Drama

It’s been a good week for fans of TV dramas that are set partly in Syria, feature poetry-lovers confronting extreme violence, like to keep their viewers in the dark (sometimes literally) and have main characters with Australian accents (sometimes accidentally). But there are also significant differences between the two examples on display – with The Narrow Road to the Deep North the much more sombre and The Veil the considerably more bonkers. Adapted from Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winner, The Narrow Road began in Syria in 1941. Through what would prove the programme’s characteristic murk, a group of Australian soldiers led by one Dorrigo Evans could just about be seen rescuing a

There aren’t many dramas featuring the rise of the Nazis that could be described as jaunty, but Outrageous is one. Oddly, this seems to be the first ever TV drama about the Mitford sisters – and, faced with the choice between playing it for laughs, going for a big historical soap opera or exploring the increasingly dark politics of the 1930s, the show’s writer Sarah Williams has, perhaps wisely, opted for all three. At times, admittedly, the clash of tones can be jarring, but generally in a way that feels like an authentic reflection of a story that remains irreducibly weird. The show also strikes a neat balance between acknowledging

Bradley Walsh: Egypt’s Cosmic Code may sound like a pitch by Alan Partridge – but, impressively, the programme itself manages to be even odder than its title. Naturally, Tuesday’s opening episode began with Bradley emphasising that his interest in Ancient Egypt long predates his signing of the contract for the show. Indeed, it was back when he was an apprentice at Rolls-Royce that he first realised ‘whoever built the pyramids, it certainly wasn’t the Ancient Egyptians 4,500 years ago’. Sharing his scorn for this discredited idea was Tony McMahon, an ‘investigative historian’ who showed up now and again to say bonkers things in an authoritative and sonorous manner. Given that

Drops of God is one of those gems of purest ray serene that cable TV prefers to keep hidden in its deep unfathomed caves because it thinks you want something more lowbrow. Try finding it by accident: you won’t. When I looked for it on Apple – which doesn’t have all that many shows – I had laboriously to type in its name. It wasn’t offered to me in the recommendations. If I hadn’t been tipped off by my friends Candy and Diarmuid, I would never have seen it. I had been lamenting, as I often do, the dearth of stuff to watch on TV that doesn’t put you through

Olga in Three Sisters, the opening speech: ‘Father died just a year ago, on this very day – the fifth of May, your name-day, Irina.’ Jeeves says somewhere in P.G. Wodehouse that people with monogrammed slippers are afraid of forgetting their names. Irina, the absent-minded sister, probably needed reminding it was her birthday. A useful side-effect is that the audience also knows exactly when and where we are. Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County begins with a frank information offload: Beverly Weston, the patriarch, conveniently explains to the new native-American hire, Johnna, the basic set-up: ‘My wife takes pills and I drink.’ This bald set-up is ‘concealed’ by digressions about Berryman,

Needless to say, there have been any number of thrillers that rely on what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: something, however random, that the goodies have to find before the baddies do. Less common are those where the MacGuffin is the mathematical formula for prime numbers – which is where Apple TV+’s latest show comes in. His first thought on seeing a 204 bus was that 2042 is the sum of three consecutive cubes Prime Target began in ‘Baghdad, Iraq’ – and therefore in a bustling market. Or at least it bustled until a large gas explosion opened up a hole in the ground leading to a spectacular medieval chamber.

There must have been a time when slow-burn psychological thrillers didn’t start with a scene of high drama followed by a caption that reads ‘Three months earlier’ – but if so, it’s getting hard to remember it. The latest programme to deploy the tactic was Playing Nice, which began with James Norton running towards the sea screaming ‘Theo!’ as a child’s body bobbed, face-down, in the waves. He was next seen, post-caption, laughing with his pre-school son in various picturesque Cornish locations while using the word ‘buddy’ a lot. Not to be outdone in the great-parent stakes, his wife also piled on the cuddles for little Theo. Before long, Miles

For most of my adult life, clever, well-read, feminist women have told me how much they love Jilly Cooper. It therefore came as a bit of shock when I finally tried her novels for myself and found what they contained. There is, for example, no mistaking Jilly’s scorn for women who are fat and/or hairy, her belief that all female unhappiness can be cured by a damn good rogering, and the idea that not only is it fair enough for middle-aged blokes to lech after teenage girls, but that teenage girls rather like it when they do. (I was also slightly disconcerted by her favourite word for female genitalia –

