Television
Father Brown S11 (BBC One) [2024]
It’s a brand new year, and of course that means a brand new series of Father Brown to get us through the dreary January and February winter weeks. The show returned on Friday January 5 for a run of ten episodes, scheduled weekly on Friday afternoons on BBC One but available immediately as a boxset to stream on the BBC iPlayer. (We’ll be following the broadcast timings.)
After the seismic changes to the cast line-up last year which left Father Brown himself (Mark Williams) as the only character to have been in the show from the very start, you’ll be pleased to know that things have settled down nicely and the regulars return unchanged for 2024. Mrs Isabel Devine (Claudie Blakley) continued as the parish secretary and Father Brown’s chief crime-solving aide, while Brenda Palmer (Ruby-May Martinwood) is back as the domestic help at the Presbytery.
At the police station, Chief Inspector Edgar Sullivan (Tom Chambers) is quite settled and in no hurry to move on, assisted as always by Sergeant Goodfellow (John Burton) who is now the second-longest serving presence in the show. That’s not to say that another familiar face won’t pop in during the run, however.
There’s no other changes to highlight, so it’s time to get on with our regular mini-episode guides of the latest stories. As usual, the entries include a short synopsis and then some notes on what we thought and any other points that came to mind while we were watching. We try and avoid spoilers as much as possible, and certainly never give away the whodunnit aspect, but purists might still prefer to wait until they’ve seen the episode before reading them.
And here we go:
Read the rest of this entry »Doctor Who – “The Star Beast”, “Wild Blue Yonder” and more
If the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who and the broadcast of three specials starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate isn’t enough to prod Taking The Short View awake from its epic slumbers, then nothing is. So let’s go; or rather, “allons-y” as the Doctor would definitely say.
I can still remember how excited I was when I heard that Doctor Who was coming back in 2005. Even more so when I found out that Russell T Davies would be in charge, having been a fan of his ever since K-9 popped up on Queer as Folk. And a year later, when I heard David Tennant had been cast as the Tenth Doctor, I knew it wouldn’t get any better than that.
On the other hand, I confess that when it was announced that Catherine Tate was coming in to do a full season after a one-off Christmas special, I was less than thrilled. It reeked of the sort of ‘stunt casting’ that got the show under John Nathan-Turner into trouble in the 1980s. That resistance lasted about 20 minutes into the first episode of series four at which point (it was the famous Tennant/Tate improvised ‘mime’) that I was totally converted. It proved to be the best run of Doctor Who this side of the millennium, and I was bereft when it was over. When Tennant signed off with “I don’t want to go” I knew just how he felt. He might pop back for the odd anniversary special every now and then but we’d never see him, Tate and Davies properly back together again. It was done, over, finished.
Read the rest of this entry »Father Brown S10 (BBC One) [2023]
Father Brown has now been running for ten years, having made its BBC One afternoon debut in 2013 and continuing every year since, with the exception of 2021 when it was waylaid by COVID. Fortunately an earlier double length season means that despite being pared back to nine seasons to date, it still managed to reach the 100-episode landmark last year culminating in a joyous celebration bringing back many of the favourite characters for a curtain call set against a backdrop of fireworks. Along the way it’s even produced a spin-off series called Sister Boniface Mysteries for the BritBox streaming service.
One year on from that party, and Father Brown returns as one of those familiar, favourite landmarks of the New Year – but quite a lot has changed in the meantime. Not least is the scheduling, with the BBC eschewing the usual daily syndication of the ten episodes across two weeks, and opting instead to broadcast one episode a week on Friday afternoons. The other timeslots of the week are held by the BBC’s medical soap Doctors. It’s a strange change to make, and I’m not sure what the thinking is behind it, but on the other hand it does mean that January and February and even the start of March will now be graced with new Father Brown stories – and I for one am not complaining. For those who can’t wait, the entire series is already streaming on the BBC iPlayer, but we’ll be following the broadcast schedule.
There are also changes on the casting front, although naturally the show could not go on without Mark Williams in his role as GK Chesterton’s eponymous parish priest. John Burton also returns as reliable, long-suffering Sergeant Goodfellow. But beyond that, brace yourself for quite a shock, because Kembleford is not how you remember it! Sorcha Cusack has stepped away from her regular full-time role as parish housekeeper Mrs McCarthy, with the character moving back to Ireland permanently to be with her sister (a couple of absences in last year’s run of episodes had also been put down to visiting her family.)
