The latest audio revival from Big Finish is a series that enjoyed just a single ten-episode run on BBC One in the summer of 1979. The Omega Factor followed the story of journalist Tom Crane, whose psychic abilities brought him into contact with the secretive Department 7. Staffed by a team which included physicist Dr … >
Back for a fifth season, and embracing a zippy new format (as trialled in ‘The Worlds of Big Finish’), the Number 22 to Putney Common has returned. For the uninitiated, her driver is the erstwhile Iris Wildthyme, trans-temporal adventuress, bon viveur and occasional sparring partner of the Doctor. For these stories, she is accompanied by … >
Former Coronation Street actress Suranne Jones headlines BBC One’s Doctor Foster, an edgy and intriguing new five-part nail-biter from Laurence Olivier and BAFTA Award-winning playwright, Mike Bartlett. Jones plays GP Gemma Foster, who falls into an unsteady path of confusion and paranoia when she finds evidence that her husband, Bertie Carvel (Jonathan Strange and Mr … >
‘The Magician’s Apprentice’. When an episode wears a title as Harry Potterish as that, you’d expect its characters to be shrouded in an invisibility cloak. There’s an element of that – it’s called a BBC embargo. However, if you’re looking for wizardiness or witchcraft, look elsewhere. The Doctor’s magic sonic screwdriver may have its part … >
The Trials of Jimmy Rose is the kind of frustrating television that leaves me shouting at the people in it for making such terrible decisions. Jimmy (Ray Winstone) is frustratingly stubborn and, in spite of having had the living crap kicked out of him, seems to struggle mightily to learn anything from his experience. Somehow … >
Welcome back, Inspector Reid. Having recovered surprisingly quickly off-screen after his waking last episode, Reid finally returned to H Division for a bottle episode that incorporated a simple yet engrossing central mystery. Almost all of ‘The Incontrovertible Truth’ is set inside H Division over the course of one night, but this limited setting never once … >
BBC One’s ‘kinda true’ biographical comedy drama based on the young life of Lenny Henry opens with cute nostalgia. A young Danny Fearon (Kascion Franklin) dancing in gold heels to ‘My Boy Lollipop’ cuts to an older Danny having the shit kicked out of him by Dudley’s cohort of oddly baby-faced teenage fascists. What’s expected … >
I’m not generally the sort of person who will gravitate towards gangster films. There’s something I find generally distasteful about the prospect of glorifying or making glamourous the basically sociopathic, violent nature of gang cultures. So when I was invited to a screening of Legend, based on the lives of real-life twin brothers and London … >
In 1993, the BBC produced Lady Chatterley: a four-part dramatisation of the DH Lawrence novel directed by Ken Russell, starring Joely Richardson in the title role and Sean Bean as her gamekeeper lover Mellors. A generation of horny teenagers tuned in, but in spite of the workmanlike woodland grunting from Bean (not to mention the … >
Ray Winstone plays – in a career first – a gruff criminal in ITV’s The Trials of Jimmy Rose, tasked with readjusting to the world and his family after a long prison sentence. The show’s alternate title could probably be A Painfully Out-Of-The-Loop Older Gentleman Makes a Dog’s Breakfast of All The Things. Kingdom writer … >