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I should know better than to get my hopes up about a Five documentary. Ok, so the presence of former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie suggested there may well be a sensationalist tinge to Jack the Ripper: Tabloid Killer, but without a two-tonne mom or cop-with-a-camera in sight there was room for optimism. This soon ebbed away as MacKenzie boorishly promised to nail the “crooked journalist at the heart of the Ripper legend”, whose boss apparently told a few porkies to up sales of his newly launched paper, The Star. The words ‘pot’ and ‘kettle’ sprang to mind… Read the rest of this entry »
It’s encouraging to discover the BBC still takes its remit as a public service broadcaster seriously, and indeed The Incredible Human Journey does furnish viewers with some interesting facts about the origins of mankind. It also underlines the prevailing belief that these facts should be delivered by young, attractive and slightly kooky ‘experts’. Read the rest of this entry »
Despite coming from the collective pens of original Perrin creator David Nobbs and Men Behaving Badly writer Simon Nye, this remake of the 70s classic fails to hit the surrealist highs of its predecessor. Clunes is more than adept at portraying Perrin, a man driven to the brink of a mid-life crisis by the mundanity of his existence, but lacks the manic tendencies of Leonard Rossiter, and too often the show feels like a dramatised version of Grumpy Old Men rather than an insight into the escalating insanity of an “everyday man”. Read the rest of this entry »
Kicking off proceedings with the discovery of a dead eight-year-old girl could be seen as a cheap trick to keep us watching, but The Children is far from your average whodunit. With a tag line ‘When adults play, the children suffer’, the painful truth of the statement becomes evident as we follow the devastating emotional and physical damage done to two children, Emily and Jack – played brilliantly by Sinead Michael (pictured) and Freddie Boath – as their parents move on from their messy divorces and into each others’ beds. Read the rest of this entry »
Not to be confused with the Spielberg mini-series of the same name, Taken sees ex-CIA black-ops agent Bryan (Liam Neeson) calling on all his special forces training to recover his teenage daughter after she’s kidnapped in Paris by an Albanian prostitution racket. Read the rest of this entry »