Her absence makes a big impact, as the character had been part of the show ever since the very first episode in 2013. The first episode of the latest run sees Father Brown recruiting a replacement as parish secretary: the obvious candidate is Agnes Burns (Elizabeth Bennett) who is even more strict and disapproving than her predecessor, which immediately leads to problems. Meanwhile one of the unsuccessful applicants is Mrs Isabel Devine, played by Claudie Blakley, who is the very antithesis of Mrs McCarthy – disorganised and scatter-brained, and not even a regular at Mass. However she does have a remarkable enthusiasm for Father Brown’s crime solving role and passionately wants to gets involved and help out. Her application gets a subsequent boost when she saves Father Brown’s life.
Read the rest of this entry »Tag! You have The Power of the Doctor
It’s been a long time since the last collaboration between Generation Star Wars‘ John Hood and Taking The Short View’s Andrew Lewin. Clearly it would take something very special indeed to get the band back together after all that time.
So how about the arrival of a special feature-length episode of Doctor Who marking the 100th anniversary of the BBC, packed full of spectacle and excitement not to mention a legion of familiar faces from the show’s long history, and culminating in a regeneration and a new Doctor? One that it turns out we really weren’t expecting?
Yes, that would probably do it. In fact it would be rude not to. So let’s buckle up and take a good look at “The Power of the Doctor” in a new piece originally published exclusively on GSW. As the Tenth Doctor of old used to say: “Allons-y!”
Warning: contains spoilers right from the start. So many spoilers, in fact, that even the spoilers contain spoilers. You have been warned, sweetie!
Read the rest of this entry »Father Brown S9 (BBC One) [2022]
We always used to say that the arrival of a new series of the BBC’s Father Brown was one of the most reliable indicators of the end of the Christmas holiday period and the arrival of a brand New Year. Its absence at the start of 2021 was therefore a painful indicator of quite how dreadful the previous 12 months had been for everyone due to the outbreak of coronavirus. Filming on series 9 had been about to start when the first COVID cases arrived in the UK and the country went into lockdown, resulting in all TV production being suspended for months.
In a similar vein therefore, the return of GK Chesterton’s eponymous country priest to the afternoon schedules can be taken as joyous confirmation that everything is finally beginning to return to normal (bit-by-bit and omicron notwithstanding). A year later than originally intended, it was possible for the filming of series 9 of Father Brown to get underway and the results are now before us to warm our hearts at the start of 2022. And at first glance it seems reassuring familiar with few changes, the look and feel of the production very much as it was despite the onerous social distancing rules that had to be observed during production. There’s no obvious sign of those measures on the screen, and cast and crew are to be commended for producing another 10 polished instalments.
However it’s quickly apparent that something has changed, and I’m obliged to post a bit of a spoiler warning at this point. While I would never divulge the key details of individual stories (and never the who- or why-dunnit), this is something that might take long-time viewers by surprise and not something they wish to know ahead of time. However there’s no way of discussing the new run of stories without mentioning it, as it comes up almost right at the start of the first episodes and impacts everything that follows. So if you don’t want to know anything at all about series 9 before watching it then shut your browser now and only come back when you’re ready.
Okay? Got it? Then here we go with our overdue annual review of the latest season of Father Brown…
Read the rest of this entry »An epistle about Father Brown
One of the mainstays of Taking The Short View in recent times has been coverage of the latest new series of the BBC’s adaptation of Father Brown starring Mark Williams which invariably pops up on the daytime schedules in the UK at the start of the year. Indeed, I’ve even described this as being one of the most reliable signs healding the end of the Christmas holidays and the proper start of a new year.
And yet this year it’s conspicuous by its absence, giving rise to too frequent questions in the last few months.
The first being, has Father Brown been cancelled or will there be new episodes at some point? I’m happy to confirm that the show is alive and well, and it had already been renewed for a ninth season which was originally scheduled to start principal photography in March 2020. Unfortunately that’s when the coronavirus pandemic reared up, and filming had to be shut down indefinitely.
