As guiltily enthralling as your neighbours having a screaming row in their back garden, unaware that you’re peeking through a hole in the fence, BBC Four’s French police drama series Spiral is not exactly enjoyable; it’s hard to even define it as entertaining. Yet once you start watching, it’s increasingly difficult to stop.
After last week’s rather bouncy and luridly erotic first instalment of BBC Two’s four-part Victorian drama comes a more thoughtful and reflective episode, focusing on some of the other characters briefly met previously.
Kirke University, home to Channel 4’s new comedy series from the makers of Green Wing, is possibly the crudest college of higher education since the Central University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, its staff a collection of grotesque super-stereotypes whose self-absorption is matched only by their ability to break into verbosely obscene soliloquy at will.
The actual title of Spiral, BBC Four’s imported French police drama, is Engrenages, which literally translates as ‘cogs’ or ‘gears’ – and if your stomach can stand the gore and your heart can stand the shocks, watching the show will give your own cogs and gears as thorough a grinding as they’ve had since the climax of The Killing.
Joining the gang in the Olympic Deliverance Team this week is Dave Wellbeck; an athlete who won two consecutive silver medals at the Olympics in the Noughties.
With a heralding cry of ‘Fantastico!’, CBBC presents a fast-paced and action-packed new drama series following the adventures of the young Leonardo Da Vinci and his friends in fifteenth century Florence.
Blushing and pounding onto our screens with an incredibly strong off and on-screen pedigree is a new four-part BBC drama set in the darker side of Victorian London, revealing a world seething with vitality, sexuality, ambition and emotion.
After a fairly turbulent four years, varying wildly in quality from episode to episode, Secret Diary Of A Call Girl draws to a close.
After a so-so second episode, the latest “mockumentary” from the BBC delivers another fine blend of sitcom antics, character studies and catchphrases. Oh, and the “reality” of the 2012 London Olympic Games.
In the final part of this enthralling series, Professor Brian Cox takes a final journey across the world from the Karnak Temple in Egypt to the Yoho National Park in the Rockies, demonstrating the many facets of the one thing which connects us all with the myriad wonders of the universe around us: light.