You can't claim the title's misleading. Not Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider and arguably the most romantic city in the world: Derek Jacobi, Anne Reid and rainy Yorkshire. What it lacks in Lurpak, however, it makes up for with a warm, sharp script and a couple of promising sub-plots involving their children's families. Oh and a car chase.
Good to know there are strong roles roles for older women that allow more subtle characterisation than Sarah Lancashire's recent role in 'The Paradise', or Anne Reid's in 'Upstairs, Downstairs'. Both of them shine here, as does Nicola Walker. Good also to know that there are still dramas made to engage an older audience, besides 'New Tricks'.
OK, this has all the staple ingredients: a 'normal' couple called 'Eve' and 'Gabe' (pick up that Old Testament, now!) with a tragedy (a missing child), a big creepy old house with a sinister reputation and a back story involving cruel guardians of innocent children, a strange attic and an even stranger basement, a dog - c'mon, there's always a ghost-detecting dog - swinging doors, scary-looking old toys and a noisy clock. If you can't guess its every twist and turn, you can grasp the general gist.
At the moment there isn't a clear link between the orphanage of the 1940s and the modern-day goings on, but we do know that there was a flash flood in 1943 that killed 68 of the Devil's Cleave villagers, that the village was named for a legend involving... yes, the Devil, swearing revenge on the area, and that Suranne Jones has some kind of telepathic contact both with her missing son and with the past tragedies at the Hall.
If you want revisionist, this won't be your bag, but for an old-fashioned grip-the-cushions ghost story, this will darken your autumn evenings quite nicely.
Apparently "very loosely based on" 'A Very British Coup', a book previously dramatised with the late Ray McAnally in 1988. This seems to have more in common, on the strength of the first episode, with a 1985 film also starring a young Gabriel Byrne, albeit as poacher rather than nominal gamekeeper, 'Defence of the Realm'. One of those stodgy, ponderous, chase-the-zeitgeist conspiracy thrillers that thrive on shots of the scared and sinister in the corridors of power and dingy back-alley rendezvous. This has the usual cast of characters. Gabriel Byrne is Tom Dawkins, Deputy Prime Minister who finds himself in very deep, dark waters after an explosion at the Petrofex chemical plant and the death of the Prime Minister, Charles Flyte (Tobias Menzies) in a mysterious plane crash. Yes, nice mix of Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte to represent the establishment. A host of known faces portray the other usual characters: Charles Dance, Sylvestra Le Touzel, Lia Williams and Rupert Graves as shadowy, power-hungry ministers; Gina McKee as the journalist investigating corruption and cover-ups; Douglas Hodge as the jaded, alcoholic ex-MI5er.
Tom has a a history as a soldier in Bosnia and a self-possessed, bruised ex-wife (Sophie Ward). After faltering faith in the government, a new poll suggests that he is a popular new leader, which makes his colleagues wary and even more distrustful of him. Unknown to him, GCHQ are listening in to his every conversation with both the press and the pathologist, who has found high levels of toxicity in the explosion victims, and ends up hanging from the ceiling of his lab.
Worth watching just for Byrne's craggy face, which holds such gravitas it wouldn't be out of place on Mount Rushmore. Also great to see Ruth Negga back onscreen after her revelatory tour-de-force as Shirley Bassey. As for the story, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to be sure that greed and self-interest frequently outweigh any nobler and compassionate concerns where global corporations and elements of government are concerned. It's just a wonder that after having been a cliche for so long, it's still in the news as well as drama, and accepted by a voting public.
Dan and Ali are not Sky fans on principle. Sadly that doesn't stop Dan subscribing. Thus we had the privilege of watching the first episode of 'Elementary', which viewers would be forgiven for not knowing was a modern American take on Sherlock Holmes.
Whereas the recent BBC revival/reboot was simply an update, with the traditional stories given a clever, stylish twist, this is essentially 'CSI' with the geek in the lead. Jonny Lee Miller is a recovering addict who has decamped from Scotland Yard to the NYPD. Aidan Quinn is his Lestrade and Watson is a disgraced female surgeon (Lucy Liu) who has been sent by Homes Senior to be Sherlock's rehab buddy. The plot, which raced past at such speed it's amazing any scene was in focus, involved a husband training his mentally imbalanced client to kill his wife in order to inherit her money. Conan Doyle is not a million miles away in this respect, but in all others he's nowhere to be seen. Holmes has sex with prostitutes, presumably because there's an assumption that American audiences can't accept a male lead who isn't interested in sex. Watson doesn't represent the viewer as (s)he does the reader by being Holmes's questioner. Instead she is, of-course, feisty, sassy etc. etc. Not bad at all, but not Watson.
