New Blood

We can't help thinking this was made for BBC3 and, now that the channel has gone online, has found an uncomfortable home at 9pm on BBC1.  Writer Anthony Horowitz was responsible for 'Foyle's War', but is best known as a children's author, and he has definitely pitched this at a young and liberal audience.  The heroes are twenty-something, ethnic minority, professional Brits battling evil Big Pharma and the powers that be who have invested in them.  There are weekly stories within a series narrative establishing a buddy-buddy relationship that generally feels like it's based on banter scripted by a middle-aged man, which of-course it is.

As a 7pm BBC3 offering it would pass muster, but the gimmicky filming and the making light of serious issues are a bad fit on the flagship channel at prime time.

The Living and the Dead *spolers*

BBC1 has made this six-part series available for free as a box set on iPlayer and we couldn't resist.  Ghosts!  Period costumes!  Manly chests!  What more could we (well, Ali) want?  Well, something a bit scarier maybe.  Ashley Pharoah was the main brain behind 'Life on Mars', and there turned what should have been a very creepy concept into a lot of fun.  It worked - at least in the first series - because of nostalgia for other cop shows as much as anything else.

This plays on traditional tropes from Thomas Hardy novels to MR James stories, but Pharoah clearly has a love of time travel narratives, and that doesn't fit quite so well here.  Nathan Appleby (Colin Morgan) returns to his family farmhouse at Shepzoy in Somerset with young wife Charlotte (Charlotte Spencer) in 1894, and before you can say 'here be dragons, get thee back to London', very odd things start happening.

It's all cleverly done, weaving a contained tale per episode into the ongoing narrative involving Nathan's dead son Gabriel (they're always called Gabriel), but we can't help feeling that some of it is a tad clumsy.  Why is there no mention of Gabriel's mother?  Ah of-course, that's for series two.  Throughout, various influences made themselves felt, notably The Others and the history of Hinton Ampner, and there was a conundrum at the end, in that we'd had have advanced combustion engines a whole lot sooner if farmers in 1894 really had discovered a submerged car in a field.  We always have high hopes of a new ghost story, but this delivered few real scares, and resorted to cliches at times.

It also resorted, rather unforgiveably, to an anachronistic look for heroine Charlotte, who wouldn't draw many odd stares in 21st Century Notting Hill.  Her attitude and that of her maid are also very liberated for the time.  A shame when trouble has clearly been taken to create an atmosphere of a place where rural folklore was still strong, in music, look and tone.  Presumably these aspects were thought to be more accessible to a modern audience.  Should we even try to cherry-pick the past and must we make everything modern?  It seems a manifestation of our disturbing current tendency to distrust anything 'other', but 'other' is what is so fascinating and compelling about the past - and ghost stories - after all.  

Undercover

The success of 'War and Peace' and 'The Night Manager' on BBC1's 9pm Sunday slot has left big shoes to fill.  'Undercover' treads confidently, if a little predictably, in its opener.  A juggernaut narrowly misses crushing Maya (Sophie Okonedo) within the first few minutes (she was fumbling for her phone on a desert highway, as you do).  She's a lawyer, fighting for client Rudy (Dennis Haysbert)  facing execution on Death Row.  We don't quite know what he's done, but Maya likes him and he's played by the cuddly President in '24', so we feel he has to have been unjustly sentenced.  Maya lives in London and is happily married to Nick (Adrian Lester) with three teenaged children, one of whom is autistic, but Nicky has a secret that threatens to expose the basis of their relationship as a lie....

Good so far.  Just enough hints and flashbacks to keep us guessing what happened, why and to whom in 1996.  This clearly takes its cue from the recent, controversial court cases involving long-term undercover cops who engaged in relationships with those they were investigating, even in some cases having children from those relationships, in addition to ongoing relationships under their own names.  We hope it holds its nerve and becomes an outstanding drama, since it is tackling such major themes as justice, prejudice, public and personal trust and betrayal in the modern democratic state.

