thu 10/07/2025

tv

True Stories: Joan Rivers - A Piece of Work, More4

Adam Sweeting

This bit was at the end, but it might as well have been at the beginning. Or, really, just bannered across the bottom of the screen all the way through: "I am a performer. That is my life. That is what I am. That's it."

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Spooks: Series Finale, BBC One

Adam Sweeting

The sense of crisis gathering over Spook Central in the last few episodes finally burst through this season finale like a Krakatoa-style cataclysm. Any lingering hopes that Richard Armitage’s Lucas North – the man we now know was really John Bateman – wasn’t really a black-hearted killer were brutally dashed. There was no more wriggle room. Bateman was bad to the bone.

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Downton Abbey: The Finale, ITV1

theartsdesk

Defying predictions that there would be no audience for a period costume drama set in an Edwardian country house, Downton Abbey has become the TV event of 2010. Episode one notched 11.6 million viewers (including repeats and ITV Player viewings), while episode two edged up to 11.8 million.

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The Walking Dead, FX

Adam Sweeting

You’re casting a deputy sheriff from Kentucky who wakes from a coma to find the landscape littered with corpses and overrun by flesh-eating zombies, so who do you call? Well obviously Andrew Lincoln, the irritatingly drippy English actor from Teachers and This Life.

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Ego: The Strange and Wonderful World of Self-Portraits, BBC Four

Fisun Güner Laura Cumming presents 'an intelligent, probing and charming visual essay on a unique genre'

Albrecht Dürer painted himself as Jesus (pictured below). Luckily, he was blessed with the looks, the hair and the initials – echoing the geometry of his golden locks the A straddles the D in his inscribed paintings. And when this German messiah of painting died, his beguiling 1500 self-portrait – one of the most hypnotic ever painted in the history of Western art – was carried through the streets of Nuremburg, his birthplace: celebrated during his life, upon his death Dürer...

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The Trip, BBC Two

Veronica Lee

There’s an interesting back story to The Trip. Before Rob Brydon was “discovered” by Steve Coogan’s Baby Cow production company in 2000, he was a workaday comic and Coogan was then at the height of his Alan Partridge-induced success.

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The Little House, ITV1

Adam Sweeting

I realise actors must be prepared to suffer for their art, but it was truly heroic of Francesca Annis to allow herself to be made up to resemble Cherie Blair after a bout of electro-convulsive therapy compounded by a facelift by Dr Mengele. In The Little House, Annis plays Elizabeth, the cold and controlling mother of Patrick (Rupert Evans, formerly King Richard IV in the hilarious royal soap The Palace).

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Keith Richards: A Culture Show Special, BBC Two

Jasper Rees

“I was a very good soprano.” Of all the sentences you’d not expect to hear tumbling from the mouth of Keith Richards, that one is up there with "Tap water for me, please, and I do hope this vegan restaurant is non-smoking." He has the addled larynx of a Fag Ash Lil who, when not mopping and dusting, perches on a barstool glugging gin and puffing on Bensons. But once upon a time little Richards did once sing for the Queen.

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Agatha Christie's Poirot: Hallowe'en Party, ITV1

Adam Sweeting

David Suchet has been perfecting his impersonation of Hercule Poirot for more than 20 years, perhaps sympathising with Tina Turner’s maxim, “The longer I do it, the better it gets.” The way Suchet keeps finding new little tics and eccentricities to keep the character fresh is a substantial feat, since around him, the fixtures and fittings of Agatha Christie-land have proved impregnable to change.

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Getting On, BBC Four

Veronica Lee

When Getting On, a wonderfully lo-fi and dark sitcom, debuted last year, it had a run of just three episodes, which possibly reflected the BBC’s lack of faith in audiences being able to appreciate a programme rich in subtlety in its writing, acting and direction. But thankfully the Corporation has seen the light and the medical comedy now returns with a six-part run, and is as brilliantly observed and laugh-out-loud funny as ever.

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