sat 19/07/2025

tv

Bodyguard, BBC One, series finale review - gripping entertainment of the highest calibre

Jasper Rees

And breathe. Bodyguard – not, as even some careless BBC broadcasters keep calling it, "The Bodyguard" – careered to a conclusion as if hurtling around a booby-trapped assault course.

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A Discovery of Witches, episode 2, Sky 1 review - when the sorceress met the vampire

Adam Sweeting

Witches, vampires and magicke of all descriptions continue to be big box office, so Sky 1’s new dramatisation of the first book of Deborah Harkness’s All Souls Trilogy should be finding a ready-made audience.

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Strangers, episode 2, ITV review - conspiracy theories multiply

Adam Sweeting

You might consider it odd that a man whose wife spends half the year in Hong Kong without him hasn’t managed to get around to catching a plane from Heathrow to visit her in the Far East, but that is the case with Jonah Mulray, the stressed-out protagonist of Strangers. Jonah’s excuse for his marital negligence is that he’s “scared of flying”.

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Killing Eve, BBC One review - the dying game

Adam Sweeting

It may be a sign of the times that the two lead performances in Killing Eve are female, with Jodie Comer fizzing hyperactively as shape-shifting assassin Villanelle and Sandra Oh (from Grey’s Anatomy) as British intelligence officer Eve Polastri (pictured below). Yet simultaneously, the show has a comic campness and air of fantasy that feels Sixties-like, reminiscent of such timewarp delights as The Avengers or Modesty Blaise.

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Classic Albums: Amy Winehouse - Back to Black, BBC Four review - suffering turned into song

mark Kidel

Formats are second nature to TV: the BBC and Eagle Rock’s Classic Albums will run and run. Like all formats, there’s always the risk that the medium becomes the message, and content suffers under the weight of form.

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Black Earth Rising, BBC Two review - Blick's new blockbuster

Adam Sweeting

As writer and director, Hugo Blick has brought us two of the twistiest dramas in recent-ish memory (The Shadow Line and The Honourable Woman).

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Wanderlust, BBC One review - an unflinching look at stale sex

Owen Richards

What signals the end of a relationship? The loss of attraction? Infidelity? Or is it, as Wanderlust explores, something more innocuous?

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Vanity Fair, ITV review - seductions of social climbing

Mark Sanderson

Emcee Michael Palin, as William Makepeace Thackeray himself, introduces us to the show: “Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy.” All his major characters – or “puppets” – are riding a fairground carousel. They – and very soon, we – are having a great time.

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Keeping Faith, BBC One, series finale review - we need to talk about Evan

Jasper Rees

It’s been a long haul for Keeping Faith. The drama was shot in Welsh and English simultaneously, and premiered in the former with subtitles on S4C at the back end of 2017. It switched to the latter language on BBC One Wales earlier this year.

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Bodyguard, BBC One, episode 2 review - a wild ride to who knows where

Jasper Rees

It was always a question of when. As in when would the hoity-toity Home Secretary and her poker-faced bodyguard move into the horizontal? “I’m not the queen, you know,” she said, by way of a hot come-on. “You can touch me.” As a mode of discourse, this marked quite a step-up from the first episode of Jed Mercurio's new drama. Then the Rt Hon Julia Montague didn’t even want his vote.

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