The Night Manager

Freely adapted from prolific spy scribe Le Carre's 1993 novel, this quickly gets going - and gripping - but is every bit as far-fetched as a Bond movie.  Ex-army officer Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) is a night manager at the swanky Nefertiti hotel in uptown Cairo.  During the Arab Spring, the beautiful mistress of a dodgy local playboy entrusts him with a document implicating famous businessman/philanthropist Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie) in arming terrorists.  When he leaks it to Simon Ogilvy (Russell Tovey) at the British Consulate, the consequences for them both are shattering.

This has all the right ingredients: glamorous locations, a good-looking cast, subterfuge, violence, sex, good vs. bad and so on.  It's engrossing in the same way as a well-put-together, handsomely mounted Hollywood movie.  The slight glitch for an English audience is the self-same cast.  Hiddleston is a great hero, but an unlikely night manager, while we kept expecting Laurie to reprise his goggle-eyed Regency Prince from 'Blackadder' and Tovey to be the cheeky chappie he usually plays.  Horribly unfair to the actors, who turn in top-class performances, along with Olivia Colman as gutsy intelligence agent and mum-to-be Angela Burr, and several other staple Brits besides.

Escapist and a good ad for the intelligence services if you are reckless.  It isn't after all the governments who wield the power and pose the threat these days.  Businessmen are rather less exposed.

War and Peace

Even a six-hour adaptation isn't going to do justice to Tolstoy's doorstopper.  It is, after all, the sort of book you could take to a desert island and still be ploughing through when the rescue ship hove into view.  Nonetheless the Beeb have gamely taken it on, and crammed in every Brit actor of note they can find, with American star Paul Dano as Pierre.  Rather confusingly, this includes a couple of the cast of 'Dickensian'.  So for the next five weeks we'll have to extrapolate Stephen Rea's Inspector Bucket from a devious Russian aristocrat and Tuppence Middleton's innocent Amelia Havisham from said Russian aristocrat's shallow daughter, though she looks rather more like Messalina than Helene here.

It's visually gorgeous (though we're not sure about one-shoulder dresses in a high society salon), and is shaping up to be perfect Sunday-night escapism.  Purist fans of the novel should probably steer clear though.

And Then There Were None

The best-selling mystery novel of all time, apparently.  A rather hoary old stage chestnut is now brought to the Boxing Day table with its revised PC title, but most of its other thirties prejudices intact.  A group of disparates are summoned to 'Soldier Island' off the Devon coast for a rendezvous billed as a dinner party.  In the comfortable but eerily deserted environs of the island's hotel, they hear a recorded broadcast accusing them all of committing (separate) murders.  By the end of the hour there were eight of the ten remaining alive.

Just about as perfect a holiday drama as you could wish for, following in the wake of this year's successful play adaptations of classics.  Rather darker somehow than the Poirots or Marples, and went down very well with a tipple.

Dickensian

Christmas half-hour gobbets of Dickens seemed to work well on BBC1 with 'Little Dorrit' in 2008, so they've come up with this series of 20 half-hour episodes, airing a bit like a soap over the holidays.  This is another of those reboots/reinventions such as all those spin-offs of Austen novels, featuring characters from various Dickens stories in a murder-mystery.  None other than Inspector Bucket investigates the murder of one Jacob Marley, partner of Ebenezer Scrooge.

It's all rather fun if you like the Dickensian vibe without being too familiar with the original novels.  If you are a die-hard fan you will probably be too busy allocating characters to novels, or being appalled at the licence taken with, for example, the relative chronology.  Young Miss Havisham (Tuppence Middleton) is here dressed much as Estella would dress in 'Great Expectations' some years later.  And then there's Marley, who here deviates from miserliness just long enough to engage the services of young Nancy, through her pimp Fagin, much to Sykes's chagrin.  Meanwhile Amelia Havisham's friend Honoria Barbary is about to disgrace herself with a soldier under the disapproving eye of her spartan sister Frances....