However I’m delighted to be able to report that the series is now back in production, with actor John Burton (who plays Sgt Goodfellow) tweeting on April 19 that the cast and crew were finally back at work on location. He’s been posting regular updates from the set ever since, while assiduously avoiding anything that might constitute spoilers. The latest word is that the new season will be complete by December and hopefully on our screens not too long after that.
As for the second question: when that happens, of course Taking The Short View will be there to provide you with the latest updates and regular thumbnail sketches of each of the new episodes as they air. Just like you, we’re looking forward to getting back on the Kembleford beat just as soon as we can.
Star Trek: Picard S1 (2020) [DVD]
Contains generally only very mild spoilers
I’ve been a Star Trek fan for as long as I can remember, which includes memories of watching the show’s early broadcasts on BBC One in the early 1970s. I endured rather than enjoyed the cartoon spin-off and then really took to the motion pictures which began in 1979. But it was Star Trek: The Next Generation and its contemporary siblings Deep Space 9 and Voyager that I really embraced as my own.
The 11th film Star Trek Nemesis released in 2002 was the last outing for the TNG-era crew; since then the follow-up films and series have been a mixture of prequels and alternate timelines (and possibly both, depending on how Discovery and Strange New Worlds precisely fit in) and while they have their strong points I confess I’ve never felt that these are still “my” Star Trek although I’ve been happy of late to see Discovery increasingly leaning into the old Trek ethos after the noisy, flashy diversion of the JJ Abrams years.
The latest spin-off show is the first time since Nemesis to return to the setting and characters of the TNG period. It wasn’t until I settled down to watch the first episode that I realised just how much I had missed it, and how much it meant to be able to revisit some familiar faces and check in to see how everyone is doing. Not that it’s been a case of “happily ever after”, as it happens.
Read the rest of this entry »Boxset Bingewatch: Battlestar Galactica, Veronica Mars, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Cops, I Claudius, Game of Thrones, The Expanse and more
From the look of the website it may seem like it was a very quiet end to 2020 and that the lack of new reviews indicates I can’t have been watching very much. In fact the reverse has been true, and I have been watching more than ever.
Longtime readers of Taking The Short View will know that I’ve never really into ‘bingewatching’ boxsets, feeling that to power through multiple episodes of a show every night rather demeans and devalues the content. Well, coronavirus has changed that. With most of us under lockdown restrictions of some degree or other for months now, and new first-run shows thin on the ground due to the impact of COVID on television production, there really hasn’t been much option other than to fill up the long dark evenings with as many episodes of extant shows as possible. And of course, as everyone who has made this jump in media consumption will tell you, once you’re over the initial barrier to bingeing it soon becomes an addictive habit and all prior reservations melt away.
In my case I’m still very much a devotee of physical media (DVDs, Blu-Ray) rather than streaming. Fortunately I have a big collection of discs including many TV series that I haven’t fully watched despite owning some for a decade or more. Coronavirus therefore gave me the opportunity to plunge into the stockpile, and I return from this time of excavation with the following brief(ish) reports from the coalface… Read the rest of this entry »
Doctor Who 2021 New Year Special: “Revolution of the Daleks” (BBC One)
Contains spoilers for the episode
It’s probably a measure of just how completely Christmas and New Year had been turned upside down by the coronavirus pandemic restrictions that I found I had very little enthusiasm for anything this year, to the extent that even the latest New Year’s Day Special edition of Doctor Who felt strangely underwhelming, and even almost out of place.
The show itself was curiously lacking in any sort of festive trappings (I don’t think it mentioned the holidays at all, which is unusual in the recent history of Doctor Who specials), and rather than presenting itself as being the start of a bold New Year it actually felt more like an end-of-term report card, tying off loose ends, generally looking backwards rather than forwards. Read the rest of this entry »
Doctor Who: Fury from the Deep (1968) [DVD/Blu-ray]
Contains some spoilers.
The coronavirus pandemic has obviously had far-reaching repercussions for pretty much every aspect of life, not least the world of arts and entertainments. The next full season of Doctor Who for example almost certainly won’t now make it to our screens until 2022 because of the delay in the start of filming. But it’s not all bad news, and indeed this year has actually been rather a good one for fans of the original classic series.
