Now, in The Reckoning , they've focused their energies on Jimmy Savile. It arrives on BBC One and iPlayer on Monday (9 October) with Steve Coogan in the leading role. The series was first announced by the BBC three years ago, but its long gestation has prompted suspicions that the broadcaster might have been having second thoughts about a project starring the notorious sexual abuser and paedophile who was once one of their most high-profile names. The way the Corporation carefully kept the press at arm's length in the run-up to the launch was indicative of the sensitivity surrounding the piece.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/reckoning-jimmy-savile-legacy-steve-coogan-stars-bbc-ones-four-part-factual-drama

#theartsdesk

As well as diving into the depths of a philosophical enquiry into what kind of consciousness such a creature could have, the play also shows how scientific enquiry can be seriously compromised by the personal relationships of its practitioners. Set in the residence of Professor George Grey (Redgrave), an expert on octopus intelligence who has a huge tank inhabited by the eight-legged Frances in her sitting room, the plot begins when Harry, a younger anthropologist, arrives to stay with her. Since George has recently lost her husband John, she is in a vulnerable state and relies on Frances, bizarrely but believably, for emotional support.

https://theartsdesk.com/theatre/octopolis-hampstead-theatre-review-blue-blue-electric-blue

#theartsdesk

The message was always bleak, and throughout these last six episodes the song remains the same. Right back in the first series, Dushane (Ashley Walters), setting out on his tortuous drug -dealing path, declared that 'I haven't anything to be but this'. The destiny that put him on a career ladder into ever-deeper darkness for ever-greater stakes eventually delivered the only conclusion possible. The end was contained in the beginning. An extra twist of sordid amorality is added this time around by the arrival of the unpleasant McGee gang, fronted by the bumptious Jonny (Barry Keoghan, a long-standing Top Boy fan).

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/top-boy-season-5-netflix-review-grime-and-punishment

#theartsdesk

Knight's role is described as having 'created and written for television ' a script 'based on" the Dickens novel (much as he did with his 2019 reworking of A Christmas Carol ). And that is what you get: a lurid Victorian gothic, so noir at times that you have trouble trying to follow what's happening, and to whom, especially at night. A handful of the novel's peripheral characters haven't made the move to TV, which is standard practice in an adaptation of a chunky tome. But some significant plot points have gone missing, too.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/great-expectations-bbc-one-review-modernised-muddied-and-muddled

#theartsdesk

That sense of an apparently 'real' world subsumed by a malign virtual facsimile which can be rewritten and modified at will again underpins this second series. As we saw in a chilling opening scene, the technology could even enable 'invisible' assassins to pick off their targets without leaving a trace in CCTV footage.Once again, Chanan has zeroed in on sizzlingly contemporary political and social concerns. While The Capture's first series pivoted around the personal travails of army veteran Shaun Emery, this time the focus broadens out to examine how shifts in the relationships between global powers have exposed the potential horrors seething up between the tectonic plates.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/capture-series-2-bbc-one-review-caught-china-syndrome

#theartsdesk

The Brunel Museum and the Royal Albert Hall represent two sides of Victorian London: the celebration of high culture and of engineering and 'progress'. And although it has none of the elaborate decoration and fine boxes, the Thames Tunnel is an extraordinary achievement: the world's first tunnel created under a navigable river. It was Isambard Kingdom Brunel's first big project, working with his father Marc, and for a while it gave London pedestrians the opportunity to walk below the Thames. Later converted into a railway tunnel, the shaft that was the entrance is now a performance space, circular, still blackened by train-soot, but actually offering a pretty good acoustic.

https://theartsdesk.com/classical-music/gagarin-quartets-modulus-string-quartet-brunel-museum-review-multimedia-journey

#theartsdesk

Although many recent black dramas have contested this with images of a more celebratory kind of identity, it remains a standard trope, as proved by Kwame Kwei-Armah's 2013 play, Beneatha's Place , which he directs himself at the Young Vic , where he is artistic director. In it he channels, among other things, his own experiences of living and working in the United States between 2011 and 2018. An intertextual tribute to African-American culture, Kwei-Armah's story is rooted in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun , which in 1959 was the first play by a Black woman to be staged on Broadway.

https://theartsdesk.com/theatre/beneathas-place-young-vic-review-strongly-felt-uneven

#theartsdesk

As its title suggests (the original French is Disparition Inquiétante ), missing persons are the show's stock-in-trade. In this case, a group of nine young schoolchildren vanished without trace from the centre of Strasbourg while on a school trip, leaving behind the murdered body of their teacher, Mme Stoller. Police Commissioner Maya Rosetti (Sara Forestier) swept into action, and we soon learned that Maya is one of those headstrong detectives who like to do it their own way, but can sometimes overreach themselves and come a cropper.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/disturbing-disappearances-more4-review-headstrong-tec-tackles-pied-piper-mystery

