wed 23/07/2025

tv

Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle, BBC Four review - meticulous account of a haunting American tragedy

Adam Sweeting

It happened 42 years ago, but the mass suicide of 900 people at the Jonestown settlement in Guyana is still an event that freezes the blood. They were members of the Peoples Temple, the semi-totalitarian cult founded by Jim Jones, who began as a mere egomaniac but morphed into a bullying dictator convinced of his own God-like powers.

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Cornwall: This Fishing Life, BBC Two review - a precarious trade on the ocean wave

Adam Sweeting

Series about fishing have become a durable mini-genre, including the likes of Deadliest Catch and Saltwater Heroes.

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Dracula, BBC One review - horrific, and not in a good way

Adam Sweeting

“Bela Lugosi’s dead,” as Bauhaus sang, in memory of the star of 1931’s Dracula. But of course death has never been an impediment to the career of the enfanged Transylvanian blood-sucker. Filmed and televisualised almost as frequently as Sherlock Holmes, Count Dracula would doubtless join the cockroaches as the only entities to survive a thermonuclear holocaust.

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Dame Edna Rules the Waves / The Graham Norton Show, BBC One review - two ways to run a talk show

Adam Sweeting

Talk shows can go one of two ways. You can create a welcoming space where your guests can kick their shoes off and start telling daringly revealing anecdotes. Alternatively, there’s the Dame Edna formula where the guests are cannon fodder for the host.

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The Trial of Christine Keeler, BBC One review - famous sex scandal makes uneven drama

Adam Sweeting

One good Sixties brouhaha deserves another. After last year’s triumphant revival of the Jeremy Thorpe affair in A Very English Scandal, here comes the sleazy saga of John Profumo, the Conservative Secretary of State for War who was forced to resign from Harold Macmillan’s government in 1963. The cause of his downfall was his brief affair with model and showgirl Christine Keeler, who was 19 when Profumo first met her.

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Best of 2019: TV

theartsdesk

As symbolic moments go, the arrival of Martin Scorsese's new gangster epic The Irishman on Netflix took some beating.

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Liam Gallagher: As It Was, BBC Two review - no expletives deleted in exhausting rock-doc

Kathryn Reilly

Liam Gallagher knows exactly how "fucking fantastic… and fucking shit I am", and proceeds to tell us so for 85 minutes. This 10-year documentary project came about as a result of director Charlie Lightening’s friendship with Gallagher, formed as Oasis came to a predictable halt.

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Gavin & Stacey Christmas Special, BBC One - a big cwtch from Barry

Veronica Lee

What joy to be back with the Shipman and West families, created by writing team James Corden and Ruth Jones.

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Martin's Close, BBC Four review - where did the scary bits go?

Adam Sweeting

The series of short films, A Ghost Story For Christmas, became a Yuletide staple on BBC One in the 1970s. Most of them were adapted from the works of medieval scholar M R James, and drew their unsettling supernatural aura from the understated and academic tone of the writing.

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Cinderella: After Ever After, Sky 1 review - preposterous fairytale sequel tweaks the funny bone

Adam Sweeting

This divertingly daft sequel to the Cinderella story (Sky 1) was the brainchild of David Walliams, who introduced it as himself, sitting smugly by a roaring fire in his authorial smoking jacket.

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