Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: David Suchet, Zoë Wanamaker, Sean Pertwee, Stephanie Leonidas, Martin Jarvis, Rebecca Front, Sam Kelly, Chris Gordon, Richard Dixon, Francesca Zoutewelle, James Anderson, Rosalind Ayres, Daniel Weyman, Emma Hamilton, Ella Geraghty, Sinéad Cusack, Eliot Barnes-Worrell.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn, Adam Rothenburg, MyAnna Buring, Joseph Mawle, David Wilmott, Joseph Drake, Gillian Saker.
For the men in H Division, the thin blue line that just about keeps some semblance of order in London’s Whitechapel, no sooner do they rid the area of one killer than another soon takes its place. This time though the killer hiding in the shadows, dealing death to those who get in the way is Heroin; the narcotic that brought back the sins of Empire to the shores of the Thames and backed by the worst criminal of all, the corrupt policeman.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: David Suchet, Hugh Fraser, Sarah Parish, Pauline Moran, Philip Jackson, Patricia Hodge, Steven Pacey, David Yelland, Tom Brooke, Nicholas Day, James Carroll Jordan, Simon Lowe, Lou Broadbent, Peter Symonds, Barbara Kirby, Nicholas Burns, Alex Palmer, Teresa Banham, Jack Farthing.
It really will be a shame for lovers of Poirot when this particular series comes to an end. The only way that they will get their fix will be to watch all the episodes on back to back repeat. Not such a hard problem to get round it seems but there will certainly be no new episodes recorded starring the irreplaceable David Suchet as the consummate Belgian.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Rupert Penry Jones, Phil Davis, Steve Pemberton, Claire Rushbrook, Sam Stockwell, Ben Bishop, Angela Pleasance, Joan Blackham, Michael Fitzgerald, James Woolley, Diane Kent, Charlotte Hope, Ann Davies.
The final case of the fourth series sees the idea of the evil that has been haunting the detective team in Whitechapel fixated on what was underneath the roads, the back alleyways and deep in the sewers. The sewers which take the waste out of the East End and in which a clan of cannibals have started to take the virtuous and honourable off the streets and like time, devouring them and leaving only the memory of them behind.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
“Murder is no parlour game likely to be solved on the last page but in act of terrible and terrifying significance.”, so relished with glee Dr. Lucy Worsley as she read from the book that set a new style of British crime fiction, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock.
The final part of Dr. Lucy Worsley’s fascinating look at the British pre-occupation with murder centred on the Edwardian age and beyond. From the terrible murder involving the seemingly innocuous Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen through to the way that murder became almost sanitised, cleaned and cleansed as parlour games and the rise of cinema and its own Golden Age of Film Noir in which the murderer became the celebrity in classics such as Brighton Rock and the outstanding Alfred Hitchcock film Sabotage.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Ration * * * *
As Dr. Lucy Worsley makes her way through the Victorian age of the most nefarious crime of all, the taking of another’s life, the second part of her new series, A Very British Murder, lifts the lid on the rise of the detective, whether in fiction or on the streets and houses of Britain and the detective’s arch nemesis, that of the arm chair detective.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
No matter where you look on television or in the book stalls and shops of Britain, there is always the chance you will come across a programme, factual case or long line of fiction dedicated to the murder. The British seem obsessed with it, so much so that no Sunday night would be the same without one of Agatha Christie’s plots giving the viewer a challenge to find the killer before the spinster or the Belgian and no trip to a book shop would feel the same without picking up the latest crime thriller. Dr. Lucy Worsley’s latest historical series delves into the mind set of our island race’s preoccupation with the despicable act and looks at some cases of the deed in A Very British Murder.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Rupert Penry Jones, Phil Davies, Steve Pemberton, Sam Stockman, Ben Bishop, Hannah Walters, Mandeep Dhillon, Munir Khairdin, Hugh Mitchell, Natasha Joseph, Angela Pleasance, Gavin Marshall, John Hodgkinson, Tom Beard.
American television programmes that would be considered on par with the I.T.V. detective thriller Whitechapel would no doubt scream for the sense of history that surrounds the East-End of London, the chilling residue of time, death, murder and mayhem that seem to come out of every pore and alleyway of the area. America’s loss is Britain’s gain especially when it comes to Whitechapel and its abundance of historical murders that can be re-enacted with a new novel twist by today’s modern writers.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * (Series 4, case 1)
Cast: Rupert Penry Jones, Phil Davis, Steve Pemberton, Claire Rushbrook, Sam Stockman, Ben Bishop, Hannah Walker, Georgina Anderson, Deddie Davies, Jake Curran, Damian Dudkiewicz, Mary Roscoe, Brian Protheroe.
If series three of Whitechapel focused on the gruesome, the first case of series four entered the disturbingly macabre in which the spirit of fear spread by Matthew Hopkins, the early 17th century self-appointed Witch Finder General, found a new playground in which to distribute terror and in the area of Whitechapel there is perhaps no greater place of significance of which fear and terror has been housed.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The name, the very thought of his face and the way he was even able to clear the pubs of any custom at his absolute peak, is enough to remember Tony Hancock for what he was, a genius of comedy, the master of stalled look at camera in which he carried a nations funny bone for over a decade until his untimely death in Australia in 1968.