Hopefully it can sustain 20 episodes, because if not it will just look like a lazy purloining of pre-written characters and their stories.  It never ceases to amaze us how what is essentially 'fan fic' can suddenly become respectable if commissioned.  We hear the new series of 'Endeavour' features riffs on famous tales such as 'The Great Gatsby'.  There are masterful reinterpretations, but they are rare, and 'Morse' ran out of good ideas when they'd exhausted Colin Dexter's novels.  So there. 

Cuffs

That's 'cuffs' as in the hand-locking variety rather than the ends of sleeves or a playful swipe to the side of the head.  A drama about either of the latter might seem to offer less possibilities, but at least they'd have lacked the cliches.  Think 'The Bill' or 'Holby Blue', 'Mersey Beat'... or any of a host of MoR cop shows.  In fact, it's probably easiest to sum up the episode with a sequence of cliches.

1: it's the rookie PC's first day
2: he's the son of the Chief Super (would they really be based at the same station?)
3: he's gay, and gets hit on by an unlikely woman and the male duty solicitor
4. he's paired with a tough, no-nonsense old-timer (Ashley Walters)
5. he makes a couple of serious mistakes but redeems himself by the end of the episode
6. his canteen lunch arrives just as they get a 'shout'
6. his dad has had a fling with a detective sergeant in the station (Amanda Abbington)
7. the aforementioned detective sergeant lives with a dog, to whom she's devoted, and eats microwave dinners
8. the mention of a racist released from prison is immediately followed by said racist attacking a victim
9. a stinger track fails to catch a getaway van but unexpectedly stops a man abducting his daughter
10. the rookie's mentor is proved wrong by the rookie when a vulnerable man hangs himself
11. no-one waits for backup, neatly explained by government cuts

Brighton hasn't featured in a good drama since Peter Mullan developed dementia and lost his criminal empire in 'The Fear', but there was little to enjoy in this beyond shots of the wheel, the piers, the marina, the Lanes and... the A27.  The writer Julie Gearey did superior work in 'Prisoners' Wives' and the main cast, other than newcomer Jacob Ifan as PC Jake Vickers, have all been far better elsewhere.  

Cider With Rosie

If you liked 'Lark Rise to Candleford', then you'll love this....  Well, ok, they're at least not spinning this out to a twee Sunday evening staple, but we did wonder why this rite-of-passage memoir was part of the short 'literary classics' series rather than a Boxing Day special.

It was a solid, if episodic, adaptation of the much-loved book, with Samantha Morton holding things together nicely as Laurie's long-suffering mother.  A voice-over by Timothy Spall as the older Lee gave viewers a taste of the lyrical prose which would otherwise have been lost and there was enough nostalgia for the chocolate boxers in the form of rolling hills and meadows, quaint print frocks and the sort of ramshackle country cottage that would nowadays fetch a cool million.  There was also enough grit left to appease the anti-chocolate box brigade, with a child's death, a murder, a war deserter and a father who behaved like Lord Marchmain in 'Brideshead' in refusing to return to his family after WWI (with less obvious cause).

For us, though, it was probably most memorable for the astonishingly brief cameo appearances of Annette Crosbie and June Whitfield as the warring grandmothers, and the inclusion of two young actors who are the offspring of... two actors.  Neither was a bad performance, but there are concerns about the accessibility of the profession to those without privilege, with the likes of David Morrissey and Christopher Eccleston raising doubts as to whether their current counterparts, starting out, would be able to make a living at it.  By 'privilege' they may be referring to the likes of Eddie Redmayne and Ben Cumberbatch, products of Eton and Harrow, who could no doubt have afforded to rest indefinitely between jobs even before becoming successful.  Aren't the ranks of actors, we would argue, equally homogenised by keeping it in the family?

