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.

The Secrets

One of BBC1's half-hour-each-weeknight dramas, all on the Secrets theme and quite starry.  This first episode has Olivia Colman reluctant to help her mother Alison Steadman commit suicide.  Hard to know what to say since this may not be representative of the whole series, but this was very depressing for a Sunday night.  The obvious counterpoint of Olivia Colman's pregnancy (death and birth, the cycle of life, yes?) and the incidental humour of Alison Steadman's smoking a joint didn't relieve the bleakness much, and the legal arguments were largely sidelined.  Yet surely it was the legal status of assisted suicide which made this a secret at all?  What made this watchable were the performances of the three leads, understated to such a degree we wondered if the dialogue was improvised.  If the rest of the acting is of this calibre, the remaining episodes will be worth watching.

The 7.39

Written by 'One Day's David Nicholls, this is unsurprisingly a story of romance blossoming, in this case between two commuters.  (Those with a daily commute who spend it giving thanks that they're not spliced or sharing a shower with any of the great unwashed elbowers sitting anywhere near them may find this a bit hard to swallow.)

Sally (Sheridan Smith) and Carl (David Morrissey) have comfortable lives but are mildly dissatisfied, a fact that they face when they start a friendship on the 7.39 and find themselves attracted to each other.  Sally is engaged to sweet-but-gormless Ryan (Sean Maguire) while Carl is happily married to Maggie (Olivia Colman) with two teenaged children.  Sally works in admin at a leisure centre while Carl has a middle-management marketing job with a boss who puts David Brent in the shade.  It isn't hard to identify with both their frustrations and their guilt at their frustrations.  What grates is the unlikely emptiness of the trains, streets, gym etc. and the frustratringly out-of-whack geography and yes, even trains, for anyone who knows London and commuting.  Would Sally's job pay enough to justify an hour-long commute each way?  Then there's an agonisingly cliched moment where they lurch into each other on a train and another where they skirt around sharing a hotel room during a train strike.

The episode ends when they are about to sleep together "just once to clear the air".  Oh please.  This can only end in tears, but it's hard to care whether they're the Brief Encounter tears of denial, or the tears of ruining their other relationships.

The Thirteenth Tale

The novel may have been a bestseller in 2006, but we'd neither of us heard of it, so we waited in vain for a haunting, or something even vaguely creepy to happen, but this was very much a cosy-slipper affair - familiar gothic/psychological thriller territory - and not much more than an ok way to spend 90 minutes of post-Christmas torpor.

Olivia Colman reprises her blunt, out of her depth role, here as biographer Margaret Lea, who visits ailing writer Vida Winter (Vanessa Redgrave with startling Titian tresses) in her country pile to hear the titular 13th tale.  This turns out to involve another country pile nearby, the crumbling Angelfield, sibling incest, insanity, suicide, murder and red-haired twin girls who reminded us disturbingly of those in 'The Shining'.  Perhaps the novel is more artfully constructed, but the television adaptation could have been the result of throwing du Maurier, the Brontes, Collins et al into a pot and seeing what was cooked up.  Yes, it was written by Christopher Hampton, but... he remains best known for something he adapted over 25 years ago.  1950s Yorkshire, we suspect, was unlikely to be a place of total isolation for these characters for years on end.  Who'd have thought that 'Heartbeat' could compare favourably in the reality stakes?  Margaret has previously written a biography of the Brontes, but doesn't seem to recognise Yorkshire, unless Hampton couldn't think of a subtler way to signpost the Moors to us.

The twist in the tale is not particularly satisfying, and instead throws up more questions, like a 'Midsomer Murders' story in overdrive, and the wholly unnecessary hint of romance for Margaret with the doctor (Steven Mackintosh) at the end just brings the whole thing down to the level of chick-lit with a kink.  Bit of a waste of a talented cast.  Speaking of which, we're hoping Emily Beecham gets to play someone sane and Tom Goodman-Hill someone other than a faithless rotter in the near future, for their sakes.

Run

This review is later than planned because 'Run' is stripped across four consecutive nights on Channel 4 at 10pm, which is after all what recording devices are for, no?  I suppose watching it live is wonderful for anyone whose memory is more like a goldfish than an elephant, but for many of us it's just impossible.  So there, TV schedulers.

