thu 31/07/2025

tv

Episodes, Series 2, BBC Two

graeme Thomson

There have been some highly unlikely couplings in the long history of television comedy, but the one between Debbie from The Archers and Joey from Friends in the first series of Episodes ranked somewhere near the top of the list. If the viewers struggled to be convinced by that oddly implausible tryst, at least we weren’t alone.

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Street of Dreams, Manchester Arena

philip Radcliffe

Street of dreams? The people who lived in the real-life inspiration and location for Coronation Street, Archie Street in Salford, hand-picked by the soap’s begetter Tony Warren, would be flummoxed and flabbergasted to hear it called that. I walked down Archie Street several times when the TV soap started. The two-up, two down, back-to-back terraced houses, separated by a three-foot alleyway, had no baths, no hot water, no inside lavatories and were dubbed “a disgrace to society”.

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Prisoners of War, Sky Arts 1

Adam Sweeting

This is, as you may have heard, the Israeli TV series which provided the inspiration for Homeland, smartly snapped up by Sky Arts to plug the gap left by the latter after last weekend's finale. And guess what - it may be even better than its Hollywood spin-off.

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Sporting Heroes: After the Final Whistle, BBC One

Jasper Rees

It’s a funny old game. Sport rewards the talented when they are young and their bodies responsive. A profession which requires the reflexes to work in instant harmony with the brain means that beyond a certain age, the gifted become instantly unemployable the moment they lose their magic powers. A case of they don’t think it’s all over: it is now.

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Cardinal Burns, E4

Veronica Lee

It's always a pleasure to watch comics first seen and enjoyed playing a tiny room at the Edinburgh Fringe make their television debut; it's an even greater pleasure to see two immensely talented comics make such an accomplished entrée as Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns did last night. But then they have a track record: in 2006 the duo (then performing as a threesome with Sophie Black as Fat Tongue) were nominated for best newcomer in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards.

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Homeland, Series Finale, Channel 4

Emma Dibdin

The course of the serialised drama finale never did run smooth, particularly in the case of a show like Homeland, which has structured its entire run around a slow-building sense of queasy, paranoid dread with, thus far, very little real payoff.

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Maestro at the Opera, BBC Two

philip Radcliffe

Even in this age of desperate reality TV, you have to have doubts about any show that tries to convert “celebrities” into serious contenders in an alien field. Is it serious or a padded-out joke? To an extent we’ve been here, or close by, before.

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Awake, Sky Atlantic

Emma Dibdin

Try this for high concept. Following a fatal car accident involving his family, LA cop Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs) gains access to two parallel realities. Every time he goes to sleep, he crosses between the two – in one, his wife survived the crash while his son died; in the other, he’s a widower but his son lived. The two realities parallel one another in every respect: in each he has a different therapist, a different stereotypical sidekick, and a different murder to solve.

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Shakespeare in Italy, BBC Two

Fiona Sturges

Francesco da Mosto’s two-parter is ostensibly about the Bard and his fascination with the TV historian’s native Italy. In reality, it’s a film about da Mosto and his apparently God-given, below-the-belt hotness. Given the camera’s ceaseless drooling at the presenter, a more honest title would have been “Ladies! Get a load of this!”

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Braquo, FX

Kieron Tyler

The first series of the French cops gone-to-pot drama ended with Lieutenant Eddy Caplan about to blow the head off his nemesis Serge Lemoine. Offing him was supposed to solve all Caplan and his team’s problems. Unfortunately, Lemoine was fitted with a wire and things didn’t go to plan. Series two began in the immediate aftermath with Caplan, his in do-do colleagues and Lemoine caged in the back of police van.

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