Banished

Considering how few dramas are set in penal colonies, compared to, say, cop and doc shows, this felt unsettlingly familiar.  Convict James Freeman (Russell Tovey) sticks up for Anne Meredith (Orla Brady) when a nasty blacksmith steals her food.  Being a classic bully, the blacksmith promptly returns the woman's food and takes Freeman's, delivering a brutal assault as he does so, and sneering that Freeman will never eat again.  No-one helps out the hungry man, not even his friend Tommy Barrett (Julian Rhind-Tutt), who has trouble of his own in the form of Elizabeth Quinn (MyAnna Buring).  She has been caught paying him a nocturnal visit and when she refuses to name her lover, is given 25 lashes.  The lovers wish to marry but have living spouses back in England, and when Barrett refuses to live without her it looks like tragedy will ensue.

Timberlake Wertenbaker got there first, and crafted a curious, lyrical and often brutal tale of unfortunates shipped off to a barren land as punishment.  This is very much McGovern's take on proceedings, and while he's an old hand at old lags, he's had most success with contemporary tales, and his decorously begrimed actors betray their well-fed 21st Century origins with almost every line.  As you'd expect, the main characters are noble, have honour, feel love, and fight a gutsy battle with tyranny and their straightened circumstances.  Barrett even claims he is innocent.  Meanwhile the soldiers and the clergy protect the blacksmith because they need his tools; the soldiers use the women prisoners for sex with impunity, and state that a dead convict is just one less mouth to feed, that scum and whores shouldn't breed etc.

It's entertaining enough, but has found a strange berth at BBC2.  The first of seven episodes had a histrionic climax and a sudden happy ending, leading us to think that the remaining six will tackle a familiar issue each week: rebellion, disease, pregnancy, unlikely friendships, the ever-present threat of death.  No doubt McGovern has done his research, and there are contemporary accounts to supplement any histories with authentic voices, but to his viewers the past is less a foreign country than an all-too-familiar landscape.

Castles in the Sky

Another one of those 'the story of...' 90-minute dramas that the Beeb does so well.  OK so they take a few liberties with the truth for the sake of dramatic tension or humour, and the 'eureka!' moments are cheesy, but the performances are solid (with the exception of Eddie Izzard's Scottish accent wandering across the Atlantic and back) and the science of radar is explained for dummies.  There is apparently evidence that people perform best under pressure, and the threat of Hitler's Luftwaffe brought out the best in weatherman Watson Watt and his team.  Despite prejudice from the toffs, the sorely tested patience of loved ones and the political infighting of Churchill, Tizard and co. they invent something that can detect enemy planes early enough to scramble aircraft effectively.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

The Wipers Times

Typically British, we struggled with the nuances of foreign languages.  Ypres?  What sort of nonsensical word is that?  Wipers will do.  This 90-minuter co-penned by Ian Hislop about two of his favourite subjects - WWI and satire - is a nicely-focused piece about a newspaper printed at the front on a salvaged printer (which seems to work better than any modern domestic counterpart, even after a direct hit) for the troops in the trenches.  The content is brought to life in sketches acted by the soldiers which surprisingly doesn't slow the narrative.  Its tight focus precludes much of the grim business of war, but the writers take knowledge of the conflict as a given, in much the same way as their WWI counterparts did.  Which is rare and nice.

We didn't know about the Wipers, and aren't entirely ignorant of the Great War, so this was another rare thing: a genuinely educational drama.  Clearly the paper became a lifeline for many of its readers and most of all for its writers, who combated the ongoing insanity that surrounded them with humour.

Wodehouse in Exile

Was Wodehouse in exile?  We like Jeeves and Wooster, but we didn't know much about their author, PG Wodehouse.  This is another of those superb 90-minute bio-dramas that BBC4 does so well.  Tim Piggott-Smith gives a nuanced performance as the innocent, gullible writer who finds himself a propaganda puppet of the Nazis during WWII.  Zoe Wanamaker is equally affecting as his more worldly wife, with Julian Rhind-Tutt and Flora Montgomery in strong support as Malcolm Muggeridge (then a Major with British Intelligence) and Wodehouse's adopted daughter Leonora.  It's a sad story and one as much about the madness and indecency of war as about one decent man's fate.

The Lady Vanishes... In the Flesh...

... and reappears as a zombie?  Now that might be a drama worth watching.  Have to be honest, this lady vanished long before the ending, and never even made it to the start of 'In the Flesh'.

The BBC remake/update claims to have been based closely on the book, 'The Wheel Spins' rather than Hitchcock's film version, so why keep the film's title if not to (falsely) lure fans of the film?  Pedantic gripes aside, this was a perfectly watchable, serviceable escapist drama which was apparently bumped from the Christmas schedules.  Maybe there were legal reasons, but any others were sheer madness since this is perfect post-pud entertainment.  Having it as a stand-alone in the March Sunday evening slot cruelly exposes the pointlessness of either a remake of the film or another adaptation of the novel.

The central premise is a tad confused (so they all lied conveniently for different reasons?) and rather distractingly every single character was a 'face'.  Is it us or is Tom Hughes the new Jonathan Rhys-Myers?  This is not a compliment.  If he is a better actor, he needs to appear in something worthwhile, fast.

And one look at the photo from 'In the Flesh' explains why neither of us sat down with a cushion and a cuppa to watch it.  BBC3 may have turned up something classy in 'Being Human' but there's just something about zombies....  It is a prejudice on our part, we admit, so maybe in the middle of the night, feeling a bit like the undead, we will take the leap.  Meanwhile there are zombies of the everyday variety all around, as anyone who commutes will tell you.