Anyway, to the drama itself.  Olivia Colman is the estranged partner of an abusive man and the mother of two troubled and troublesome teenaged sons.  She lives on an estate with walkways and underpasses and works in a dead-end job.  It might be 'Shameless' without the laughs except that the family dynamics and the plot take some very dark turns indeed.  Less shameless than unflinching, and a very believable exploration of lives behind cases on the news and in court.  It's not an enjoyable watch, or a comfortable one, with our put-upon mum smoking like the proverbial chimney and drinking tins of cheap lager every five minutes, but the writing is raw, and Colman's performance is one of her finest.  You want good things to happen, even while you know they are unlikely.  Roll on eps. 2-4.  Parliament should be made to watch before ever again uttering words about Broken Britain and cuts as though they knew what that means for millions.

Update, having watched the remaining episodes.  They didn't disappoint, so a big hello to the two writers, from whom we hope to have more.  And we liked Lennie James before but now we love him.  We defy anyone who has a heart not to have it wrung out by his rehab dad, even if they hate drugs and love their cars - can't say more without spoilers.  Fabulous.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

Before saying anything about this as a stand-alone work of fiction, a word about artistic bankruptcy.  Paddy Considine and Olivia Colman are probably capable of convincing an audience of absolutely anything and actors, like the rest of us, have to pay the bills, but... this has been commissioned on the success of the TV adaptation of Kate Summerscale's non-fiction book.  A real, and horrible crime of child murder in 1860 was explored in the 2008/9 book which had stellar sales after Richard & Judy recommended it to a television audience.  Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that it was made into a drama which - in our humble opinions - managed to blunt the force and erase the subtlety of the case, as represented in Summerscale's book.

So now, Whicher is back as a sort of private gumshoe in Victorian England, handling an entirely fictional case.  The real Whicher retired into obscurity, but hey, who cares about facts?  Any researcher into 19th Century crime will know that there were enough real horrors to obviate the need for fiction, but we continue to be bludgeoned by clumsy plots and fictional characters assuming the identities of people who had lives and have descendants.  It's all about the brand, and Brand Whicher has outstripped reality, as well as the author who brought it to prominence (Summerscale's subsequent book "Mrs Robinson's Disgrace" was a very modest success by comparison).

This is more 'Whicher Street' than anything rooted in the real history of the Metropolitan Detective.  Whicher here is given an honourable grief (like Ripper's Inspecter Reid, the loss of a child) to account for his obsessive behaviour and is also given the usual hero-in-adversity situation courtesy of his no longer being an officer of the law.  There's even some bromance with his old friend DCI Dolly Williamson (William Beck) and supposed new friend Inspector George Lock (Shaun Dingwall).  This could have been a chance for original costume drama to be a cut above the soapy 'Downton Abbey' but sadly it's let down by a plodding (pardon the pun) script.  There are several "But that's not how it happened!" and "I didn't kill her!" exclamations; Whicher enters an asylum via a Trojan coach and there's an obvious suspect due to hang but whom Whicher, of-course, suspects is innocent.

We'd worked out whodunnit by 9.10pm and we're sure a good portion of the audience got there before us.  Despite his Suspicions, it took Whicher a tad longer.  Clearly the costume department have read the letters of Lady Lytton, who insisted that the more hirsute a man in the facial department, the more he had to hide.

Broadchurch

Another murder-mystery-thriller?  Yep.  This one at least doesn't throw up a gallery of weirdo suspects, like its opposite number on the BBC, and it appears to be moving faster, although it has eight episodes so there's plenty of opportunity to drop the pace.

Hope not, it's a great cast and the inevitable secrets that bubble up are at least not signposted in a size even the short-sighted can easily see.  Nonetheless, at the risk of being descended on by a posse of Tennant fans, we have to say that he didn't really look convincing in the police appeal at the end of the episode.  He doesn't look like any detective we've seen speaking on the television news, and he certainly didn't sound like one, promising the killer that they would be caught no matter what.  That's what's known as setting yourself up to fail, and even an archetypal PC Plod would surely avoid that old chestnut.