One glance at this recent series looking at the wonders of the human body and you can just picture the TV execs huddled around the desk contemplating a bold ‘event’ documentary delving inside ourselves.
‘Torchwood’s gone,’ Rex tells Vera in the fifth instalment of Miracle Day. ‘It’s just a name, these days.’ Yet for a number of reasons, this is perhaps the most Torchwoodian episode of the series yet.
Hoovering up Emmys and Screen Actor’s Guild awards in the US, Monk has been a consistently strong drama since it launched in 2002 and deserves more fans over here in the UK.
Three weeks in, and the show is avoiding some of the worse gross-out gags that plagued the first episode and is mining a new seam of sentimentality, thanks to that mainstay of teen drama: parent-child relationships.
It would be easy to decry the idea of creating an updated version of 1972’s ‘Day of the Daleks’ with modern CGI as a doomed attempt to polish a turd – too easy, in fact.
In 1931, a young Jewish prosecutor at the central criminal court decided to force Adolf Hitler to appear as a witness at the trial of some brownshirt brutes accused of murdering innocent civilians.
The premise of The Strange World Of Gurney Slade sounds like a 1960’s TV precursor to The Truman Show: a sitcom actor walks off the set in the middle of a live episode only to find that the ‘real world’ is in fact a sitcom.
New Doctor Who novel ‘Paradox Lost’ is a fine representation of the series’ recent fascination with the more puzzling consequences of time travel.
Warning: this episode does not feature either Bill Pullman or Lauren Ambrose. As their antics have been some of the most entertaining aspects of the series so far, this results in the sixth instalment falling somewhat short of interest.
The Hour is never less than compelling television, but on the occasions when it really steps up its game, it becomes something rather unmissable.