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I expect the Midsomer Constabulary scores very highly in the police performance charts, given the ‘always get their man’ attitude that has prevailed there for nearly twenty years. But the force’s zero tolerance policy towards unsolved murders has not always been so rigidly followed – and ‘The Incident at Cooper Hill’ revolves around a murder … >
It doesn’t quite have the high profile of a Sherlock special, or the sense of occasion of yet another final ever Lewis. Nevertheless, ITV’s Midsomer Murders must be doing something right to now be embarking on its eighteenth season. Less than a minute in to season opener ‘Habeas Corpus’ there’s a death – and we … >
Quietly slipped into the pre-Christmas schedule on BBC Two, We’re Doomed! The Dad’s Army Story is a lovingly made dramatisation of the events behind the creation and production of Dad’s Army in the mid to late 1960s. It’s still available on the BBC iPlayer until the end of January and is well worth catching. Here … >
BBC Two’s We’re Doomed! The Dad’s Army Story is very like the show that inspired it. It’s an ensemble piece where each player has their own little moment, yet again and again it comes back to its two lead characters. The leads here are writer Jimmy Perry and writer/producer David Croft. Though not exactly the … >
I know it’s the final Lewis episode we’re going to get, so maybe I should be a little more charitable towards the rather uninspiring detective work in Part 2 of ‘What Lies Tangled’. With nothing in the way of evidence having emerged from the investigation so far, Lewis decides to return to the scene of … >
If you subscribe to the old adage of not speaking ill of the dead, then part one of ‘What Lies Tangled’ may not be for you. Its unusually long opening montage ends with the explosive death of one Professor Adam Capstone and almost before the good folk of the Oxfordshire Constabulary Pathology department have picked … >
Full marks to Angela Griffin as DS Maddox when she almost gets away with the line, “It says here under occupation he was a Practicing Alchemist” in the concluding part of ‘Magnum Opus’. Despite the absurdity of the comment she gives it the same lightness of touch that less convoluted police dramas would give to … >
There’s a moment about halfway through the first part of ‘Magnum Opus’, just before the second ad break in fact, where academic Wouter Eisler (played by Stephen Boxer with an extraordinary German accent) confirms that the picture found with the murder victim is an alchemical image. It represents, he explains, “Nigredo… the Blackening… the first … >
Perhaps it’s just a sign of cuts at ITV, but Lewis Season 9’s opening story, ‘One For Sorrow’, has a lower than average body-count. If you only caught the first quarter hour of Episode 1 last week, then you’ve seen all the corpses you’re going to see: the body in the well and the dead … >
The opening titles montage for ‘One for Sorrow’ ends with a dead animal stuffed and returned to the approximation of life, as a masked Magpie is placed by the grave of a squirrel. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to cynically claim this as an appropriate metaphor for Lewis, the improbable spin-off where a … >