit. Forget the computer-generated high-speed U-turn and the armour-plated panda cars. We are clearly in the outer reaches of sci-fi alt reality because the arteries are miraculously unclogged of jams that snarl and belch with white vans and Priuses. Bet they don’t even have the congestion charge.This London, with its gleaming towers, would be paradise if only the eponymous curfew Read more ...