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TV Review: Unforgotten, Series 4

Don’t read on if you haven’t finished Series 4 of Unforgotten for major spoilers are within 

“We are who we are – I don’t think you can ever really change that”

It’s a good job that Series 4 of Unforgotten aired as spring arrives in the air and the promise of easements is finally taking some of the sting out of lockdown life. For had it been on in the endless depths of the last few dark months, I don’t think I could have coped. Indeed, I’m not sure I can still really cope now even with it being 23 degrees outside.

They killed Nicola Walker! Again! I’ve barely recovered from how they did Ruth dirty, but given the way that episode 5 ended and the way people were talking at the beginning of episode 6, the writing was on the wall. And so as Sunny finally cracked the case and unwound the puzzle of Matthew Walsh’s death and the four young police officers intimately involved with it, DCI Cassie Stuart breathed her last. Continue reading “TV Review: Unforgotten, Series 4”

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TV Review: The Bletchley Circle Series 2

Hattie Morahan makes a more than able replacement for Anna Maxwell Martin in Series 2 of The Bletchley Circle 

“Well ladies, let’s get cracking”

Series 2 of The Bletchley Circle at least has one more episode in it than the first, as it takes the form of two two-part stories but as it is the last season, it is also tinged with sadness. It is also a little curiously structured as Anna Maxwell Martin’s Susan departs after the first story, allowing Hattie Morahan’s Alice Merren – who appears as the protagonist of the opening mystery – to step up and replace her in the group for their final case.

Alice just happens to be another former colleague from Bletchley Park who, as the series opens, is awaiting trial for killing her old flame from those Bletchley days. Julie Graham’s Jean is sure she must be innocent and so reconvenes Lucy, Millie and a reluctant Susan to try and prove her innocence and solve the mysterious connections to a place called Porton Down… Continue reading “TV Review: The Bletchley Circle Series 2”

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TV Review: The Bletchley Circle Series 1

Rachael Stirling and Anna Maxwell Martin are fantastic in Series 1 of The Bletchley Circle, which I’ve finally gotten round to watching 

“You really think that just by listening to the wireless, you can tell the police where to look for a murder victim”

I don’t really know how I have left it this late to finally watch The Bletchley Circle, just nine years since series 1 first aired in the UK. It is tailor-made for my interests too: Rachael Stirling, Anna Maxwell Martin, women in wartime(ish), oh and Rachael Stirling 😍 and with the show being on one of my streaming services, I finally took the plunge. This miniseries was written by Guy Burt and directed by Andy De Emmony, with Julie Graham and Sophie Rundle rounding out the lead cast.

And but of course, I loved it. An all-too-brief three episodes take us through the crime-solving exploits of four women who worked as codebreakers at Bletchley Park but now, in 1952, find their talents ignored by a resumption of traditional societal values. As a serial killer murders young women across London and the police fail to take their warnings sufficiently seriously, the foursome start to delve into the investigation themselves despite the intense danger that emerges. Continue reading “TV Review: The Bletchley Circle Series 1”

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TV Review: The English Game (2020)

Not even a precious few shots of rippling abs and a cast full of talent can save the mad folly of The English Game, someone stop Julian Fellowes now please

“Lads, football is not complicated”

Who would have thought it? Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford has zero facility for writing Northern working class characters. (Or on this evidence, any characters at all.) Not having watched Downton Abbey in any meaningful way (though I did suffer through the film), I wasn’t prepared for just how cringeworthily bad it would be in his Netflix series The English Game.

I remembered Lucy Mangan’s excoriation of the show in the Guardian just as the first lockdown kicked in but it has taken me this long to get round to watching it myself, despite Netflix constantly flicking it onto my homepage. And there’s actually something quite magisterial in just how jawdroppingly awful the first episode is, even with the changing room scenes that have somehow been screenshotted here. Continue reading “TV Review: The English Game (2020)”

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TV Review: The Capture

Lia Williams is all kinds of caustic brilliance in conspiracy thriller The Capture

“Accepting you can rarely see the whole picture is part of the job”

I’m working my way through the TV shows I can watch on my free trials on various services, which has lead me to The Capture which aired on BBC1 in late 2019 and somehow completely passed me by. This is particularly egregious since it features Lia Williams the kind of amazing top boss role that makes you wonder why she isn’t better known.

