The population of the Shetland archipelago is only about 23,000 (similar to Broadstairs or Amersham), though judging by the adventures of DI Jimmy Perez, an extraordinarily large percentage of them harbour dark secrets or murderous tendencies.
Eight-years passed between the publication of Wole Soyinka’s debut novel, The Interpreters (1965), and his second, Season of Anomy (1973). A lot happened in the interim.
More than once, reading Colson Whitehead’s latest novel Harlem Shuffle, the brilliant Josh and Benny Safdie movie Uncut Gems from 2019 came to mind, which was unexpected. For one, Whitehead’s book takes place on the other side of Central Park, far uptown from the film’s downtown Diamond District setting. It also unfolds in a meticulously recreated 1960s era Harlem rather than the early 2010s.
Budget constraints. In the hands of the right filmmakers, they can be a blessing in disguise, forcing creativity from simplicity. That’s exactly what works for The Toll, a dark comedy set in the wild west of these isles: Pembrokeshire.
There just isn’t enough there, with ANNA X. Daniel Raggett’s production is the third and final of the RE:EMERGE season at the Harold Pinter Theatre, with Emma Corrin of Lady Di fame in the lead. The graphic design – the brightly-striped faces of Corrin and her co-star, Nabhaan Rizwan, on a dark background – is impeccable. Joseph Charlton’s writing, not so much.
Baptiste (BBC One) has two powerful weapons in its armoury, in the shape of its stars – Tchéky Karyo as the titular French ‘tec, and Fiona Shaw as the central character in this second series. Both of them are astonishingly persuasive at conveying unfathomable depths of pain and loss, and it looks like they’ll have plenty of opportunities to prove it across these six episodes.
Lupin isn’t really about the fictional character it’s named after (the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, created in 1905 by French writer Maurice Leblanc), but about Assane Diop, who’s an obsessive fan of the Lupin novels.
Fans of Bob Odenkirk’s work in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul will be delighted to see him taking centre stage in Ilya Naishuller’s thriller, but perhaps bamboozled at the spectacle of Odenkirk taking the plunge into the blood-splattered territory previously the preserve of John Wick and Liam Neeson’s Bryan Taken Mills.
They all laughed when the streaming service Britbox declared that it wanted to become a sort of UK-orientated Netflix, because so far it’s been mostly a back catalogue operation which plunders the BBC and ITV archives. You really want to pay a subscription to watch Are You Being Served? and Rosemary and Thyme?