The Go-Between

The past is a foreign country: they made things differently then.  The 1971 adaptation by Joseph Losey starred three stalwarts of British cinema in Alan Bates, Edward Fox, and Julie Christie as the luminous Marion.  The three instantly-recognisable stars and Losey's distinctive style somewhat swamped the novel's close adherence to Leo, the boy at the centre of the story.  Ben Batt, Stephen Campbell-Moore and Joanna Vanderham as farmer Ted Burgess, Viscount Hugh Trimmingham and Marion Maudsley are, while not unknown, easier to accept as people whose lives swim in and out of the focus of a twelve-year-old boy.

This is the third in the short series of 20th Century classics adapted by the BBC and to our minds the most successful so far.  It hasn't the controversial baggage of 'Lady Chatterley' nor the stage bound setting of 'An Inspector Calls', just a first line that (unlike the current shenanigans with Hamlet's monologue on the London stage) belongs in the opening scene.  Nuanced performances from Lesley Manville as Mrs. Maudsley and Campbell-Moore as the facially scarred Trimmingham keep the novel's fine balance of ambiguity and acuity as young Leo (Jack Hollington) is dropped deep into the maelstrom of adult love, class and propriety, never to be the same again.

Much has been made of the scheduling opposite the opener of the final series of 'Downton Abbey', but they are surely not fighting for the same audience.  That's cod roe, and this is caviar.

Doctor Foster

Doctor Foster went to... Hitchin, apparently.  Probably just as wet as Gloucester.  This is the latest star vehicle for Suranne Jones, alongside lately-arrived leading man Bertie Carvel from 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell').  Doc Gemma Foster is happily married - she enjoys sex with her husband, you see - has a nice son, a lovely home and is senior partner in a GP practice.  She has friends, nice clothes, a rapport with almost all the hypochondriacs in town - you get the picture.  Anyway, things start to change when she finds a long, blonde hair on hubby's scarf, and a strawberry lip balm in his pocket.  From that point on, nothing can quite convince her that he isn't having even better sex with a long-haired, strawberry-lipped blonde.

There were a few clunky-feeling moments in the first episode.  I'd be none too happy if my GP broke off in the middle of my appointment to check a text, nor would I agree to spy on her husband for her if she promised to give me the sleeping pills I wanted and she had previously felt inadvisable.  There are four further episodes to go, so this could start to feel either tedious or ridiculously OTT very soon.  However, the first episode was gripping enough.  From thinking her perfect exterior life must hide a wholly paranoid and insecure woman (a hair and a flavoured lip balm wouldn't have satisfied Othello as proof of infidelity, after all) we were drawn into her doubts.  The script cleverly had her slipping back and forth from telling herself she was just being daft and showing that she wasn't: his phone was clear, but he never came straight back from work; he bought flowers, but they were for his mum... but then he tells Gemma he visits his mum most days, and she can't find him in the visitors' book they are made to sign... and then her amateur sleuth follows him to a house where he is seen kissing another woman.... Finally, Gemma finds something that seems to prove that her whole life is something other than she thought it was.

Strong stuff.  Reallly hoping it can sustain four further episodes with a credible plot and no over-reliance on quoting incongruous Congreve in a drama concerned with how the modern age enables the privacy of a double life while disabling a properly private existence. 

Lady Chatterley's Lover

Constance Chatterley, newly-married, looks a little apprehensive here, as though she can see into the future.  The umpteenth adaptation of DH Lawrence's racy 1928 novel, which originally caused a sensation, a 1960s trial, and a comment about the material being unsuitable for one's servants, is here a 90-minute one-off.  Within the first 15, Constance has met Clifford, fallen in love and married him; he's gone off to war and been seriously injured, while one of his men Mellors has survived both a mining disaster and the war and returned to find his wife pregnant by another man.  It takes another 25 for Lady Chatterley to sneak off to the newly-appointed gamekeeper's shack for the sex she can no longer enjoy with her paralysed husband.

