fri 15/08/2025

tv

Run for Your Life, ITV review - giving the nation's youth a sporting chance

Adam Sweeting

With the knife crime epidemic seemingly raging out of control, and the government at its clueless worst as it stumbles around hoping for a quick fix, here was a look at a possible solution.

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Looking for Rembrandt, BBC Four review - painter's biog is a mini-masterpiece

Adam Sweeting

This final episode of BBC Four's Looking for Rembrandt, exploring the life and work of the Netherlands’ greatest painter, was a mini-masterpiece in itself. We rejoined the story in the mid-1650s, when Rembrandt found that his days of popular acclaim and patronage by heads of state and the nobility were behind him...

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Climate Change: The Facts, BBC One review - how much reality can humankind bear?

Katherine Waters

Peer down the glassy dark and you’ll see them. White bubbles trapped in the frozen lake which appear to be rising to the surface. Look through the permafrost this way and you’re seeing into the past: as the ice melts, gas which was captured and stored tens of thousands of years ago when woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed cats stalked Alaska is released into the atmosphere. Each slick of melt water is another decade returning to the rivers.

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Chimerica, Channel 4 review - fake news, true drama

Tom Birchenough

Chimerica is a stage-to-screen adaptation that has certainly kept up with the times.

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Trust Me, Series 2, BBC One review - hospital killer chiller

Adam Sweeting

Great, a new drama not by the Williams brothers. Instead it’s Dan Sefton’s second iteration of his medical thriller Trust Me, last seen in 2017 starring Jody Whittaker.

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Back to Life, BBC Three review - Daisy Haggard finds laughs in prison release

Jasper Rees

Pre-publicity for Back to Life has been all about its stablemate. This new six-part comedy comes from the same producers who brought you Fleabag, and the hope is that the Midas touch is catching.

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Rock Island Line: The Song That Made Britain Rock, BBC Four review - the early dawn of Britpop

james Woodall

If you were a fan of “Rock Island Line” when it became a pop hit, you’d have to be at least in your mid-70s now. In 1956, Paul McCartney heard Lonnie Donegan perform it live in Liverpool, and Paul’s rising 77.

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Don't Forget the Driver, BBC Two review - trying to beat the Bognor blues

Adam Sweeting

Bognor Regis was once renowned for its restorative climate and was much favoured by George V (he awarded the town the “Regis” tag), but times have changed if Toby Jones’s new series is anything to go by.

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Fleabag, Series 2 finale, BBC Three review - Phoebe Waller-Bridge's miraculous situation tragedy

Jasper Rees

The problem with Fleabag (BBC Three/BBC One) is that it makes almost all television look pedestrian. It’s like the difference between Fleabag’s scummily inadequate boyfriends and the unattainable perfection embodied by the cool sweary priest. Earth vs heaven. Water/wine. And now it is gone.

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The Widow, ITV review - Kate Beckinsale stars in tale of a missing husband

Markie Robson-Scott

The Williams brothers (The Missing, Liar, Rellik, Baptiste) are back.

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