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 … >
This month, the Doctor Who main range presents one of its occasional anthology releases, with four short stories starring Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor and Nicola Bryant’s Peri. The first, ‘Breaking Bubbles’, finds the time travellers in a set of formal gardens much to the surprise of its sole resident. Safira Valtris is a deposed royal … >
‘Secrets are weird,’ Ephra Stein (Andrew Buchan) tells sister Nessa (Maggie Gyllenhaal). ‘People think you share them – but you don’t.’ Not if you’re a selfish, narcissistic, emotionally-stunted handpump hopelessly in thrall to the Israeli government, MI5 and your own penis, perhaps. But if you’re the best British drama series of 2014 (note to Hugo … >
You know Chekhov’s Gun, right? The dramatic principle that everything should have a purpose. Anton Chekhov explained it with a rifle – ‘If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be there’ – and Utopia loves to follow that rule. Hardly is a pistol pulled in Episode 4 without someone’s blood painting the wall. … >
Some Doctor Who stories have characters so well written and cast that they leave you wanting more. Like Jago and Litefoot before them, the team from 1988’s Remembrance of the Daleks cried out for their further exploits to be chronicled. Now three series in, Group Captain Ian ‘Chunky’ Gilmore (Simon Williams), Professor Rachel Jensen (Pamela … >
The Purge – 2013’s horror/thriller about a near-future America, where on one night a year, for twelve hours, virtually all crime is legal – was a frustrating experience. It boasted an intriguing premise, but failed to build upon it, instead focussing in on one (uninteresting) family in a fairly generic house-under-siege plot, and featuring an … >
Giving drama a backdrop of contemporary world events is a double-edged sword. While it lends realism and gravitas to a story that might otherwise be as fantastic as it is fantastic (as it were), it can also be like trying to use a live tiger as a sofa: there’s a real danger of it biting … >
Guardians of the Galaxy is a strange entry into the Marvel canon. Based on a lesser known comic franchise, and featuring such an outlandish group of characters as a genetically engineered, gun totting raccoon and a sentient tree, it’s something of a wonder that it got made at all, let alone into a big-budget, tent-pole … >
What’s a modern conspiracy thriller without some hacking? Nothing. Since humanity first hooked its TV up to an Atari to play Pong, ‘hacking’ has been an entirely misrepresented but convenient techno-obfustication to leapfrog plot difficulties faster than the speed of typing. It’s the wi-fi Expelliarmus. A deus.exe machina. And it’s no different in Utopia, where … >