wed 10/09/2025

tv

The Cry, BBC One review - every parent's nightmare

Adam Sweeting

Following the runaway success of Bodyguard, Jed Mercurio is no doubt popping more champagne and saying “follow that”. Stepping up to BBC One’s Sunday 9pm slot is The Cry, which transports us from suicide bombs and political intrigue and instead immerses us in the emotional plight of new mother Joanna (Jenna Coleman) and her partner Alistair (Ewen Leslie).

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Queen of the World, ITV review - born to run and run

Marina Vaizey

Awesome numbers: over a million miles, the equivalent of 42 times around the globe, have been traversed by Her Majesty the Queen, enabling visits over the past seven decades or so to 117 different countries. No one has reigned longer nor travelled further.

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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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