tv
TS Eliot: Into The Waste Land, BBC Two / Four Quartets, Starring Ralph Fiennes, BBC Four review - a great 100th birthday present to a giant of modern literatureMonday, 17 October 2022
Can you make modern poetry come to life on a TV screen? The BBC has had two stabs recently at answering this question, as part of the centennary celebrations for TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, seen by many as the greatest poem of the 20th century. One programme works significantly better than the other. Read more... |
Karen Pirie, ITV review - cold case mystery drags itself across the finish lineMonday, 10 October 2022
Although plaudits have been rolling in for Lauren Lyle’s smart and sparky portrayal of the titular detective in Karen Pirie (ITV), getting to the end of the third and final episode felt like a long slog. Read more... |
Inside Man, BBC One review - strong cast trapped on a sinking shipWednesday, 05 October 2022
Screenwriter and showrunner Steven Moffat is renowned for some of his work, especially Sherlock, but other stuff not so much (I direct you towards Dracula or The Time Traveler’s Wife). When the history is written, Inside Man is liable to languish at the dog’s-breakfast end of the Moffat canon. Read more... |
This England, Sky Atlantic review - how Boris's No 10 got Covid wrongWednesday, 28 September 2022
From underneath the messy ash-white thatch of hair, a strange mooing suddenly issues: Sir Kenneth Branagh is wrestling with Boris Johnson’s odd way of saying the “oo” sound. It’s a brave attempt but ultimately a bit wayward, rather like the drama series Branagh is starring in, This England, Michael Winterbottom’s six-part reconstruction of Boris’s early days as PM, Covid, lockdown and all. Read more... |
Am I Being Unreasonable?, BBC One review - comedy thriller delivers the gagsSaturday, 24 September 2022
In case you're not au fait with Mumsnet, the title of Daisy May Cooper's follow-up creation to the stupendous This Country is a nod to the parenting website's readers' questions corner, where the responses boil down to “Yes, you are” and “No, you're not” in equally judgmental proportions. (Although, it has to be said, sometimes the replies are far from that and can be funny or helpful.) Read more... |
Crossfire, BBC One review - pacy and nail-biting, the holiday from hellWednesday, 21 September 2022
A sun-baked island resort; Keeley Hawes taking a leisurely dip in an infinity pool as we hear her in voiceover musing on how events happen unchosen, with you in them; then we are up in her room, where she is texting somebody. The sounds of gunshots and mass panic jolt her into action. She rushes for her trainers – not flipflops, she admonishes herself, you are going to need to run. Read more... |
The Capture, Series 2 finale, BBC One review - gripping ride to a barnstorming conclusionTuesday, 13 September 2022
[Here be spoilers.] If you have been glued to the second season of The Capture, just ended, does it bother you that its content is borderline science fiction? Probably not. Writer Ben Chanan’s depiction of artificial intelligence may outstrip the reality of what it can currently achieve, but he can sure spin a gripping TV series around AI's potential for creating chaos in the wrong hands. Read more... |
Munich Games, Sky Atlantic review - superbly crafted thriller races to prevent a terrorist attackSaturday, 10 September 2022
A black box with a red blinking light is being stashed in a cabinet under the seating of the Olympic stadium in Munich. Then a hoodie-ed man is seen in silhouette, the stadium in the background. We are about to be plunged into the darker corners of the prosperous Bavarian city where, 50 years earlier, as the footage in the opening credits recalls, the infamous massacre of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team by PLO gunmen took place. Read more... |
The Capture, Series 2, BBC One review - caught up in the China syndromeTuesday, 30 August 2022
When the first series of The Capture arrived three years ago, theartsdesk liked it so much that we reviewed it three times. Writer-director Ben Chanan had successfully, and addictively, tapped into a secret dystopia of blanket digital surveillance and so-called “correction”, in which anyone might be manipulated by shadowy state agencies to serve their own hidden agendas. Read more... |
Van der Valk, Series 2 Finale, ITV review - sleaze, corruption and skulduggery in AmsterdamMonday, 22 August 2022
Despite the jarring effect of having British actors speaking colloquial English while purporting to be Dutch policemen working in Amsterdam, the second series of ITV’s Van der Valk arrived at its third and final episode feeling as if it had reached its comfort zone. Read more... |
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