‘Big Fat Gypsy Weddings’ DVD review
Channel 4’s surprising breakthrough hit of the year proves that Britain’s favourite pastime is a healthy dose of schadenfreude viewing.
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Channel 4’s surprising breakthrough hit of the year proves that Britain’s favourite pastime is a healthy dose of schadenfreude viewing.
Based on the real life events pre and post the 1958 Munich air crash that saw eight of the Manchester United football team lose their lives, United is a one-off feature-length drama from BBC Two starring Doctor Who‘s David Tennant and Mission Impossible II actor Dougray Scott.
When call-centre worker and former nurse Sally Wilson (Ashley Jensen) discovers she has been bequeathed five million pounds in the will of someone she’s never heard of, it should be the windfall that she needs to provide expensive treatment for her seriously ill daughter.
BBC Four’s imported French police drama Spiral reaches the halfway point of its third season this week, maintaining its ability to disturb and distress but never disappoint with its unstinting gore and unending bleakness.
Sarah Jane Smith is investigating strange goings-on at a meditation centre in rural England; spooky alien spiders are controlling the minds of human beings in a fiendish plot to take over the world; and the Doctor is wearing a bowtie, because bowties are cool.
The final part of ITV1’s latest medical drama brings the series to a suitably watchable conclusion, although this is not a Casualty-style blockbuster climax, with no major calamity leaving bodies strewn all over the landscape and the hospital struggling to cope under the weight of the blood and gore.
As guiltily enthralling as your neighbours having a screaming row in their back garden, unaware that you’re peeking through a hole in the fence, BBC Four’s French police drama series Spiral is not exactly enjoyable; it’s hard to even define it as entertaining. Yet once you start watching, it’s increasingly difficult to stop.
After last week’s rather bouncy and luridly erotic first instalment of BBC Two’s four-part Victorian drama comes a more thoughtful and reflective episode, focusing on some of the other characters briefly met previously.
Kirke University, home to Channel 4’s new comedy series from the makers of Green Wing, is possibly the crudest college of higher education since the Central University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, its staff a collection of grotesque super-stereotypes whose self-absorption is matched only by their ability to break into verbosely obscene soliloquy at will.
The actual title of Spiral, BBC Four’s imported French police drama, is Engrenages, which literally translates as ‘cogs’ or ‘gears’ – and if your stomach can stand the gore and your heart can stand the shocks, watching the show will give your own cogs and gears as thorough a grinding as they’ve had since the climax of The Killing.