We’ve had the release of the 1976/7 Season 14 on Blu-ray which included some of the best-loved Tom Baker serials including The Deadly Assassin, The Face of Evil, The Robots of Death and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. It sold out so absurdly fast (totally unavailable to order a full two months before release!) that it had to be re-released a second time shortly thereafter – and that sold out almost as quickly. Let it not be said that there isn’t a market for this sort of thing.
There’s also been the unprecedented release of not one but two animated reconstructions of ‘lost’ serials in quick succession. This arises from the BBC’s policy at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s to wipe master tapes of old productions that were thought to have no conceivable rebroadcast value in the days before home media. Over a hundred episodes of Doctor Who were among the material destroyed – a disproportionate number of them starring Patrick Troughton – and while a few have been unearthed and recovered in the years since, there’s still 97 of the original 253 episodes missing from the archives with no realistic chance of copies turning up. Read the rest of this entry »
Babylon Berlin S1-2 (2017) [DVD]
One part of history that has always held a particular fascination for me is that of Weimar Germany/. It’s the period following the country’s defeat in the Great War, through the twenties and into the Depression, setting the scene for the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party. It’s a society modern enough to be recognisably like our own, but twisted and bent out of shape by Germany’s humiliation of losing the war, the economic collapse caused by the excessively punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and the consequent societal degeneration leading to the rise of organised crime. And yet despite all these hardship, Berlin streets and nightlife were fizzing with an almost manic energy, while the country’s embryonic motion picture industry was producing some of the greatest expressionist movies of the silent era with the likes of Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari, Nosferatu and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Dr Mabuse masterpieces.
It’s within this world that Babylon Berlin is set – a dangerous, delicate time for the fledgling Republic which is under siege from violent anarchist groups of all political persuasions. The lead character of police Inspector Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) is very much of the centre of it all, determined to do his duty without fear or favour to anything other than justice and the sense of what’s right. But Germany in April 1929 is not the place for a man of principles to stand on one’s own, and Rath soon finds himself stained by and implicated in crimes no matter his best intentions. Read the rest of this entry »
A house call on Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple
We’ve had quite a few articles about Agatha Christie on Taking The Short View, from the Hercule Poirot films featuring Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov and a new version of Murder on the Orient Express starring Kenneth Branagh, to the more recent (and divisive) BBC adaptation of The Secret Adversary plus stand-along stories such as And Then There Were None and Witness for the Prosecution.
But with a solitary exception, the other major Agatha Christie character of Miss Marple has been somewhat overlooked here, and I thought it was time to set that right – not least because the stories that featured her were my earliest Christie loves. To a seven year old boy growing up in the seventies, the idea that Nanny might be some sort of supersleuth in disguise solving crimes from the comfort of her armchair in the corner of the living room was just too wonderful.
The character had already made it onto the screen as long ago as the 1960s with Margaret Rutherford in the key role. Her portrayal of Miss Marple is about as accurate to the books as Roger Moore’s James Bond is to Ian Fleming’s novels, which is to say not even close. And yet I have a deep affection for the four Rutherford films made by MGM, just as I love some of the Moore 007 outings out of all proportion for their actual merits. Read the rest of this entry »
Vienna Blood S1 (2019) [BBC Two]
Vienna Blood is a three-part period crime drama that slipped into the BBC Two schedules last autumn while Taking The Short View was treating itself to an impromptu six-month nap. Not having heard of the original series of novels by Frank Tallis I didn’t have particularly high expectations, and the first 15 or 20 minutes led me to the snap conclusion that this was just another Sherlock wannabee – perhaps not surprising as the showrunner and lead writer is Steve Thompson, who worked on that show along with Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss and who also contributed a number of Doctor Who scripts during Moffat’s tenure on that show.
Something kept me watching through that first 90 minute episode, however, and I found myself being slowly won over. So much so that I made a point of watching the next two stories as well, and ultimately my only regret was that I hadn’t given the series my full attention from the start. I ended up buying the original novel, and resolved to give the series a proper second full chance on BBC’s iPlayer at some point in the future. And as luck would have it, the BBC has now handed me the perfect opportunity by selecting Vienna Blood for a rapid rerun to the screen, presumably as a stopgap to bolster its lockdown-hit schedules.