The best thing about this production is James Norton as Clifford Chatterley, cast against type as an impotent hero and sympathetically portrayed as a man bound by the expectations of his peers and upbringing.  Holliday Grainger caught the voice and mannerisms of pampered Connie perfectly, but while she has 'a good face for period', and is around the right age, something about her doll-like features made her seem like a petulant child.  The cleric who married her appeared to be about twelve also.  Presumably the war didn't slaughter the nation's aged clerics to this degree?  Richard Madden, as the earthy Oliver Mellors, bore an unfortunate passing resemblance to Peter Sutcliffe, aka the Yorkshire Ripper, which made it rather hard to understand his attraction.

Generally, the faults are those of the novel, i.e. the slow pace, the overblown melodrama and the giggly nature of the John Thomas references.  It has something to say, rather heavy-handedly, about the changing nature of class in England after WWI, but in terms of personal choice, we couldn't help thinking that sex with Mellors would have to be amazing to compensate Lady C for the loss of about six sumptuous dresses and the huge dining table of Wragby Hall.  It isn't as though there had been any hint of anything beyond the physical in their relationship, and until they were found out, Constance appeared content to have her beefcake and eat it.  They drove off in the final scene, inexplicably in a posh Chatterley car, with an unborn Mellors waiting, but how long before the romance faded in the face of unplucked chickens, unpeeled vegetables and unwashed nappies? 

Danny and the Human Zoo

This is essentially Lenny Henry's account of his early days in showbusiness.  Danny Fearon (Kascion Franklin), from a Jamaican family in Dudley in the 1970s, faces a future as a welder in British Leyland unless he can overcome the usual odds, in addition to staggering racism, to win his dream of becoming a comedian.

Good on Henry, for his success, for his writing about it as an inspiration to struggling artists, particularly those who face prejudice, and for his understated portrayal of his own stern father.  The 90-minute drama was entertaining, featured some great performances, not least from Kascion Franklin as Danny, and was at its best when showing the eye-wateringly casual racism that was everywhere, even on mainstream television, in the 1970s.  It seems incredible to us now that 'The Black and White Minstrel Show' was allowed on air, and still more incredible that anyone actually wanted to watch it.

Where it suffered, for us, was in the rather cosy portrait of adolescence that most of us would feel writing our autobiographies.  Maybe another hand would have helped here?  (Not a common problem when most celebrities leave the writing to someone else!)  Henry's writing is serviceable in terms of dialogue and structure, but the drama follows a familiar biopic route, complete with period signifiers that are cliches: glam rock and disco on the soundtrack; ill-fitting wigs and execrable wallpaper.  The ending - his (white) girlfriend having left him because his career has stalled, and the possibility of a new future with a Jamaican girl - seemed rather a hollow choice, particularly in view of the real Henry's later marriage to fellow comedian Dawn French.  His coming to terms with the death of his father through his funny, touching eulogy at the funeral felt a far more apposite milestone in his career and personal life.  Far more goes on in the human zoo, after all, than the mating game, and Danny's triumph over his unusual family set-up is a case in point. 

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. 

The Interceptor

Terrible title, cliched show.  Actually we're not even sure we can say anymore about this.  Dedicated, maverick Ash is a customs officer recruited to a crack-but-shadowy team who go after the big criminals rather than the small fry they usually manage to catch at borders.  Dialogue by numbers, some who-cares chases and some gadgets had us tuned out halfway through.  We suffer for our blog, but only within limits.

The C Word

The currently ubiquitous Sheridan Smith plays the late Lisa Lynch, whose diagnosis of breast cancer at 28 led to her writing a blog about her battle with the illness.  We have problems with dramas depicting real-life victims of terminal illness, not least that you know how it ends and it's depressing.

