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.
‘No one dies these days!’ Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) yells to new acquaintance Esther Drummond (Alexa Havins) as they leap out of a top-floor window of the CIA archives in Washington, just in time to avoid a huge explosion that rips the building to bits.
The second instalment of the new series sees what started as a fairly narrow story opening up around John Luther (Idris Elba) as he searches for salvation amid the wreckage of his private life and the darkness that his life as a policeman brings him into incessant contact with.
With a spooky alien menace in a modern day English setting, ‘The Awakening’ is a two-part adventure featuring a feisty female companion, a slightly cowardly, wryly amusing male counterpart and an energetic, good-humoured Time Lord who conveys an incredible sense of age and wisdom in spite of his youthful appearance.
The Doctor (William Hartnell) and his companions Steven Taylor and Dodo Chaplet turn up in Tombstone, Arizona, 1881, just in time for the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral.
A complete and unexpurgated knowledge of the truth is what DI Jonah Gabriel (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and the viewers who have followed his exploits through every twist and bloodstained turn of this expansive, intricately-plotted thriller deserve; and happily, it’s precisely what they get.
When one half of comedy horror series The League Of Gentlemen’s acting and writing quartet, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, were commissioned by the BBC to write the first series of this superficially similar oddball production, the assumption was that it may be a lesser variant on the Royston Vasey mould.