The series principally revolves around the character of Dr Max Liebermann (a stand out performance from Matthew Beard), a brilliant young medical student in 1900s Vienna who is a particular devotee of the controversial work of Sigmund Freud in the fields of psychoanalysis and neurology. While his views are frowned upon by the stuffy and staid hospital establishment, they make him an ideal pioneer in the field of forensic psychology and criminal profiling – and consequently an asset to the work of senior police detective Oskar Reinhardt (played by Jürgen Maurer, a familiar face on Austrian television) who is immersed in some particularly complex and baffling murder cases. Read the rest of this entry »
Van der Valk S1E1 “Love in Amsterdam” (2020) [ITV]
Contains some mild spoilers for the aired episode
I was intrigued to see that ITV had decided to revive its hit 70s detective show Van der Valk for a limited three-part run of new 90 minute dramas starring Marc Warren as the titular character. Intrigued, but not particularly optimistic to be honest. That’s because I was never much of a fan of the original, which always seemed rather mediocre to my mind. I was too young to see it when it was first broadcast but I’ve caught up with early episodes on DVD and on the fantastic free-to-air Talking Pictures digital channel, and even by the standards of the day the pacing of the stories is positively glacial.
What the original series did have on its side were three key assets: the Amsterdam setting and location filming (hugely exotic back in those days before the advent of the ubiquitous city break); Barry Foster’s crisp and charismatic central performance as Commissaris Piet Van der Valk; and the iconic “Eye Level” theme tune that became a big chart hit for the Simon Park Orchestra on multiple occasions. The good news is that the new series returns to Amsterdam for the purposes of filming, and director Colin Teague makes the city look absolutely splendid including scenes filmed in the world-famous Rijksmuseum. Sadly Foster has passed away but I found Warren a perfectly fine replacement, bringing his own hard-to-like cynical edge to the character to maintain a reasonable amount of interest.
Unfortunately the “Eye Level” theme is almost entirely absent, although its echo can just about be heard as a light refrain under the main titles. It seems a weird decision to excise it; it’s like reviving Doctor Who without Ron Grainer’s music, or a James Bond film stripped of the instantly recognisable Berman/Barry 007 guitar riff. When American TV rebooted shows like Hawaii Five-O and Magnum PI, great care was taken in updating but fundamentally retaining their respective iconic theme music. However I think I can understand why the makers of the new Van der Valk change things here, at least to a degree: the “Eye Level” music is simply too distinctive and frankly rather dated, and was always anachronistically jaunty for the purposes of the show itself. Unfortunately the 2020 replacement music by Matthijs Kieboom is all low droning chords restlessly seeking but never stumbling across a memorable tune. Dull, boring, generic, unnecessary and entirely forgettable – the very same adjectives that could be used to describe most facets of the first episode of the new Van der Valk, which is solidly made but ultimately disappointing. Read the rest of this entry »
War of the Worlds (2020) [Fox]
Contains some mild, general spoilers for the first season
In the run-up to Christmas, the BBC aired its prestige adaptation of HG Wells’ classic 1898 science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds. There had been high hopes for it as the first screen version of the story to be set in the source work’s time and English home counties location, but alas the production proved to be deeply flawed and failed in just about every respect, either in its efforts to be a faithful version of Wells’ book or as a bold new reimagining. It was, to put it simply, rather a mess.
As it turns out, we didn’t have to wait for long for another War of the Worlds (note the removal of the definitive article this time around) to come along and sluice the bitter taste of the BBC adaptation’s failure from our mouths, with French production company Studio Canal in association with Fox Networks Group providing a brand new eight-part vision of the venerable tale. I’ll say upfront that Misfits writer Howard Overman’s show is a much stronger dramatic presentation than last year’s dead on arrival effort from the BBC, with some interesting and distinctive elements. However, it has to be said the trade-off for this medium level of success is that any resemblance to the contents of HG Wells’ novel is entirely coincidental.
For one thing, there’s a distinct lack of ‘war’ involved. The first episode depicts the arrival of the aliens in much the same way as Independence Day (with certain similarities to Contact) as the attack is heralded by a mysterious throbbing signal, followed soon after by fireballs falling from the skies which wipe out most of humanity on the spot in something resembling a deadly EMP blast, leaving just a few lucky survivors who happened to have taken sufficient cover in advance. Read the rest of this entry »
Taking the Short View 