fri 25/07/2025

tv

The Farthest: Voyager's Interstellar Journey, BBC Four review - awe-inspiring and life-affirming space odyssey

Owen Richards

Long before Barack Obama spoke about the audacity of hope, the Voyager mission left the Earth driven by something else: the audacity of curiosity. What do the outer planets look like? What are they comprised of? And what’s beyond that?

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Witnesses: A Frozen Death, BBC Four review - plummeting temperatures in the Pas de Calais

Adam Sweeting

A thankless task, perhaps, to find oneself following in the footsteps of the berserk Spanish melodrama I Know Who You Are (theartsdesk passim).

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Joe Orton Laid Bare, BBC Two review - charming look at theatre's irresistible upstart

Owen Richards

Laid Bare – it has a lurid implication which is all too suitable for Joe Orton’s work. During a time where the straight-laced British struggled to ease into sexual liberation, Orton stretched acceptability to its very limits. Salacious acts had been going on behind closed doors long before the Sixties, but everyone hid behind a modest front.

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Godless, Netflix review – a proper wild west ride

Owen Richards

There’s a storm heading to La Belle, the small forgotten town in the heart of the American West. As black clouds flash above the prairie, the injured body of Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell) falls at the door of widowed rancher Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery). After adding one more wound to his collection, she takes in the stranger and helps him heal.  

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I Know Who You Are, series 2 finale, BBC Four review - Spanish drama literally took no prisoners

Jasper Rees

So, if you’re reading this you probably trudged all the weary way to the very end of I Know Who You Are. Or you didn’t but still want to find out what the hell happened. After 20-plus hours of twisting, turning, overblown drama, long-service medals are in order for all who flopped over the line.

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Love, Lies & Records, BBC One review - Ashley Jensen too good to be true

Jasper Rees

Love, Lies & Records (BBC One) is one of those bathetic titles that are very Yorkshire. See also Last Tango in Halifax, which didn’t do badly. Sleepless in Settle is surely in development.

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Peaky Blinders, series 4, BBC Two review - new threats, same thrills

Owen Richards

BBC Two’s flagship crime drama Peaky Blinders returns for another guilty dose of slo-mo walking, flying sparks and anachronistic soundtracks.

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Motherland / Detectorists review - comedy classics go at their own pace

Barney Harsent

As Motherland settles down into its first series proper after last year’s pilot, it still seems to be going at a fair gallop.

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Storyville: Toffs, Queers and Traitors, BBC Four review - the spy who was a scamp

Tom Birchenough

“There is something odd, I suppose, about anyone who betrays their country.” It’s an excellent opening line, particularly when delivered in director George Carey’s nicely querulous narrative voice, for Toffs, Queers and Traitors (BBC Four).

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Howards End, BBC One review - EM Forster adaptation is finding its footing

Matt Wolf

Can it really be a quarter-century since that finest of all Merchant-Ivory film adaptations, Howards End, was first released?

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