I’m a bit disappointed – déçu, as we Francophiles like to say – with La Maison. When French TV drama is good it can be very, very good, as we saw with Spiral, Les Revenants, and, maybe the best series ever made about spies, Le Bureau. But La Maison is not in their league. This is a shame because its milieu is not one that has been explored that often in TV serials – and it’s something that a French production really ought to have handled brilliantly: haute couture. Judging by the fancy Parisian settings and general patina of Succession-style luxe, it hasn’t been short of a reasonable budget. What

Why Am I So Single? opens with two actors on stage impersonating the play’s writers Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. You may not recognise the names but you’ve probably heard of their smash-hit, Six, which re-imagined the tragic wives of Henry VIII as glamorous pop divas. This follow-up show is a spoof of vintage musicals and it’s deliberately knowing and self-referential. That’s why the authors are played by members of the cast, and they start with a few disparaging quips about Mamma Mia! and other West End fare. They even call the audience at the Garrick ‘riff-raff’, which seems a little charmless. The actors then morph into two new characters,

Like many sitcoms, W1A featured a middle-aged man convinced that he’s the only sane person left in the world. Usually, of course, this merely goes to show how delusional the bloke is – but the subversive twist here was that Ian Fletcher, the BBC’s head of values, seemed to be right. Playing Ian, Hugh Bonneville therefore spent much of his screentime radiating a bemused dismay at the madness around him. The only question is whether the show will hold its nerve or whether Douglas will prove toxic after all Now, as the main character in the comedy drama Douglas Is Cancelled, Bonneville is at it again. When we first met

The most controversial aspect of Netflix’s new drama-documentary Queen Cleopatra – not least in Egypt – was the casting of a black actress, Adele James, in the title role. After all, one of the few things that seems certain about Cleopatra’s early life is that she was a Macedonian Greek. Luckily, though, the show had a powerful counterargument to this awkward and Eurocentric fact. As the African-American professor Shelley P. Haley put it with a QED-style flourish, back when she was girl, her beloved (if uneducated) grandmother once said to her: ‘I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black.’ Watching Queen Cleopatra felt alarmingly like witnessing

When TV makes shows about TV, it rarely has a good word to say for itself. In the likes of W1A, The Day Today and, savagest of all, Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV, the industry has looked in the mirror and ripped itself to shreds. What all these comedies say, in their own way, is that most TV is bombastic, brain-dead, two-star crap put together in a blind panic and a moral vacuum by idiots and monsters. Second only to politics, it’s the satirists’ biggest sitting duck, the gift that can’t stop giving. The Newsreader, a new newsroom drama, turns out to be cut from different cloth. It’s set

Grizzled police officers of the old school should probably avoid Channel 4’s Night Coppers for reasons of blood pressure. Like most documentary series with close access to the police, this one paints them in a light so favourable as to be almost comically sycophantic. The trouble for those grizzled types is that – the times being as they are – what’s now considered favourable is to make the rozzers who patrol Brighton after dark all seem like that pathologically liberal Dutch cop played by Paul Whitehouse in the late 1990s. Not that this is a reference which most of the officers featured in Wednesday’s opening episode would get – largely

Older readers may remember a time when people signalled their cultural superiority with the weird boast that they didn’t watch television. These days the same mistaken sense of superiority is more likely to rely on the equally weird one that they don’t watch terrestrial television. So now that the BBC and ITV find themselves in the historically improbable role of plucky underdogs, it’s pleasing to report that this week saw the launch of two terrific new terrestrial shows — one of which already looks set to be as good as anything on Netflix, Amazon or Disney+ (except for Get Back of course). The programme in question is The Responder. It

For people who like a good upper-class scandal (or ‘people’, as they’re also known), 1963 was definitely a vintage year. Even before the Profumo affair came along, the divorce of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll offered plenty to enjoy, with its courtroom tales of her 80-odd lovers and that famous Polaroid of her pleasuring a titillatingly anonymous man while still wearing her pearls. All of which presented something of a problem for BBC1’s three-part dramatisation, A Very British Scandal — and not just because it had to pretend not to be titillated itself. At a time when female blamelessness is such a dominant media theme, could it find a