Churchill's Secret

'Elderly man isn't all that well' isn't really a revelation, but when the man in question is Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Michael Gambon), symbol of British Bull-doggedness in WWII, the news is not to be bandied about.  Loyal members of his cabinet want the PM's stroke kept under wraps, lest there's an unseemly scramble for power in the absence of both Churchill and likely successor Anthony Eden (Alex Jennings), who was having gall bladder surgery abroad.  Mrs. Churchill, the redoubtable-in-her-own-right Clementine (Lindsay Duncan), wants Winston away from the temptations of Westminster and brings him back home to the Kent countryside home of Chartwell.  To nurse him, they contract Nurse Millie Appleyard (Romola Garai) but their peace is short-lived when the in-fighting Tories - plus ca change! - and the equally quarrelsome younger Churchills flock to Winston's bedside.

One of those 'rather nice' dramas that will go down well in America, this is a bit of a curio.  The storyline runs in a similar way to 'The Madness of George III': statesman brought low, struggles of his family and the succession, slow recovery, lessons learned etc.  It's beautifully filmed, some of it at Chartwell itself, now a National Trust gem, and is directed solidly by Charles Sturridge.  Overall though, it's rather a byway in the great man's life, and not that one that really altered the course of his remaining decade or so.  The addition of a fictional character to nurse him, who of-course happens to be from a Labour family, seems an unnecessary addition to proceedings, and merely a cypher in whom Clemmie can confide about the grief of losing her young daughter Marigold some thirty years earlier.  Things only really spring to life when the children arrive and, facing their father's death, are candid about the drawbacks of growing up with parents who were almost always otherwise engaged.

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.

Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands

Sometimes it's easier than others to write an objective review.  We admit that, faced with a host of CGI monsters and dragons generic enough to have appeared in many another fantasy drama, it's difficult.  The problem is that, devoid of an affinity to beasts of this sort, the fantasy tropes, or - to put it unkindly - the similarities between all the stories, render it difficult to tell them apart.

So is this good fantasy or bad fantasy?    Well it's more enjoyable froth, if you like fantasy.  One thing it isn't is 'Beowulf', as in the early Middle-English poem/story.  As is currently common, it takes the classic as some very basic source material and weaves a new bunch of episodes around it.  One thing it is, therefore, is similar to most other tales.  Old warrior is waning, so young(ish) warrior prepares to assume power and undertakes a journey, but there are rivals to his claim etc. etc.  It's at 7pm, so the younger kids should be in bed and the adults not yet on the sofa.  We'd suggest it's not going to convert any dragon-haters, but should please dragon-lovers well enough.

Just have to say that Joanne Whalley looks great (and not mucked about with surgically, praise be).  If nothing else, fantasy does at least have strong roles for mature actresses that don't require them to look either underage or like someone's great-grandmother.

Harry Price Ghost Hunter

Harry Price famously investigated the 'most haunted house in England', Borley Rectory, but this finds him much earlier in his career, cheating gullible clients out of their cash by telling them what they want to hear using the technique of cold reading.  When a client whom he - in the guise of the man's dead brother - has advised to be at peace takes him rather too literally and shoots himself, Price (Rafe Spall) has a rethink and begins to expose other charlatans.  He is then approached by a senior Liberal (Michael Byrne), who asks for his help on behalf of the party's rising star, MP Edward Goodwin (Tom Ward).  Goodwin's wife Grace (Zoe Boyle reprising the rather wan and wet type she played in a season of 'Downton Abbey') was found hysterical and naked in the middle of town, and claims she is being haunted.  After Harry reluctantly begins his search, he finds more than he bargained for in terms of corporeal threats from the doting husband and the sharp-tongued parlourmaid Sarah (Cara Theobold).

ITV clearly hope this will be a series, since it ends with the formation of a partnership and the solving of the mystery.  It definitely lends itself to a definition of 'enjoyable froth', and hedges its bets on the supernatural Big Q (Are there ghosts?).  There are real cases to dramatise, including Borley, but here they have fictionalised, and at times rather lazily.  The Goodwins are stereotypes a la 'Lady Chatterley' and their mansion is improbably grand for a former workhouse.  If it becomes a TV fixture, then on the current evidence it isn't likely to blaze any trails.

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. 

The Frankenstein Chronicles

A similar concept to the current retake on 'Jekyll', this is a chase around after the jolly scientist who stitches body parts together and reanimates them, only shown later and, rather bafflingly, on ITV Encore.  More names than you can shake a stick at here, with Sean Bean playing decent, syphilitic river cop John Marlott, who senses that something other than macabre needlework is going on.  The course of his investigation leads him to body-dealing hospital porter Pritty (Charlie Creed-Miles), his big boss Peel (Tom Ward, here exchanging his pathologist's apron with Samuel West), patrician politicians (Elliot Cowan and Ed Stoppard) and even authors William Blake (Steven Berkoff) and Frankenstein's own creator Mary Shelley (Anna Maxwell-Martin).  Oh and let's not forget the magnificent carcass of a pig that he throws into the Thames to test the tides.

This was quite fun and focused less on the gore and shocks of 'Jekyll' than the lacks and longings that would lead someone in early Industrial England to create a composite creature out of dead children.  Marlott has his own Big Sadness that he carries around with him and that we know will be exacerbated by both his mercury pills and his determination to find the truth behind the strange goings-on.  Bean is likeable in the lead role, almost a worn-down, less celebrated version of his Sharpe character grown older.  Why Encore, though, when an ITV audience would enjoy this in a 9pm slot?