sun 27/07/2025

tv

Syria: Across the Lines, Channel 4

Terry Friel

Covering both sides of a conflict is never easy. Apart from the physical dangers, warring parties are wary of journalists who've reported on and established ties with the enemy. Afghanistan showed this as clearly as anywhere, when the US forces were suspicious of any journalists with Taliban contacts.

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Endeavour, Series 1, ITV

Jasper Rees

Where will it end? Inspector Morse keeled over all the way back in the year 2000. Then the faintly unimaginable happened. Morse’s plodding sidekick Lewis got a promotion and started solving Oxford’s apparently inexhaustible supply of murders himself. When Lewis retired this January, the logical choice would have been to hand the baton on his lanky junior.  Hathaway sounds like a series, doesn't it?

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The Security Men, ITV

Lisa-Marie Ferla

Does Caroline Aherne hate women? Surely not, but given that there have been plenty of painfully humourless so-called comedies over the years with this heavy a reliance on recurring jokes about older women’s breasts you could be forgiven for hoping that one of the country’s most high-profile comediennes might use her position to produce something a little less puerile than The Security Men.

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Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea, BBC One

Jasper Rees

The cup of tea is a national institution that brings comfort and good cheer to millions. So is Victoria Wood. Blend them in a pot and you’ve got a pleasing brew called Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea. It might not have been so. When Wood last ventured out into the former Empire it was to visit all the places in the world named after Queen Victoria. The concept felt slightly stewed. Not here.

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Scott & Bailey, Series 3, ITV

Adam Sweeting

I don't know how accurate Scott & Bailey is as a portrayal of the daily experiences of policewomen, but screenwriter Sally Wainwright is enjoying herself hugely with the chaotic private lives of her protagonists. Quite a bit of this echoes back to the death of barrister Nick Savage (the ineffably sleazy Rupert Graves) in series two. He was DC Rachel Bailey's lover, though he'd failed to mention that he was already married with two children.

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Arne Dahl: The Blinded Man - Part One, BBC Four

Kieron Tyler

Swedish cop drama Arne Dahl snugly fits BBC Four’s Saturday-evening slot for continental European TV imports, but it also suggests that the well might be running dry. Based on the opening episode there’s not much intrinsically wrong with it, but it’s not distinctive and – beyond Irene Lindh’s forceful portrayal of lead detective Jenny Hultin – lacks any characteristically Scandinavian markers.

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High Art of the Low Countries, BBC Four

Fisun Güner

There was a time when the art of the Low Countries was considered to be very lowly and base indeed. It was the high art of Italy that counted if you were a person of culture and breeding. Not for you the carousing common folk of Jan Steen, or those watery flatlands of Van Goyen, touched with too much bleak realism. It was the arcadian Campagna of Claude – like Poussin a Frenchman but with the Rubicon flowing through his veins – that you looked to.

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The Other Pompeii: Life and Death in Herculaneum, BBC Two

Fisun Güner

Ten years ago Peter Nicholson made a BBC drama about Pompeii and its destruction. This fictionalised reconstruction, depicting made-up characters in togas saying made-up things, sounded cheesier than a pound of Brie, but was actually completely gripping: you knew what was coming, but you rooted for the characters all the same. And while it had all the ingredients of a tense thriller, nothing got in the way of telling the story clearly and intelligently.

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Jonathan Creek: The Clue of the Savant's Thumb, BBC One

Adam Sweeting

Three years after Jonathan Creek's last one-off special, tellies across the land resounded once again to the strains of Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre, a theme tune cunningly chosen to reflect the show's mix of menace, wit and whimsy.

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Game of Thrones, Series 3, Sky Atlantic

Demetrios Matheou

We hear ghastly, otherworldly shrieks and human screams over a black screen, which then fades to white and the sight of a man running for this life through a snowy wilderness. As he approaches a seated figure, he cries out, “friend”, only to find the poor chap holding his own head in his lap.

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