Created, written and directed by Ben Chanan, The Capture takes place in a surveillance state that not too long ago would have been described as a near-future dystopia but now, is just London on a Tuesday. In a society that closely monitors CCTV, so much of justice depends on the reliability of those camera image. But what happens when that confidence is eroded? Continue reading “TV Review: The Capture”

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TV Review: Four Weddings and a Funeral

The only real pleasure in this TV version of Four Weddings and a Funeral is hearing Alex Jennings say “Yes, I suppose you were somewhat of a basic bitch” with a straight face

“You’re insane and watch too much TV”

This lockdown has seen me sign up to too many free trials on various online TV services and so I’ve been ripping through some of the shows newly on offer to me. Over on STARZPLAY, first up for me was the TV adaptation of  Four Weddings and a Funeral which I’m not sure if I ever knew actually existed until now.

Created by Mindy Kaling and Matt Warburton and airing in the US in the summer of 2019, the show is an inexplicable riff on Richard Curtis’ 1994 film. Ultimately it is nothing like the film, which is probably for the best,  emerging instead as a ridonkulous Jilly Cooper-esque rom-com in a fantastical version of London (and beyond).  Continue reading “TV Review: Four Weddings and a Funeral”

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TV Review: Unforgotten Series 4 Episode 1

Just a brief reminder really that one of the TV highlights of the year (cos it will be, you know that) has just started – the fourth series of Unforgotten

“Why would someone keep a body for 30 years?”

My love for Nicola Walker has been one of the most consistent relationships in my life, so to see her land on the kind of project that people will rightly be talking about for years to come is highly satisfying. Chris Lang’s Unforgotten now enters its fourth series, an unlikely one you might have thought, given the way the last ended but it’s a welcome return indeed and one which deals adroitly with DCI Cassie Stuart’s uncertain relationship with her job.

Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar’s Khan have lost none of their pleasingly undramatic chemistry as the deeply empathetic heads of the never knowingly over-worked cold case department, this time dealing with the discovery of a headless, handless body in a discarded freezer. And as ever, the casting is nigh on perfect (Victor Jenkins for this series) as the likes of the brilliant Liz White and Susan Lynch – both performers who do ‘sad’ so heartbreakingly well – emerge as part of the web of people intimately connected with the crime, the details of which will spill forth over the next five weeks. Can’t wait!

 

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TV Review: I Hate Suzie

Billie Piper and Lucy Prebble reunite and collaborate to great success with the sharply funny I Hate Suzie

“I’m sorry the world’s seen your dick, but also – fuck off, slightly”

Lucy Prebble and Billie Piper’s creative relationship has covered TV (Secret Diary of a Call Girl, the first season at least) and theatre (the excellent The Effect) and was recently reignited with Sky series I Hate Suzie. Drawing something of personal history, the show follows a former teen pop star turned sci-fi actress as she deals with a phone hacking incident which leaves problematic intimate photos of her scattered on the internet.

The eight episodes cycle through, and are titled after, stages of trauma – Shock, Denial, Fear, Shame, Bargaining, Guilt, Anger, and Acceptance – representing the indubitably self-centered Suzie’s processing of her experience. And it is a highly entertaining, linear journey, one which Suzie barrelling forward with an interesting lack of recurring characters – even her family members only get the one episode in which to appear, such is the pace of the high-maintenance that she is alternately trying to salvage and sabotage. Continue reading “TV Review: I Hate Suzie”

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TV Review: The Drowning (Channel 5)

I’d follow Deborah Findlay anywhere but Channel 5’s schlocky drama The Drowning might have been a step too far

“I understand how it feels to lose someone”

The premise of The Drowning, Channel 5’s newest original drama, seemed intriguing enough and its first episode mostly delivered on that promise. At a family picnic, 4 year old Tom goes missing, drowned in a lake, and his mother’s life naturally shatters. Nine years later, Jodie spots a teenage boy who bears a scar on his face that looks just like one Tom has and becomes convinced that it is, in fact, her son.

Directed by Carolina Giammetta, Luke Watson and Francesca Brill’s drama has clear designs on aping the Nordic Noir vibes of many a Scandi-drama, not least in its beautiful colour palette, but it is let down by some horrific writing choices that see it veer far closer to trashy thriller than affecting crime drama in the vein of, say, Unforgotten. Continue reading “TV Review: The Drowning (Channel 5)”