Likeable performances aren't enough to lift a so-so script and a production with no panache. If you set out your stall under a brand name, you'd better make sure yours is at least a passable fake, if not the genuine article.
They sure were ornery back in them days, way out West. Well, west of the UK. To Americans it's a sort of Eastern Western. Everyone wore brown (or maybe they were just downright dirty); the men carried guns, spat tobacco at every opportunity and cussed all the time. The women just looked about ten years older than they were and wore cross expressions, which is hardly surprising given the stupidity of their menfolk.
This is a feud so famous that their names have passed into a colloquialism for discord, but as this TV series shows, it had its origins in nothing very much more than a difference of opinion, and continued for decades to the detriment of several members of both families, who were either killed or, in one case, kept apart from their loved one. (Not that Johnse Hatfield was exactly faithful to Roseanna McCoy - he eventually married her cousin Nancy. Nice.)
The production features, under all those beards, Kevin Costner, Tom Berenger and a fair few English actors, who assume Virginian/Kentucky accents with varying success. Sarah Parish (sans beard) also appears as Hatfield's long-suffering wife and matriarch of the clan, while Mare Winningham, ex-brat packer, is her opposite number in the McCoy tribe. It's all quite fun in a so-glad-I-didn't-live-then kind of a way, and it looks and feels suitably grimy and backwoods, but... while at bottom it's a condemnation of the futility of violence, we can't quite get beyond the feeling that it's one lot of ignorant hillbillies with grubby beards attacking another lot of ignorant hillbillies with grubby beards for no very good reason. Well, it is a Western, so what did we expect?
The new 'Spooks'? Well superficially it's similar, with espionage, pretty leads, and pretty spectacular fight and action sequences. It also has similarities with 'Homeland' and 'Ashes to Ashes'. Yes folks, our heroine has issues, and a troubled past. She also survives two potentially fatal gunshot wounds in the first fifteen minutes.
Programmes like this are grist to our mill, fodder to our cannon and sitting ducks to our fairground rifle range. It's surprising that commissioning editors thought this was anything but one whopping TWNH. I admit that the average trainload on the 11.43 from Scunthorpe probably love this (and for Scunthorpe, read Anytown, UK). It's the eternally popular po-faced, we've-only-three-minutes-to-save-the-world combination of violence, sex and unbelievable setups that forms a staple of prime-time TV these days.
Sam (Melissa George) is our first TWNH. In her twenties, smart, adored by men, able to kick ass in a way that would trounce James Bond and fearless enough to swat a gun out of a man's hand without a second thought. She's the smartest operative in a global, upmarket private security firm; the sort that has boardrooms with touchscreen desks and no windows. Likely?
Most of the first episode is about her, pouting like she'd sucked her dummy well into adolescence and had only recently thrown it away. She wants to find out who wanted to kill her and made her lose her baby. It could be her boyfriend, who works alongside her, or did until she went AWOL for a year. Likely?
She's back now and despite her boss looking daggers and spitting trite dialogue at her, she walks straight back into an op. Likely?
Her second honey trap of the episode is the op that will presumably form the main plot of the series. She's given a backstory of bereaved American mother - despite being Australian and playing Sam as English - and thrown literally into the role of saviour of her target's son. Her target happens to be, in turn, the son of a rich gangster and they're all living in paranoid purdah in Regent's Park. Yet, with this one staged rescue act, Sam, aka 'Miss Kent', gets an invitation to live in the hideous house with the Turner crime mob. Likely?
Remember, though, that everyone's grey. Sam and her team are essentially mercenaries, and we're not convinced they're worth caring about. We're set up with all the usual hooks: will she rescue the boy? Fall in love with his father? Discover who set her up? Retire into the sunset with her boyfriend? Kill her boyfriend? Who can she trust? Are her boss and colleagues on the level? Unlikely.
Those under thirty may not remember the unique Kenny Everett with his outre brand of humour, but he was all over the schedules in the 1980s. "All in the best possssible taste!" was his ironic catchphrase (given that he was usually dressed in drag and leather with long bestockinged legs at the time). His risque MO was known to have spilled over into his private life, too and this is the latest in the BBC4 line of biopics of once-mainstream media figures.
This bears the hallmarks of the BBC4 production line: good acting, sharp writing and a slightly quirky presentation. Maurice Cole's story jumps forwards and back in time with alter-ego Kenny Everett's, err, alter-egos commenting in character on the events. So the mime artist has a happy or sad face, the busty model lusts after his male companions, etc. The baby, the biker Sid Snot and the cleric with the big hands will also be familiar to fans of his show, and it's surely those fans that this is aimed at.
We found it watchable enough, but don't find Kenny's brand of light entertainment scintillating, and his life story is a trawl through the emergence of popular music radio and popular gay culture with no surprises.
