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Field of Blood: The Dead Hour, BBC One

Jasper Rees Friday, 09 August 2013

There are not generally a lot of laughs in dead bodies. So Raymond Chandler saw the funny side of murder, and Carl Hiassen dresses felonies in a bright Hawaiian shirt. But Glasgow, you’d think, would tend to keep corpses and comedy in separate boxes. Not here. Denise Mina’s fiction can keep a straight face when it needs to. Her trilogy of novels set in a hard-boiled Glasgow news room in the early 1980s takes a head-on look at the worst in humanity.

Legally High, Channel 4

Thomas H Green Friday, 09 August 2013

“How much risk are you willing to take when the only benefit is pleasure?” asks toxicologist Dr John Ramsey, as if pleasure in itself were not worth risking much for. He has a collection of over 29,000 psychoactive drugs but doesn’t seem to have much fun with them. He pulls them out of their little drawers, prods them and tells us how in the old days he and his toxicologist chums would have a celebratory drink when a new drug hit the market. Nowadays an avalanche of them is upon us.

Comment

New Tricks, BBC One

Claudia Pritchard Wednesday, 07 August 2013

Moving the action to an exotic location is usually a sign of desperation when a character-based drama is flagging on home turf. New Tricks, most at ease in Soho and Stepney, hobbled into its tenth series with a two-parter set in Gibraltar – which is what passes for an exotic location in a show whose idea of the big chase is a sprint through the botanical gardens.

Comment

Southcliffe, Channel 4

Adam Sweeting Tuesday, 06 August 2013

The last time I noticed Sean Harris he was playing Micheletto Corella, the merciless assassin and enforcer for Pope Jeremy Irons and his Borgia clan. Unpleasantly good at it he was too.

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The Dealership, Channel 4

Adam Sweeting Friday, 02 August 2013

Buying a used car is not for the squeamish at the best of times, but the notion of buying one from something called the Essex Car Company freezes the blood. Yet the idea of making a slice-of-life, fly on the wall, reality-tv-style doc about the aforesaid jalopy-shifting outfit radiates an unmistakeable allure.

Caligula with Mary Beard, BBC Two

Jasper Rees Tuesday, 30 July 2013

Loving the title. Caligula with Mary Beard. Professor Beard has been mentioned adjacently to some rum types of late. Internet trolls. AA Gill. They pale into nothingness, do they not, next to the emperor who mistook his horse for a consul. And his sister for a lover. You've heard the rumours. Caligula was huge in the Seventies, when such garishness blended with the wallpaper. Hence dyed blond crossdressing John Hurt being well weird in I, Claudius.

The Returned, Series Finale, Channel 4

Kieron Tyler Monday, 29 July 2013

It could so easily have been The Walking Dead, where the living endlessly battle an ever-increasing tide of returnees from the beyond. The resurrected in the contemplative Returned weren’t zombies, but actual living people with a desire to pick up where they left off and reintegrate themselves into day-to-day life. Unfortunately for them, and for those they became reacquainted with, it couldn’t go smoothly.

The Mill, Channel 4

Adam Sweeting Monday, 29 July 2013

Does it always have to be so flipping grim up north? In Channel 4's new four-parter, the Mill in question is at Quarry Bank in Cheshire. The date: 1833, during the Industrial Revolution. Villains du jour: the Greg family, industrialists and merciless exploiters of child labour.

Notes from the Inside with James Rhodes, Channel 4

graham Rickson Thursday, 25 July 2013

Most of us could compile soundtracks to our lives. We’d probably save our favourite songs and pieces for the worst bits. Pianist James Rhodes was sectioned in his twenties and maintains that a visitor who smuggled in an iPod stuffed with classical music helped to save his life. He’s refreshingly candid though, admitting slyly that “listening to a piece of Bach isn’t going to fix everything".

Comment

Imagine... Woody Allen: A Documentary, BBC One

Adam Sweeting Wednesday, 24 July 2013

You might wonder if anybody really deserves three and a half hours of TV biography, but after the first half of Robert Weide's immense survey of Woody Allen, the nebbish messiah, I was pawing the carpet in anticipation of part two. Documentaries don't, as a rule, leave you in seizures of mirth, but the judicious selections from Allen's bottomless catalogue carried a sealed-in guarantee of hilarity despite being snatched from their original context.