thu 11/09/2025

tv

Ripper Street, BBC Two, Series 5 review – apocalypse looms in Victorian Whitechapel

Adam Sweeting

There has always been an air of incipient doom hovering over Ripper Street, since the show is more of a laboratory of lost souls than a mere detective drama.

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Murdered For Being Different, BBC Three review - unbearable but unmissable

Jasper Rees

Heaven alone knows we've pressing anxieties enough to preoccupy us, but if you have the emotional bandwidth to accommodate more, the iPlayer can oblige. Available now on BBC Three is the latest in what now becomes a trilogy of heartrending dramas with Murdered in the title.

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Riviera, Sky Atlantic review - codswallop on the Côte d'Azur

Mark Sanderson

W Somerset Maugham, who knew a thing or two about the dark side, summed up the Riviera as “a sunny place for shady people”. On the evidence of this first episodeRiviera is a funny place for shitty people.

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Fearless, ITV review - Helen McCrory lights up dense conspiracy thriller

Jasper Rees

Emma Banville is almost too good to be true: a human rights lawyer who houses Syrian refugees, wins the most hopeless cases of wrongful conviction, won’t be bullied by anyone – coppers, prison wardens, the system. OK she smokes, presumably for the stress, and pints of lager don’t sit quite right in her hand. And she’s trying to adopt a child with, somewhat implausibly, John Bishop.

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The Loch, ITV review - hokum shrouded in Scotch mist

Mark Sanderson

There’s something nasty in Loch Ness – a corpse tied to a curling stone – but, this being tellyland, the real monsters lurk on its shores. The Loch aspires to be a Scottish Broadchurch – Braidkirk? – but, alas, is nothing of the sort.

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Poldark, Series 3, BBC One review - tempestuous passions and pantomime villains ride again

Adam Sweeting

Is it always the same bit of Cornish clifftop they gallop along in Poldark? Anyway here it was again, raising the curtain on the third series.

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Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World review - the weird and wonderful roots of the Sixties counterculture

Adam Sweeting

As the accompanying music reminded us, it's the time of the season for looking back in languor at the psychedelic daze that descended on America's West Coast in 1967. It was an era when one was enjoined, if going to San Francisco, to "be sure to wear flowers in your hair".

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Election Night 2017, BBC One, ITV, Channel 4, Sky News

Barney Harsent

The latest test of the nation’s perseverance and patience – a snap election called just before the negotiations for Brexit are due to start – seemed like an extraordinary act of hubris at the start.

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Ackley Bridge, Channel 4 review – can the town's new academy bring racial and social harmony?

Adam Sweeting

Welcome to Ackley Bridge Academy, home of a new Channel 4 drama and a new amalgam of two segregated schools in a Yorkshire mill town setting out to prove itself “a new school with a new attitude”.

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Lord Lucan: My Husband, The Truth review - the coldest case of all

Jasper Rees

Four years ago the BBC dramatised the story of the Lucans. Rory Kinnear donned the forthright moustache and Catherine McCormack played his spouse Veronica as a brittle victim of mental cruelty. The script speculated about the murder of the nanny Sandra Rivett using all the known sources. A year later Laura Thompson’s book A Different Class of Murder was published and last year the vanished earl’s death certificate was issued. That might have been thought to be that.

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