With most of the ground-work for Season 3 laid down in last week’s opener, this week finds Game of Thrones on surer footing. ‘Dark Wings, Dark Words’ is a more exciting episode and a more interesting one.
One of the wonderful things about Broadchurch is that it has made water cooler detectives of us all. Heck, even Ant & Dec were jabbering on about it on their Saturday evening entertainment trough; a sure sign that Chris Chibnall’s drama has deservedly reached the point of cultural supersaturation. The Geordie finger puppets suspected Reverend Paul Coates of murder, and Episode 6 doesn’t do anything to disprove that theory.
In this on demand digital age, we can stream Hollywood movies to our mobile phones and pre-order the DVD boxset of a television show before it has even aired. As Doctor Who approaches its 50th anniversary, the show is reaching ever-greater heights of popularity and international exposure. Amid all this, it somehow seems impossible to comprehend that there is a large swathe of the programme’s early episodes now lost to posterity.
Ahh, 1983. M*A*S*H, the moonwalk, ‘Mawdryn Undead’. Oh, and Mutually Assured Destruction. Good times.
But a bad time for The Doctor and Clara to land aboard a stricken Russian nuclear submarine. At the helm is Liam Cunningham, being all authoritarian and troubled, just as he was in BBC One’s short-lived space oddity Outcasts; while in the hold is David Warner, toting naught but a Walkman and a loveable grandfatherly nature.
You know that feeling you got as a child when you had to sing a song in front of the whole school? Well, they’ve gone and made a Doctor Who episode about it.
It’s a truism that Doctor Who inspires playground re-enactment; but rarely has an episode so obviously been designed with Monday morning playtime in mind. So much of the story is imitable: from the alien who barks like a dog to the fact that the monster is defeated with an autumn leaf. A psychically-charged, totemic sort of leaf, but a leaf nonetheless.
Doctor Who’s ‘Destiny of the Doctor’ series reaches its fourth instalment with ‘Babblesphere’, a tale for Tom Baker’s Doctor and Lalla Ward’s Romana. Written by Jonathan Morris, the play is performed by Ward with Roger Parrott.
Arriving on the Earth colony of Hephastos, the time travellers come across a replica of the palace of Versailles encased in a geodesic dome and set amid a harsh volcanic landscape. Within, they find an artistic commune where the perils of social media are writ large.
So, you’ve scoffed all the chocolate, watched the umpteenth repeat of Uncle Buck on TV and vaguely pondered the true meaning of this extended bank holiday. What now, very few people ask.
Well, how about a bevy of horror releases and a documentary about one of the greatest films of that genre? More chocolate? Sorry, it’ll have to be the movies.
Given the star and showrunner – 24’s Kiefer Sutherland and Heroes creator Tim Kring respectively – you could be forgiven for expecting something of a thrill-a-minute ride from Touch. It eschews expectations, however, providing a narrative that, whilst occasionally contrived, relies on elegantly scripted drama rather than intense action beats.
While the bodies have been steadily piling up over the course of this season (particularly in last week’s episode), ‘Separate Paths’ is the first episode that really hammers home just how damned the central characters of Spartacus are.
‘Every great magic trick consists of three parts’, says Michael Caine in Christopher Nolan’s gaslight and handsomeness extravaganza The Prestige. Someone forgot to pass the message on to Jonathan Creek.