James Walton

It’s not easy for a drama to be over-cautious and clumsy at the same time. Or to turn a real-life story that shocked (and, let’s face it, titillated) the nation into an oddly flat piece of television. So how did the much-hyped Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards manage to do both? The answer, I’d

The Other Bennet Sister is to Pride and Prejudice what Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet. The events of the original novel are all there, but the focus is on a character Jane Austen mostly neglected and occasionally scorned. One effect is that the other sisters, including the sainted Lizzy, come

Judging from the two biggest new streaming dramas around, the taste these days runs towards the kitchen sink – not as in gritty northern blokes smoking Woodbines and moaning a lot; rather, as in the writers throwing in everything but. A fortnight ago, I reviewed Lisa McGee’s How to Get to Heaven from Belfast: a

The Fabulous Funeral Parlour ended with possibly the least necessary caption in TV history: ‘Filmed in Liverpool’. Whenever I go back there (quite often these days for family reasons), I’m struck all over again by how the whole city seems engaged in the production, distribution and promotion of Scouseness. Yet, even by normal Liverpudlian standards,

When it comes to Agatha Christie adaptations, there are normally two possible responses to the denouement. One is a deep satisfaction that the unlikeliest suspects were the inevitable culprits after all. The other’s the same as that – except approximately a quarter of an hour later you suddenly find yourself thinking: ‘Hold on a minute…’

Secrets of the Conclave seemed rather optimistically titled, given that everybody at this year’s papal election had made a solemn vow before God not to divulge any. But, while we duly heard nothing about backstage politicking – apart from regular assurances that none took place – this respectful and quietly charming documentary did succeed in

Anybody growing weary of the debate surrounding the BBC’s unexamined assumptions and biases about modern politics might have expected to find some relief in a scholarly documentary about the sack of Rome in AD 410. Sad to say, though, the first episode of Civilisations: Rise and Fall offered very little of it. Of course, it’s

Yeats famously summarised Ireland in the four words, ‘Great hatred, little room’. But, as Louise Kennedy’s 2022 debut novel Trespasses showed, in 1970s Northern Ireland the hatred had grown even greater and the room even littler. Channel 4’s faithful adaptation began – as it would continue over its four parts this week – with the

If you didn’t already know that Down Cemetery Road was based on a novel Mick Herron wrote before the Slough House series – later adapted into TV’s Slow Horses – it mightn’t be too difficult to guess. After all, main character Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson, no less) is a cynical sixty-something with a dodgy hygiene

Is there anything menopausal women can’t do (on television)? Last Sunday, as a couple of them were still working on the daring theft of a Salvador Dali painting in ITV1’s Frauds, BBC1 launched Riot Women in which five others form a punk band. Meanwhile, two regular features of British TV remain actresses lamenting the lack

By now, viewers of TV thrillers are no strangers to a baffling prologue – but this week brought a particularly extreme example. Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue opened with shots of a desert, a cactus, an animal skull nailed to a cross and a moustachioed man driving a battered pick-up truck with a Virgin

As we know, when terrestrial television has a big new hit these days, its response – once it’s got over the surprise – is to serve up a variation on the same formula. In the case of The Hack, the hit that inspired it is clearly Mr Bates vs the Post Office, as another real-life

The drama series Doc began with the most literal of bangs. While the screen remained black, the sound-effects team knocked themselves out by creating a spectacular crashing noise. When the lights came on, we saw a smashed-up car containing ‘a female, unresponsive’. By the time she did respond – one major brain operation and seven

This Is Spinal Tap is now such a deserved comedy behemoth that it’s easy to forget how gradual its ascent to generally agreed greatness was. Only over the years did so many lines and scenes from a low-key 1984 mockumentary about a heavy-rock band (amps that ‘go to 11’, a tiny Stonehenge, a classically inspired

Another week, another show striving desperately to become the new Traitors. So it is that The Inheritance brings a group of disparate people together in a very big house, gives them tasks that win them money and invites them to pretend to cooperate while secretly behaving treacherously. In fact, about the only surprising thing about