#theartsdesk

Not that it doesn't have its fair share of notable thesps. Somehow they've lured Juliet Stevenson aboard as Matilda Anchor-Ferrers, preparing to be scared to death as she, her husband Oliver (Owen Teale) and daughter Lucia (Annes Elwy, all pictured below ) find themselves the targets of a pair of sneering, cold-blooded… well, you have to wait a while to find out exactly what they are. But they're certainly not the police detectives they pose as when they knock on the door of the Anchor-Ferrers' agreeable Monmouthshire mansion.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/wolf-bbc-one-review-load-old

#theartsdesk

It's set in the titular village of Rabo de Peixe, and centres on four friends who are eking out their uneventful and unpromising lives in the picturesque but remote archipelago (the islands are about 1,000 miles out in the Atlantic from the Portuguese mainland). The show extracts full value from its locations, with scintillating low-flying shots of rugged cliffs, turbulent waves crashing on the shore and verdant mountains climbing into the distance under huge, wide skies. However, claustrophobic village life revolves around a few shops, bars and narrow streets, and it's no wonder that Eduardo (José Condessa) yearns to escape to the USA and build a new life.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/turn-tide-netflix-review-cocaine-madness-comes-azores

#theartsdesk

In Air Force One , the President himself (played by Harrison Ford) was hijacked. And then there's Liam Neeson in Non-Stop . In Apple TV's new seven-parter Hijack , it's Idris Elba's turn to be the cool, unflusterable one who finds himself the eye of the in-flight storm, as a gang of oafish thugs take over the plane on which he's flying from Dubai to London . Each episode supposedly covers one-seventh of the seven-hour flight. The flight is Kingdom 29, and Ben Miles plays the smooth but rather shifty pilot Robin Allen ( pictured below , Kaisa Hammarlund as First Officer Anna Kovacs).

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/hijack-apple-tv-review-trapped-40000-feet-bunch-armed-thugs

#theartsdesk

Its genius lies, for starters, in going back to basics. Family feuds are positively biblical, the preferred stuff of drama through the ages. Nowadays we dress them up as intergalactic struggles with high-octane heroes and dazzling SFX. But Succession has taken them back to Shakespeare's history plays, with a nod to King Lear , where factions talk and talk, jostle and plot, implode and regroup, claw at each other for the big prize. Who knows whether the show's writers openly use the terms, but you sense they instinctively know all about the traditional techniques of classic theatre – hubris, nemesis, the deus ex machina , not just the precepts of screenwriting school.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/succession-season-four-sky-atlantic-review-powerful-beginning-endgame

#theartsdesk

The absurdity of preaching eco-awareness while travelling everywhere by private jet and motorcade never seems to prick their perma-bubble of blissful self-regard.Finally their Netflix documentary has landed, or at least the first three of its six episodes (mercifully it didn't get 10, like The Crown), and most of it is bland, unquestioned self-promotion. It's not going to make the Royal Family very happy, though. The so-called 'Firm' is depicted as stuffy and stultifying, riddled with impenetrable rituals and afflicted with such appalling dress sense that Meghan was unable to wear any interesting colours (peach, yellow or whatever) until she transplanted herself back to California.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/harry-meghan-netflix-review-home-harkles

#theartsdesk

Billed as having 'haze, strobe, flashing lights, sudden light changes, sudden and loud noise, strong language, nudity and audience interaction', so we certainly know what to expect. And boy do we get it! And then some...Borrowing its title from the Girls Aloud 2002 classic pop song, the show begins rather slowly in a kitchen (designed by Rosie Elnile and Max Johns), as Rhys Hollis and seven other underground drag performers discuss the economics of the scene, highlighting issues of poor wages and conditions, and the need for a trade union of their own.

https://theartsdesk.com/theatre/sound-underground-royal-court-review-loud-and-triumphantly-proud

#theartsdesk

Her inside knowledge lends weight and verisimilitude to scenes depicting admission procedures or the way the treacherous politics of NHS hierarchies work, and perhaps most significantly, how internal investigations are conducted. And she couldn't have asked for a finer or more harrowing performance than Niamh Algar delivers in the lead role of Dr Lucinda Edwards. She works in an A&E department in a Yorkshire hospital , and judging by first appearances she's a tough-minded professional who's on top of her game.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/malpractice-itv1-review-she-got-mess-nhs

#theartsdesk

We live in a different world, of course, to the world of 2017; and as the production opens with a hauntingly evocative performance of We'll Meet Again we remember not just the evacuees of the Forties but the Ukrainian families ripped apart in recent months. Then, as now, the train was the prime mode of escape; here – as in Cookson's original – it's brilliantly represented by a toy steam-engine followed by battered suitcases that suddenly light up so that they look like carriages.Tom Paris's new design enhances the original concept of worlds within worlds by creating a set in which concentric circles evoke a magical solar system.

