Based on three novels by Kate Atkinson, this recent BBC One series features the adventures of former soldier, onetime policeman and permanently good-natured private investigator Jackson Brodie, played by Harry Potter villain Jason Isaacs.
There are only a few reasons why television remakes are commissioned, but the ways in which they can fail are as plentiful as there are fans to castigate a production company for daring to make such horrendous sows’ ears out of the silk purse originals.
‘This is the NHS,’ a podgy pathologist points out to Detective Sergeants Brooks and Devlin at the beginning of the episode, ‘not CSI.’ – and there’s no mistaking the warmer, more down-to-earth British cousin of the long-running, long-faced American franchise for anything more transatlantic.
After a fair bit of scheduling problems in America, The Kennedys finally arrive at the BBC. Back in the US, the show was pulled by the History network; apparently because, according to some critics, its version of real-life events wasn’t anybody’s idea of history.
Stolen opens with the legend, ‘Once upon a time…’ printed on the screen. Like the fairytales that two German brothers collected and published in the nineteenth century, this is about as Grimm a story as it gets.
Irwin Allen, the cult producer of various fanciful sixties TV sci-fi shows including Lost In Space, The Time Tunnel and Land Of The Giants, was best known as a purveyor of factually incorrect, faintly ridiculous camp classics.
Even in a modern entertainment world where America, France and even Denmark are routinely exporting excellent psychological police thrillers as if there’s a NATO surplus, Neil Cross has proved with this show that British television hasn’t forgotten how to make them either.
It’s difficult to imagine how a Doctor Who story inspired by Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and J.G. Ballard’s High Rise could possibly work in the over-lit, under-financed confines of the BBC during the 1980s. It should come as no surprise, then, that it doesn’t.
Jesse Tyler Ferguson, AKA Mitchell Pritchett from Sky1’s US comedy import Modern Family, recently entertained an audience of appreciative fans at BAFTA in London as the star of a comedy masterclass.
One of the (many) great things about Luther is the bad guys. Despite their diabolical schemes and vicious acts of mass murder, they’re not bald-headed men in secret lairs. Instead, they’re frighteningly ordinary-looking young men.