In 2010, Maxine Peake starred in The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, but this new dramatisation of Lister’s life has been gestating in Sally Wainwright’s brain for 20 years, and finally arrives under the auspices of the BBC and HBO.
This year, Cannes has been adamantly defending traditional cinema, with more than a few jibes at Netflix (who remain persona non grata at the festival), but that hasn’t stopped them screening two episodes of Nicolas Winding Refn’s new Amazon TV series, Too Old To Die Young. Refn has gone on record stating that his latest project is still cinema — a 13-hour film that shows all the verve and ambition you’d expect from the Danish auteur.
The Virtues (Channel 4) sees director Shane Meadows (Dead Man’s Shoes, This Is England) reunite with actor Stephen Graham in what is certainly their most raw and emotionally bruising project to date.
As the double-edged Chinese proverb has it, “may you live in interesting times.” Screenwriter Russell T Davies evidently thanks that’s exactly where we’re at, and his new six-part drama Years and Years (BBC One) is a bold, sprawling but – as far as episode one is concerned at least – amorphous attempt to assess the state of play.
“I take it the safety test was a failure,” remarked Viktor Bryukhanov, director of Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power station. You could say that again. The catastrophic explosions at the Vladimir I Lenin plant on 26 April 1986, caused by a safety test that went wrong, produced history’s worst nuclear disaster, releasing radioactivity into the air equivalent to two Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs per hour. There were fears that human casualties could run into millions.
The porn was a bit disappointing, was it not? Dear old Ted, no longer romantically active, admitted to being a user. The Superintendent Hastings fanclub sighed for sorrow to witness him toss away his status as an essentially decent heartthrob for the Saga generation. Sorry for your loss, ladies. It was also disappointing because the high-risk act of wiping his laptop turned out to have such a bathetic explanation. The 50k lying around in a brown envelope he clearly deemed to have less pressing potential for embarrassment.
Chimerica is a stage-to-screen adaptation that has certainly kept up with the times.
Bognor Regis was once renowned for its restorative climate and was much favoured by George V (he awarded the town the “Regis” tag), but times have changed if Toby Jones’s new series is anything to go by. The Bognor we see in BBC Two's Don't Forget the Driver is a crumbling ghost town, all run-down bungalows, pensioners and, it seems, an underclass of exploited immigrants.
The Williams brothers (The Missing, Liar, Rellik, Baptiste) are back.