Lisa's blog, 'Alright Tit', led to a book, produced after her op and chemo when she was in recovery, before finding out that the cancer had spread to her bones and brain.  Her therapist then recommends a book to help her, which turns out to be Lisa's own.  (Seriously?  The therapist didn't twig that her client of the same name and with the same illness might just have been the author?)  It was a funny, honest and even uplifting 90 minutes, and Lisa's battle, with the support of her husband and family, was a remarkable one, but ultimately it was still an emotional wrencher of a drama for a holiday Sunday evening.

The Game

Have I Got News For You?

Cold War spies, you know the ones: Bond, Smiley et al.  This BBC2 apple hasn't fallen far from the tree.  The title sequence has an espionage montage set to twanging, mournful Ipcress File-alike tones.  Already there's been a tense stand-off, whisperings of a trap and a killing.  So begins our induction into the world of Joe Lambe (Tom Hughes), rising young star of MI5 in drab 1972 Britain. Model-pretty Joe works for an old dog of a boss known ironically as 'Daddy' (Brian Cox) and who may or may not be losing his powers.  A KGB defector has passed word about Operation Glass and now the race is on to find out what it involves.  A traitor is killed, and another, sending shivers through the team.  Daddy's deputy Sarah Montag (Victoria Hamilton) says there must be a mole among them: mummy's boy Bobby Waterhouse (Paul Ritter), her own husband, nerdy Alan (Jonathan Aris), police liaison DC Jim Fenchurch (Shaun Dooley) and admin Wendy Straw (Chloe Pirrie).

In other words, classic spy drama territory.  Is our boy Joe all that he seems?  Another murder puts this in doubt and there are five more episodes which we expect will be a taut, switchback ride.  If you like your spies more Smiley, i.e. in rather murkier moral and physical territory than Bond, then this is for you: clipped remarks, damp dark streets, the fug of cigars and cut-glass tumblers of brandy in the firelight (well, the miners' strike meant power cuts, you know) while men called Sergei run about with guns.  A refreshing dose of realism after the pre-election debate.

The Ark

So, you live with your large, grown family who have terrible table manners but otherwise rub along pretty happily together.  One day, while sitting and contemplating your strangely arid farm, God's messenger, in the form of Ashley Walters, plops down beside you and tells you God is fed up with the greed, selfishness and violence of human beings and is going to send a flood to drown them all.  Understandable enough, you reckon, if a bit drastic, but then comes the killer: you alone can save mankind!  All you have to do is build an enormous wooden structure, waterproof it and persuade as many people as you can to join you, and drag in some animals that will come your way.  The phrase "easier said than done" could have been coined for poor Noah (David Threlfall), previously considered a devout, strict but kindly old eccentric.  It goes without saying that Mrs. Noah, Emmie (the estimable Joanne Whalley) and the offspring don't exactly jump at the idea of hard labour and ridicule for building an ark in the sunny desert.

This is a nice re-telling, emphasizing the human aspects of the story - the sons' longing for independence; the wife's despairing, "Please tell me you've miscalculated the size?!" - if a little oddly paced.  Thirty minutes into a ninety-minute production before God's instructions arrived meant little time for the actual flood, which was, as CGI effects go, pretty underwhelming. Forty days and forty nights took little more than forty seconds of rather muddled images of water walls.  For bibliophiles, too, it may have been puzzling, since Canaan (Nico Mirallegro) is here Noah's son who strays off the righteous path through no fault of his dad's.  Ah well.  The core message of, umm, keeping faith despite all, comes through, and the acting was nicely understated for a biblical epic.  It made a nice change from Easter-centric crucifixion tales and yes, apparently rainbows are a reminder of man's covenant with God, not leprechauns and pots of gold, and the two are not the same....

