TV
Judi Dench: My Passion for Trees, BBC One review - an arboreal delightThursday, 21 December 2017
“I am going to find out how much my trees live, breath, and even communicate. I am Judi Dench, and I have been an actor for 60 years – but I have had another passion ever since I was a little girl: I have adored trees. My six acres are a secret... Read more... |
Agatha Christie's Crooked House, Channel 5 review - actresses chew furniture for funMonday, 18 December 2017
Crooked House is being released as a film in various territories, but has already been shown on television in America and has now surfaced as a drama on Channel 5 bearing the title Agatha Christie’s Crooked House. It duly falls in with a recent... Read more... |
Witnesses: A Frozen Death finale, BBC Four review - weirdo childbirth cult hits the buffersSunday, 17 December 2017
It’s remarkable how pervasive the Scandi-noir formula has become, with its penchant for weird and perverted killers, labyrinthine plotting and intriguingly flawed protagonists. The French-made Witnesses: A Frozen Death was another fragment chipped... Read more... |
The Tunnel: Vengeance, Sky Atlantic review - entente not-so-cordialeFriday, 15 December 2017
For the third and allegedly final time, we hasten back to the Kent coast for another outbreak of cross-Channel crime. Not all that surprisingly, this new series of the Franglais cop show focuses on a people-smuggling racket bringing bedraggled... Read more... |
Bancroft, ITV review - Sarah Parish's very cold caseThursday, 14 December 2017
This week we were all meant to be gripped by a bunch of ancient geezers nicking diamonds in Hatton Gardens. The postponement of ITV’s nightly four-part drama – the second of four (four!!) different versions of the infamous burglary – is a bit of a... Read more... |
Blue Planet II, BBC One review - just how fragile?Monday, 11 December 2017
The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter... Read more... |
The Crown, Series 2, Netflix review - all our yesterdays, cunningly rewrittenFriday, 08 December 2017
Beneath the creamy overlay of gowns, crystal chandeliers, palaces, uniformed flunkies and a sumptuous (albeit CGI-enhanced) Royal Yacht, a steely pulse of realpolitik fuels The Crown, returning to Netflix for its much-anticipated second series.... Read more... |
Howards End finale, BBC One review - who isn't going to miss the Schlegel sisters?Monday, 04 December 2017
How good was Howards End (BBC One)? Practically flawless. Even if it broke into a bit of an action-packed sprint towards the dénouement, it’s been a triumphant reaffirmation of EM Forster, a canonical favourite back in the 1980s courtesy of Merchant... Read more... |
Imagine... Rachel Whiteread: Ghosts in the Room, BBC Two review - making memories solidSunday, 03 December 2017
Eureka! A programme about a woman artist that doesn’t define her as a wife and mother first and an artist second. In fact, Rachel Whiteread’s husband and two sons were mentioned only briefly in this excellent documentary that followed her career... Read more... |
The Farthest: Voyager's Interstellar Journey, BBC Four review - awe-inspiring and life-affirming space odysseyFriday, 01 December 2017
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?Storyville:... Read more... |
'She has escaped from my Asylum!': The Woman in White returnsTuesday, 28 November 2017
The Woman in White insists on being told and retold. Wilkie Collins’s much loved thriller is perhaps the most widely and frequently adapted of all the great Victorian novels. In Marian Halcombe it has a resourceful heroine whose appeal doesn't rest... Read more... |
Witnesses: A Frozen Death, BBC Four review - plummeting temperatures in the Pas de CalaisSunday, 26 November 2017
A thankless task, perhaps, to find oneself following in the footsteps of the berserk Spanish melodrama I Know Who You Are (theartsdesk passim). However, BBC Four’s new Saturday night import, whose first series was shown on Channel 4 a couple of... Read more... |
