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Homeland, Series 5, Channel 4Monday, 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. Read more... |
Return to Larkinland, BBC FourMonday, 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. Read more... |
Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death, BBC TwoSunday, 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. Read more... |
Music for Misfits: The Story of Indie, BBC FourSaturday, 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. Read more... |
Unforgotten, ITVFriday, 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. Read more... |
Doctor Foster, Series Finale, BBC OneThursday, 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. Read more... |
The Celts: Blood, Iron, and Sacrifice, BBC TwoTuesday, 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. Read more... |
From Darkness, BBC OneMonday, 05 October 2015
This is the first of two new TV series this week to feature a female police officer investigating the discovery of long-buried skeletons (the other one is Thursday's Unforgotten on ITV). The two shows are different in tone, but still reminiscent of numerous noir-ish policiers of recent vintage. It makes you wonder whether commissioning editors are trying hard enough. Read more... |
Storyville: A Syrian Love Story, BBC FourTuesday, 29 September 2015
Managing the boundaries of closeness in documentary filmmaking can be a complicated issue. Does the documentarist figure only as a fly-on-the-wall observer – or become involved, caught up in the story of his or her subject? Is it possible to maintain a distinction? When, and what is going too far? Read more... |
Cider with Rosie, BBC OneMonday, 28 September 2015
For the final instalment of its season of 20th-century classics, the BBC left the world of fiction behind and took a Rosie-tinted amble along the leafy byways of Laurie Lee’s youth. The first part of Lee’s autobiographical trilogy is much the most read. Sales of six million means Cider with Rosie has a lot of fans who will have watched this dramatisation anxiously fearing the worst. Read more... |
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