Ordinary Lies

You'd expect ordinary lies in a second-hand car showroom along the lines of "Never been in an accident, mate," or "only one careful owner and two thousand on the clock"; not "my wife's just died" when she is at home with a mild outbreak of irritable bowel syndrome.  Salesman Marty's rather extra-ordinary whopper is, it's hinted, the tip of the iceberg among his colleagues' lurking secrets, but it's his story that features in the first of six 'Clocking Off' style episodes.  When his mid-life low leads him to drinking, late or no-shows for work and rows with his wife he is given a final warning.  The next day - running late again - he phones in and finds himself telling his colleague that he has just become a widower.

If you can get over this wholly unlikely scenario, and the fact that he relies on his sulking wife to wake him up in the morning when he has a working alarm, then this is an entertaining hour.  You know he's going to get found out, even he knows he's going to get found out, but it plays out well enough.  Jason Manford (Mark Addy's younger sibling, surely) is a real find and conveys the agony of a decent man who finds himself in a downward spiral of his own making.  He's ably supported by a great cast, notably Rebecca Callard as lonely do-gooder Grace, and things move from comic to serious as bumpily as Marty's own journey through his crisis.

Whether this is anywhere near as good as 'Clocking Off', or Brocklehurst's own recent 'The Driver' is still in the balance.  (The author also wrote 'Exile', which turned out to be a bit less than the sum of its parts.)  There are clear storylines shaping up here about a broken marriage, a missing partner, drug couriering and old family secrets, and they will need a sure hand.  So far, we're sticking with the characters, but needless to say, we wouldn't buy a second-hand car from any of them.

Poldark

If you like your swashes buckled, your bodices ripped and your upper lips stiff as you like, you really are spoiled for choice on UK TV at the moment, with the 'Musketeers', 'Banished', 'Arthur and George', 'Indian Summers' and 'Mr. Selfridge' all jostling with each other in the schedules, and now, going head-to-head on a Sunday with two of the above, comes 'Poldark'.  (That's pronounced 'PolDARK' btw, with the emphasis on the last syllable, Cornish-style.)  The series of eight episodes is based on the first two of Winston Graham's novels which form an epic family saga of late 18th Century tin mine-owning squires.  Several were filmed in the mid 1970s and that adaptation, staring Robin Ellis and Angharad Rees, retains a fan following so devout that an attempt in the late 90s at a sequel following the next generation (but without any of the original stars) sank without trace.

Galloping up, then, is Aidan Turner, who admittedly looks the part to the extent that you wonder why he hasn't already been cast as Heathcliff, Mr. Rochester and every other brooding hero you care to name.  Turner plays the eponymous Ross Poldark, newly returned in defeat from the American War of Independence, to find his once-prosperous home and mines gone to wrack and ruin after his father's death.  Thinking Ross lost in the war, his fiance Elizabeth (Heida Reed) has got engaged to his drippy cousin Francis (Kyle Soller), none of which turns Poldark from a brooder into a cheery chap.  This first episode sees him rescuing young tomboy Demelza Carne (Eleanor Tomlinson) and suffering the violent repercussions of her brutish kinfolk; meanwhile he vacillates about whether to make something of his dwindled inheritance or leave the crashing Cornwall waves behind him.

So, will this be as popular as the '70s version?  Almost certainly not, but that has as much to do with the multitude of channels and viewing-on-demand available now.  Times have changed in other ways too - the original saw Sunday evening church services in abeyance because parishioners were apparently glued to the screen.  This is a perfectly respectable adaptation of Graham's original prose, and so far faithful to the previous TV version too.  It's also good Sunday evening hokum with a cracking cast and that lovely wild coastline as a backdrop.  It's a worthy last job for the late Warren Clarke as Uncle Charles Poldark, and Ruby Bentall finally steps out of dim-girl roles as the centre of gravity of the piece, Ross's cousin Verity.  (There's also an improvement, in the persons of Beatie Edney and Phil Davis as Prudie and Jud, whose every appearance in both book and previous version had the attention wandering.)  If they keep up this standard, we hope they go on to become a Sunday staple.  After all, this has the blessing of the previous Ross, Robin Ellis, who makes a cameo appearance in the series.