tv | The Arts Desk

tv

The South Bank Show: Benedict Cumberbatch, Sky Arts

Marina Vaizey Thursday, 15 October 2015

It’s huge, it’s just huge, said Benedict Cumberbatch, struggling to express the scale of the challenge that playing Hamlet presents.

The Apprentice, Series 11, BBC One

Veronica Lee Thursday, 15 October 2015

Where do they find them? The candidates for each new series of The Apprentice, that is. It's not as if they don't know the score by now - humiliation, first in the boardroom by Lord Sugar and his clunking putdowns, and then on nationwide television. But it makes good telly, so hoorah for series 11, with 18 more numpties vying for Sugar's £250,000 investment in their business plan.

River, BBC One

Jasper Rees Wednesday, 14 October 2015

Crime drama is a bit like the wheel. There’s only so much scope for reinvention. People try to come up with novelties all the time, then you turn on the telly and realise everyone else has had the same idea. Rumpled cops in macs, ex-cops haunted by the past, cops with overbearing bosses descended from Jane Tennison – they’re all out there, all the time. Even the casting department is running on empty.

Homeland, Series 5, Channel 4

Adam Sweeting Monday, 12 October 2015

Stunningly reinvented in series four, Homeland sustained the momentum with this tense and menacing fifth season opener. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) has now quit the CIA for a new job in Berlin, where she's working as head of security for billionaire philanthropist Otto Düring (Sebastian Koch). The past, however, is not giving up without a fight.

Return to Larkinland, BBC Four

Tom Birchenough Monday, 12 October 2015

Return to Larkinland was the second of AN Wilson’s intimate portraits of poets, following his similar excursion to “Betjemanland” last year.

Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death, BBC Two

Matthew Wright Sunday, 11 October 2015

The tragic love of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath is probably Britain’s most notorious 20th-century relationship. While other controversies – for example, those of Wallace Simpson, John Profumo and Princess Diana – have been laid to rest, Hughes and Plath are still generating headlines more than 50 years after Plath’s suicide in 1963.

Comment

Music for Misfits: The Story of Indie, BBC Four

Barney Harsent Saturday, 10 October 2015

If there was any doubt as to the musical preferences of BBC4's commissioning arm, consider this: the whole history of funk got an hour. Meanwhile, indie music – a niche, artistic movement that somehow ended up drinking champagne while wallowing in its own mess by the mid-Nineties – gets a three-part series. Just thought I’d mention it.

Comment

Unforgotten, ITV

Jasper Rees Friday, 09 October 2015

The rule doesn’t always hold good, but in a television drama a fairly reliable kitemark of quality is when the opening credits list the cast and you’ve heard of them. The title sequence of Unforgotten promised Trevor Eve, Nicola Walker, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Tom Courtenay, Gemma Jones, Ruth Sheen, Peter Egan, Hannah Gordon, Bernard Hill, Cherie Lunghi and Tom Cobbleigh. OK not Uncle Tom, but you get the picture.

Doctor Foster, Series Finale, BBC One

Veronica Lee Thursday, 08 October 2015

Revenge dramas are such a guilty pleasure - there's a vicarious thrill in watching a baddie being taken down in a way that we might wish to, but never would, in real life. And boy, but did Gemma take down cheating husband Simon in the closing episode of Mike Bartlett's Doctor Foster. Senior GP Gemma and hip property developer Simon's perfect life, with their perfect house and their perfect son was, of course, anything but - and finally it all came crashing down.

The Celts: Blood, Iron, and Sacrifice, BBC Two

Marina Vaizey Tuesday, 06 October 2015

Not a ray of sunshine illuminated the landscapes that were explored in this stormy programme, the first of a three-part history of the Celts. It aimed not only to show the latest investigations into the Bronze and Iron Age tribes who inhabited Europe from Turkey to Britain but to suggest their culture was richer than the simple cliché of barbarians at the gate.