https://theartsdesk.com/theatre/lion-witch-and-wardrobe-gillian-lynne-theatre-review-puppetry-all-part-magic

#theartsdesk

As for the 'traditional' tag, I might beg to differ. True, for their first Prom (out of three this year) they delivered a triple-decker stack of mainstream Romantic goodies: Weber's Freischutz overture followed by the Schumann Piano Concerto (with Sir András Schiff) and Mendelssohn's Third, 'Scottish' symphony. Despite the BFO's creamy, warm and enveloping sound, Mitteleuropa on a high-calorie plate, the agility and audacity of Fischer's approach to even the most familiar pieces means that every outing for a venerable warhorse can feel like a frisky reinvention.

https://theartsdesk.com/classical-music/prom-37-schiff-budapest-festival-orchestra-fischer-1-review-landscapes-and

#theartsdesk

Although he was to reach the age of 98, he already felt very senior when I met him at his home in his mid-70s. He was very keen to stress that his abilities stretched beyond delivering a famous catchphrase and luring girls into an open-top sports car.Those famous roles came out in his middle years. Before that he had been a very busy child actor. Then in his 50s Phillips took the courageous decision to do no more broad comedy. There was a stomach-churning period of inactivity when he was widely presumed to have died, but the roles for nabobs, mandarins and stuffed shirts started to roll in.

https://theartsdesk.com/film-theatre-tv/leslie-phillips-i-can-be-recognised-my-voice-alone

#theartsdesk

We are in Golaszewski's usual world of bedded-in domestic routine, where characters often hide their feelings and assume it's just what you do. It looks like a comedy of modern manners, but it's a minefield. Tonally, it's in gradations of beige, pale grey and watery green, both visually and emotionally; then, much like the way brief pops of intense colour appear in its palette, the dialogue suddenly explodes, before retreating into banality again.To negotiate this drama-world requires the finely tuned acting skills of major players, especially in the lead roles, which is what Golaszewski gets – Russell Tovey and Sarah Solemani in Him and Her, Lesley Manville and Peter Mullan in Mum.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/marriage-bbc-one-review-brilliantly-executed-drama-series-big-heart

#theartsdesk

It's written by sisters Penelope and Ginny Skinner, and it makes you wonder what ghastly experiences they might have gone through to be able to create a character as hideously unscrupulous as Dr Rob Chance. Or at any rate that's the name he's using when we first encounter him – through the eyes of one of his victims, Alice Newman (Rebekah Staton) – as he pushes his bicycle through the middle of Oxford, where he's due to give a lecture at one of the colleges. Clad in a suitably blizzard-proof orange anorak, Dr Chance is (he claims) an intrepid Arctic explorer and 'ecopreneur', committed to saving the environment via his Saattu Climate Academy.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/following-events-are-based-pack-lies-bbc-one-deliciously-bingeable-drama-skinner-sisters

#theartsdesk

For her 80-minute documentary TS Eliot: Into The Waste Land (BBC Two) ****, director Susanna White was significantly aided by the 'buried treasure' element in the story of this famously elusive poem, long laboured over by critics and students. Sitting like a ticking time bomb in Princeton's archives was a cache of letters deposited there in 1970: the correspondence from Eliot's long relationship with an American woman, Emily Hale (he had had all her letters to him burnt.)Eliot's biographer, Lyndall Gordon, had long suspected Hale was the 'hyacinth girl' in a line he had cut from an early draft of The Waste Land but later reinstated.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/ts-eliot-waste-land-bbc-two-four-quartets-starring-ralph-fiennes-bbc-four-review-great-100th

#theartsdesk

Running throughout are regular datelines, starting with the weekend of the Challenger disaster in February 1986 and progressing through to Chernobyl the following April. This timeline isn't just adding handy topical references: these are the plum news events that stir the journalists' blood, rouse them from their hangovers and rev up their sex drives.  The titular newsreader (we assume from the early episodes) is Helen Norville, played by Anna Torv, previously seen in Fringe. Helen is a glamorous presenter in the young Barbara Walters vein, with an older, gnarly co-anchor, Geoff Walters (Robert Taylor, pictured below).

