With episodes lost to the mists of time, as expensive videotape was routinely reused, a mere two full episodes exist from the first series of The Avengers. Of course, we are not talking about the popular Marvel franchise here, but rather the British 1960s television series of the same name which focussed on the exploits … >
Occasionally a Doctor Who story comes along with such a great premise that you cannot believe it has not been tackled before. ‘The Abandoned’, despite its somewhat generic title, has just that. While it has been repeatedly established over the years that the Doctor stole his TARDIS from Gallifrey, or it stole him, we have … >
Maybe it’s joke fatigue – the audience’s funnybones worn down by a lathe of relentless puns – but it tends to be the case with A Touch of Cloth that the second half feels a little less punchy and fresh than the first. It happened in Series 1, it happened more so in Series 2 … >
The Honourable Woman is hardly a light-hearted comedy romp at the best of times, but the sixth episode – which opens with a rape and ends with a young boy shooting himself – is bleaker than a Dartmoor funeral. Like a spindle of black cotton unravelling, ‘The Mother Line’ is dark from the first and … >
Kay Mellor (Playing the Field, Fat Friends) returned to our screens this week with In the Club, BBC One’s new comedy drama about a group of pregnant women from various walks of life whose lives intersect at a Parent Craft class the women attend. Whilst juggling their pregnancies, the women’s outside lives provide even more … >
Holmes devotees will know that The Great Detective’s last canon adventure was ‘His Last Bow’, in which he foiled the German agent Von Bork on the eve of World War One. It ends with Holmes in an oddly reflective mood: ‘There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on … >
Two hipsters meet at a party. Both are a bit awkward but in an appealingly cutesy, rather than “bust-stop weirdo”, way. They have an instant connection. She already has a boyfriend. Indie soundtrack and twee animations ensue. It’s so easy to be dismissive of What If, a movie that tries incredibly hard to present itself … >
Well if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and no one’s taken the tool-kit to A Touch of Cloth. Charlie Brooker and Daniel Maier’s police procedural parody once more turns your television into a Naked Gun of puns and fires relentlessly at your face until you bleed laughter or your sense of humour is shot … >
While Series 2 has lost much of the obliqueness of its predecessor – and there is no doubt that Utopia this year has used its torture spoon to feed you plot rather than push perplexities in your eye – the fact there are fewer questions has left greater space to admire performance of its talented … >
If you’ve ever read Alan Partridge’s autobiography ‘I, Partridge’, you’ll remember the chapter where he details his detective series, ‘Swallow’. It’s a morass of cop cliches and odd ideas; a police procedural from the Monkey Tennis mind. BBC One’s pilot for the police comedy drama Walter seems to have come from the same place, but … >