London Spy

Honestly, you wait years for Mr Whishaw to appear in a spy drama and two come along at once.  He's currently reprising his role as Q in cinema's latest Bond film, and here he is as a far less geeky Danny, a vulnerable young man in London working in an Amazon-style warehouse.  After a chance meeting, he falls in love with Alex, a mysterious and inhibited young man who says he works for an investment bank, but just as they begin to envisage a future together, Alex disappears.

Exquisite and painful.  The cast, including Jim Broadbent as Danny's friend Scottie, don't put a foot wrong.  It doesn't appear, from this episode, that the homosexuality is a theme at all; these are two young men in love, one of whom has an impossible secret.  It's left to Scottie, a Whitehall mandarin with secrets of his own, to suggest that the man the police are calling Alastair worked for MI6.  By this time, Danny has made a gruesome discovery of his own, that has similarities to the real-life case of the man found in a holdall.  As gripping for its heartfelt portrayal of love as for its murky depiction of espionage, we genuinely can't wait to see what Danny finds out.

Coalition

Coalition was Channel 4's dramatisation of the formation of the Conservative / Lib Dem coalition government in 2010.  Starting with the first ever TV debate, it took viewers up to the point of the foundation of the government, and Cameron & Clegg's first joint press conference.

While it started well - the debate worked, I think - it soon drifted off into less comfortable territory.  The biggest problem was that the cast of characters was very big.  Normally with re-creations you have a few actors playing real figures, but in this almost all characters were current, living politicians.

So while you could take the 3 party leaders ('Cameron' looked very convincing for example), as more and more people started to appear it became a very distracting case of 'who is that meant to be?'.  I spent a few minutes wondering whether Alex Avery has shaved the top of his head to play William Hague (Google images suggests he had), and also to wonder where I'd seen 'Ed Balls' before (it was, of course Nicholas Burns, aka Nathan Barley).  It was a serious drama, but a few knowing gags like one about Chris Huhne's marital problems again broke the suspension of disbelief.

A few interesting points came out of the drama.  I'd forgotten how rude Gordon Brown could be, for example, but overall I felt that it would have been done far better as either a documentary, with talking heads, or a Comic Strip style take on the story, complete with action sequences, and over the top performances.  (They could have called it 'Inside Number 10')

However, like some of the voters, the programme makers chose to go a third way, and produce something that didn't really work very well, although you could see what the original intention was.  A bit like the coalition, in fact...

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.

Mapp & Lucia

Another drama that pretty much eschewed younger actors and characters (see earlier) was Steve Pemberton's adaptation of EF Benson's Mapp & Lucia.

Previously adapted in the 1980s with Prunella Scales, Geraldine McEwan & Nigel Hawthorne (which neither of us saw), the new version had Miranda Richardson, Anna Chancellor, and Pemberton as Mapp, Lucia, and Lucia's friend Georgie Pillson. 

Lucia and Georgie move to Tilling to spend the summer, Lucia renting a property from Mapp.  An undeclared war then breaks out between the Mapp & Lucia over social influence in the community, with each resorting to dirty tricks to get one up on the other.

In the age of Instagram and Facebook and the sort of social boasting that those two offer it feels very relevant, even through it's 1920s & 30s. 

The other great thing was that it gave meaty roles to a whole host of great actors, like Felicity Montagu, Poppy Miller, Paul Ritter, and Gemma Whelan.

Most credit must go to long-term EF Benson fan Steve Pemberton both for the idea to adapt the stories again, and for coming up with such a brilliant script.  It almost makes you wish that the powers that be give over a special part of the commissioning budget to former members of The League of Gentlemen, given the quality of work that has come from Pemberton, Mark Gatiss (though we remain skeptical of 'Sherlock)', Reece Shearsmith and Jeremy Dyson, and also seek out similarly talented bands of writer-performers to conceive new shows. 

We only got 3 episodes, but given the wealth of material in the original six books, and the flexibility of the concept, we hope that there will be many more to come (there were 10 episodes in the 80s)

The Tractate Middoth

Montague Rhodes James must be one of the most terrifying men who ever lived.  He looked mild enough and was a scholar at Cambridge, but depending on your inclination he would probably be the very first or very last choice to be stranded in a lonely old house with on a stormy night.  Or any night.  Or even any time at all.  Penned over a hundred years ago, his stories still send shudders down the spine, freeze the blood and generally get under the skin.  To anyone who has read or seen 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad', weighing down the sheets on an unused twin bed will seem a perfectly sound act, likewise shunning a pair of binoculars unless the exact provenance is known after 'A View from a Hill'.  To say Mark Gatiss is one of his keenest fans is an understatement, and lucky Mr G had the largesse of BBC2 on Christmas night to indulge his fascination.

This was lucky for us, too.  We can't help thinking that a venegeful demon or two would liven up 'Downton Abbey' no end, but meanwhile, we switched over gratefully and settled down with some pud to watch 'The Tractate Middoth'.  We found ourselves in familiar James territory: a dusty old library, arcane texts and men with dubious motives.  As befits a Christmas tale, it was greed that proved the undoing of at least one character, John Eldred (John Castle, another actor of whom we see too little) and possibly of his successor Mrs. Simpson (Louise Jameson).  James's stories always tease with ambiguity.  While there are descriptive passages of what the protagonist/victim suffers, we're left wondering what exactly it is that has been unleashed on them.  This clever absence of explanation leaves us unsure of how to avoid the same fate (though avoiding spiders wherever possible would seem a good start).

Gatiss is a godsend as a genuinely inventive writer who presumably enjoys writing for TV.  Are others with his talent champing at the bit?  We guess not, or not visibly to producers, who have at times denied us Christmas ghost stories altogether.  Perhaps the only, smallest of quibbles with the adaptation was the explicit visibility of the malevolence that haunts the pages of the book to such ill effect.  This was also in evidence in 'Crooked House' a few years ago, which until the flashing light sequence towards the end had proved the best Jamesian tale we had seen by another author.  (Jeremy Dyson's 'The Haunted Book' has a similar seen-in-strobe effect in one story).  Less is more when it comes to fear... but we're aware that it's a matter of personal taste, and that it's hard to convey visually what James manages so well in print.

At just over 30 minutes, a great little Christmas treat.

Sherlock *spoilers*

We're wondering whether the BBC had the jitters about this series, or whether Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat had them about the BBC.  Despite the success of series one, series two has featured three key stories, as though they wanted to make all their favourites in case it either wasn't recommissioned, or Benedict Cumberbatch or Martin Freeman moved on.  They can go back and do the other stories - as with Conan Doyle, he didn't stay dead after the Falls - but they're making it hard for themselves to keep up the pace and tension.

We liked the reworking of 'Baskerville' particularly.  It had that sense of gothic paranoia that ran through all the original stories, while elegantly using the paraphernalia of modern life to update both setting and relevance.  Overall, though, the series feels like it was made it for teens, with that breathlesss, over-the-top sense of... 'Dr Who'?  We can't help but wonder if it isn't another facet of dumbing down.  Not that the scripts themselves are crude or witless, or that it is necessarily a bad thing to pander to arrested development in some sense - who wants to grow old anyway? - but the England of Conan Doyle's formidable hero was very different to one in which every third household has single occupancy and Playstation games are among the favourite pastimes for adults in their 40s.  The modern Sherlock, in the current film as well as on the Beeb, is undeniably fun, but at the expense of something quite sinister and adult that marked the original.