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/newsreader-bbc-two-review-drama-series-welcome-substance-australia

#theartsdesk

American comic Krystal Evans (now living in the UK) tells us she has a 'resting sarcastic voice' but after five minutes in her company you realise she's just naturally, hootingly funny. Which is a good thing because Krystal Evans: The Hottest Girl at Burn Camp describes a horrific childhood incident in which her younger sister died, and  a less funny comic might not be able to pull it off. Evans begins her tale by describing her chaotic upbringing. Her family lived in a mobile home in Washington State – 'Nirvana, rain and heroin, just like Edinburgh' – but moved around a lot, her parents divorced when she was a baby, her mother remarried (to a man who hit her) and had a second daughter, Katie.

https://theartsdesk.com/comedy/edinburgh-fringe-2023-reviews-krystal-evans-william-thompson-alison-spittle

#theartsdesk

Let's face it, this is a plot in which the female love interest doesn't just disguise herself as a man but names herself after Ganymede, famed in mythology as Zeus's gay lover. The idea that this might be heteronormative in any way sounds like a spurious idea on some emotionally constipated academic's bookshelf. There's not just sauce for the goose here but plenty of sauciness for the gander.    Still, it's undeniable that Ellen McDougall's vibrant, glittering, funny, cheesy-song-studded production takes Shakespeare's initial plot and – after adding some more cross-gender casting flourishes – sends it spinning like a Catherine Wheel.

https://theartsdesk.com/theatre/you-it-shakespeares-globe-review-vibrant-ebullient-fun-forest-where-anything-goes

#theartsdesk

Whatever the reasons, The Crown now feels slightly jaded, re-running familiar themes and recycling whiffs of various historic scandals with yet another different cast. As ever, there are plenty of class acts on show (though any self-respecting thesp who hasn't yet felt The Crown's tap on the shoulder must be feeling a bit desperate by now). Jonathan Pryce steps up to the plate with his portrayal of an abrasive, decisive Prince Philip, the epitome of the 'be reasonable, do it my way' school of thought.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/crown-season-5-netflix-review-royal-epic-outstaying-its-welcome

#theartsdesk

The screenplay is by Steven Knight, who has repeated his Peaky Blinders trick of using an ahistorical soundtrack to soup up the on-screen action. However, where the Brummie gangster odyssey unfolded against a backdrop of the White Stripes, Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen, this time Knight has gone rockier. The narrative is liberally sprayed with chunks of AC/DC, from 'Highway to Hell' to 'Live Wire', while The Stranglers and The Damned leap out of the speakers at opportune moments. When Captain David Stirling and his ragged but ferocious troupe sweep in from the desert to destroy German and Italian airfields, they're accompanied by The Clash's 'I Fought The Law' (though in this case the law didn't win).

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/sas-rogue-heroes-bbc-one-review-rocknroll-desert-warfare-pen-steven-knight

#theartsdesk

In Sonali Bhattacharyya's two-hander, Two Billion Beats, which premiered at the Orange Tree a year ago and now returns with a new cast, 17-year-old Asha and her 15-year-old sister Bettina struggle to behave in an ethical way when confronted by racism and bullying. As Bettina reminds us, most human beings have two billion heartbeats per lifetime so it's a real struggle to not waste these on heightened anxiety and fear.Set in Leicester, over a number of weeks as Asha's secondary school career is drawing to a close, the play gives a rapid sketch of her situation.

https://theartsdesk.com/theatre/two-billion-beats-orange-tree-theatre-review-lively-overly-idealistic

#theartsdesk

Then flashback to her among a busload of excited tourists, arriving at the hotel, unaware of their fate, naturally. More musing on life, choices, fate etc. You sense that writer Louise Doughty (Apple Tree Yard) is trying to avoid the traditional arc of the disaster movie: that is, assemble a disparate bunch of people in an enclosed space far from anywhere, immerse the audience in their back stories, then after about 45-60 minutes start killing them off. In Crossfire, you hear shots in the first five minutes (it does what it says in the title), then proceed by fits and starts from there.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/crossfire-bbc-one-review-pacy-and-nail-biting-holiday-hell

#theartsdesk

There used to be a TV cooking show where contestants had to somehow create a meal from a random batch of ingredients they found in the fridge – a pineapple, a pork chop, a crumpet and a jar of mayonnaise, perhaps. Inside Man (BBC One) looked as if it was similarly devised as a kind of brain-teaser. How can you create a drama out of a tormented Home Counties vicar, his teenage son, his maths tutor and a paedophile verger, plus two convicted murderers thousands of miles away on Death Row in an American prison? Well maybe you can't, since while Inside Man boasted a powerful cast, the twain never met.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/inside-man-bbc-one-review-strong-cast-trapped-sinking-ship

#theartsdesk

What a pleasure  to be in the audience for this terrific musical whodunnit, about best friends Kathy (Bronté  Barbé ) and Stella (Rebekah Hinds), who live in Hull and have a podcast devoted to 'in-depth chat about murders', the grislier the better. So when their heroine, crime writer Felicia Taylor (Jodie Jacobs) is decapitated shortly after they meet her, they set about finding her murderer.What follows is pure joy as the cast of five (three of them playing multiple roles) sing, dance and emote their way through a story littered with red herrings and multiple suspects but which is actually about love and friendship, and finding a purpose in life.

https://theartsdesk.com/theatre/edinburgh-fringe-2022-reviews-kathy-and-stella-solve-murder-hiya-dolly

#theartsdesk