Jericho

Newly-widowed Annie Quaintain (Jessica Raine) faces ruin as she discovers her late husband's debts.  The former schoolmaster's wife finds her friends are fair-weather and must sell up and take her two children to the... wild west.  North Yorkshire to be more precise, specifically to the shanty town of Jericho, where navvies are building the Ribblehead Viaduct on the Settle to Carlisle railway line.  Here she opens a boarding house - not to be confused with the bawdy house next door - and takes in a couple of lodgers, including gentlemanly hunk Johnny Jackson (Hans Matheson).  We know that Annie has come down in the world because her hair comes down too, from an elaborate Victorian nest of coils to a far more 21st Century loose look.  Not very respectable for a mother, but rather more comely to Johnny.

The 90-minute opener fitted in brawls both male and female, a fatal accident that imperils the future of the project, theft, an accidental murder and a cover-up.  All to a slightly twangy soundtrack that, if not Morricone, leans westward of York.  Despite the basis in fact, this is of-course rather soapy.  We have the western stock characters of pragmatic madam, slutty daughter, respected gang leader, plucky young mother, violent brute and even a rather unlikely black incomer from the real west.  Well Baltimore (Clarke Peters, lately of The Wire).  What is this need to re-imagine our foggy Victorian past as an Anglicised Dead Man's Gulch?  Life was hard and the ironic achievement of this symbol of Britain's industrial might over the empty valley would be hard to do justice to in a drama.  There are seven more episodes, so it could still go either way.  Hopefully that way won't be further west.

Partners in Crime

Tommy (David Walliams) and Tuppence (Jessica Raine) are a couple who embark on amateur detective adventures in the 1950s in this BBC adaptation of Agatha Christie's dwarfed-by-Poirot/Marple novels.  For the three people remaining in the English-speaking world who still haven't heard of Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa, she had a mind for murder like few others, and millions have whiled away a cosy afternoon or evening reading about stabbings, strangulation and poison.  Murder may appeal, but coupled with 1930s or 1950s settings and costumes and the attendant traditional trappings of a country house, or a steam train, and the mysteries are irresistible to large swathes of the population.  Readers and viewers don't expect too much gore, and hardly any realism at all, and they are rarely disappointed.

'Partners in Crime' will have pleased its target audience, we think it fair to say.  Dan is not fond of the elderly lady with the knitting, nor ze little man wiz ze grey cells, but even he found this watchable and has made a note for Sunday evenings.  The nonsense plot, as always, turns on rather unlikely coincidences and some deeply unpleasant types, but the Beresfords are enjoyably batty - even if Walliams is too Walliams to be entirely Tommy - and good on the writers to keep them of their time in their so-hideous-it's-wonderful interior design and their boarding-school son.  The script has (adds?) a soupcon of wit, Jessica Raine  is wonderful as Tuppence and the production looks gorgeous.  Is the licence fee worth it?  How can you ask?!  We're already hoping for a Christmas special. 

Wolf Hall

The superlatives came thick and fast even before broadcast.  Is this the most eagerly anticipated BBC drama in years?  All the augurs were good: two Booker-winning novels, a long hit run of a two-night play at the Globe and in the West End, and not forgetting much-loved predecessors covering similar territory ('The Six Wives of Henry VIII' etc.).  Hype, however, is a double-edged sword, and the transformation of over a thousand pages of close, nuanced text into a compelling televisual feast was always going to be a challenge.

On the evidence of the first episode, fans of 'The Tudors' will be sorely disappointed.  Other than the necessary bursts of tedious exposition ("The Emperor's men have taken the Pope!  That's Queen Katherine's nephew and he'll never let the Pope grant a divorce!") this panders hardly at all to an audience in search of Henry-lite storytelling.  The costumes do not flatter, the dialogue retains the sour wit of the original prose and Cromwell himself, though reconfigured from villainy, is too elusive to be a hero.

Broadly speaking, this follows the chronology of the novels, a teasing, pleasing structure that takes small hops forward and back like a courtly dance.  We accompany Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance), son of a blacksmith, with a murky, violent past on his journey through the often sad, always brutal rise and fall of Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy).  Rylance, for anyone who has yet to be convinced, is wonderful, his expression and demeanour conveying in stillness or mobility the man Cromwell, aware he is engaged in dangerous manoeuverings and beset by men who kill easily, take confession and eat with a hearty appetite afterwards.

It is, to be slightly pedantic, a bit clean.  Floors are swept, draperies untouched by dust or grease, even in Cromwell's middling home.  It's forgiveable though, when the sound is audible, the music unobtrusive and the filming in appropriate light such as fire and candlelight gives beautiful shade and depth to the scenes.  This isn't history, it is Mantel's re-imagination of a man's life in Tudor England.  We know relatively little about the figure with the steely gaze in Holbein's portrait, but this telling surely does him proud.

Call the Midwife

We've not read Jennifer Worth's memoirs on which the series is based.  No doubt they're an absorbing social document of a specific time and place (late 1950s, London's East End).  As dramatised by the BBC, think 'Casualty' meets 'Casualty 1900', bumps into 'The Royal', takes a detour through 'District Nurse' and ends up being very close neighbours with all manner of heartwarming post-war grubby England tales.

Is that unfair?  Maybe after one episode it's too early to judge, and the performances and production values are all they should be, but... it's all so familiar: the young newcomer, years of tradition, the agonies and ecstasies of childbirth, the nostalgic look back at a bygone age and even the carefully chosen soundtrack.  Granted, it has been made for the 8pm Sunday slot and it doesn't shirk from showing the less salubrious side of life.  So far it's so-so, but for emotional impact and a recreation of the 1950s without the childbirth, see 'Vera Drake'.