Category Archives: TV

Departure: Series Two. Television Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * *

Cast: Archie Panjabi, Kris Holden-Reid, Karen LeBlanc, Mark Rendall, Christopher Plummer, David Hewlett, Dion Johnstone, Kelly McCormack, Etienne Kellici, Charlie Carrick, Wendy Crewson, Donal Logue, Jason O’Mara, Greg Bryk, Jennifer Podemski, Cara Ricketts, Diana Bentley, Florence Ordesh, Danny Waugh, Lindsey Connell.

Accidents happen, it is inevitable as a good man making a poor choice that leads to his ruin, and yet some accidents are merely the underplaying of planned catastrophe, the chance taken by one person or a group of like-minded individuals to further their cause but presenting it as a freak mishap, a calamity of coincidence that just happens to change the world, or at least the locality in which it took part, forever.

Departure: Series Two. Television Review. full post

(479 words, estimated 1:55 mins reading time)

Doctor Who: Flux. Television Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Jodie Whittaker, Mandip Gill, John Bishop, Barbara Flynn, Jo Martin, Kevin McNally, Craige Els, Steve Oram, Nadine Albina, Sam Spruell, Sarah Powell, Jemma Redgrave, Craig Parkinson, Rochenda Sandall, Jacob Anderson, Annabel Scholey, Blake Harrison, Dan Starkey, Robert Bathurst, Jonathan Watson, Barbara Fadden, Paul Broughton, Gerald Kyd, Sue Jenkins, Nicholas Briggs, Bhavnisha Parmar, Alex Frost, Vincent Brimble, Jemma Churchill, Penelope McGhie, Nicholas Blane, George Caple.

Doctor Who: Flux. Television Review. full post

(659 words, estimated 2:38 mins reading time)

Supergirl: Series Six. Television Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *

Cast: Melissa Benoist, Chyler Leigh, Katie McGrath, Jesse Rath, Nicole Maines, Azie Tesfai, Julie Gonzalo, Staz Nair, Peta Sergeant, David Harwood, Jon Cryer, Brenda Strong, Sharon Leal, Claude Knowlton, Jason Behr, Matt Baram, Jhaleil Swaby, Mila Jones, Calista Flockhart, Mechad Brooks, Jeremy Jordan, Chris Wood, Helen Slater.

There are finales that leave you breathless, there are finales that make you question your beliefs, and there are endings in which the length of time invested in a particular television series leaves you understandably devastated by its removal from your timetable and television schedule that it can hit you like a bereavement, not of the physical, but of the declared love you have shown it.

Supergirl: Series Six. Television Review. full post

(550 words, estimated 2:12 mins reading time)

Shetland: Series Six. Television Review.

Liverpool sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Douglas Henshall, Alison O’ Donnell, Steven Robertson, Mark Bonnar, Lewis Howden, Erin Armstrong, Anne Kidd, Fiona Bell, Neve McIntosh, Benny Young, Juie Brown, Jimmy Chisholm, Conor McCarry, Angus Miller, Cora Bissett, Stephen McCole, Kate Bracken, Thoren Ferguson, Andy Clark, Anneika Rose, Lewis Gribben, Sharif Dorani, Shonagh Price.

A pertinent question of the times, the ambiguity of morality, and the classic example of how low someone can stoop when they look to revenge; all this against the backdrop of island life in the shadow of murder, of the slow decline of the human mind, and the tensions that run high when an island’s life is supposedly threatened by a returning, and unwanted, soul.

Shetland: Series Six. Television Review. full post

(554 words, estimated 2:13 mins reading time)

Cobra: Cyberwar. Television Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Robert Carlyle, Victoria Hamilton, David Haig, Richard Dormer, Marsha Thomason, Lisa Palfrey, Edward Bennett, Lucy Cohu, Joshua Hogan, Grace Hogg-Robinson, Richard Pepple, Andrew Buchan, Neil Stuke, Alexa Davies, Karan Gill, Dipo Ola, Georgie Bingham, Michael Jibson.

When it comes to politics, art and life are so entwinned that it can be difficult to discern the difference, to understand where fiction and fact blur and merge, where the lines of personal ambition overlap the need of entertainment; only politics seems to play with its own creation, and like Frankenstein looming over the unfortunate being as he pushes electricity through its monstrous shaped body, the result is one of indisputable carnage and denial of responsibility.

Cobra: Cyberwar. Television Review. full post

(555 words, estimated 2:13 mins reading time)

The Outlaws. Television Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Cast: Rhianne Barreto, Gambia Cole, Christopher Walken, Eleanor Tomlinson, Darren Boyd, Clare Perkins, Charles Babalola, Stephen Merchant, Isla Gie, Jessica Gunning, Grace Calder, James Nelson-Joyce, Guillermo Bedward, Aiyana Goodfellow, Ian McElhinney, Gyuri Sarossy, Dolly Wells, Marcus Fraser, Tom Hanson, Kojo Kamara, Sam Troughton, Inez Solomon, Evelyn Temple, Claes Bang, Hannah Brownlie, Josh Alexander, Leigh Williams, Michael Cochrane, Richard E. Grant.

The Outlaws. Television Review. full post

(586 words, estimated 2:21 mins reading time)

Y: The Last Man. Television Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Ben Schnetzer, Ashley Romans, Olivia Thirlby, Diane Lane, Elliot Fletcher, Amber Tamblyn, Juliana Canfield, Diana Bang, Missi Pyle, Jess Salgueiro, Yanna McIntosh, Jennifer Wigmore, Paul Gross, Kristen Gutoskie.

Nature abhors a vacuum, remove a species, destroy a civilisation from existence, and what you are left with is a power struggle, a false manipulation of authority and dominance that requires feeding, and can turn on what remains on itself; the sense of the diminishing resonance that comes with extinction.

Y: The Last Man. Television Review. full post

(537 words, estimated 2:09 mins reading time)

Miss Scarlett And The Duke. Television Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Cast: Kate Phillips, Stuart Martin, Cathy Belton, Ansu Kabia, Danny Midwinter, Evan McCabe, Richard Evans, Nick Dunning, Simon Ludders, Amy McCallister, Andrew Gower, Kevin Doyle.

There are few places in time that make for the convenience of the private detective to ply their trade, and the later Victorian period with its pulse set firmly on the expansion of the Industrial Revolution, the sense of optimism shrouding the creeping decay, the rust of human life, as they fall foul to mechanisation, is up there with the very best of them.

Miss Scarlett And The Duke. Television Review. full post

(511 words, estimated 2:03 mins reading time)

Dalgliesh: A Shroud For A Nightingale. Television Review. (2021).

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Cast: Bertie Carvel, Jeremy Irvine, Helen Aluko, Alice Nokes, Eliot Salt, Robin Krostoffy, Alex Krostoffy, Beccy Henderson, Fenella Woolgar, Amanda Root, Siobhan Cullen, Richard Dillane, Avin Shah, Natasha Little, Syd Ralph, Lily Newmark.

We have come to think of the past as a rusting, decaying, and in many cases unnecessary distraction from the objectives of today, and the hope for the future that we all wish to witness, the new sense of puritanism that has come replete with cancel culture, of objectifying key moments and simply erasing them as if they didn’t happen, rather than confronting them and placing them in their appropriate modern day thought; that is the past not only rusting, but being corrupted in the same way that the workers of the Ministry of Truth changed details daily under the terrifying eye of Big Brother.

Dalgliesh: A Shroud For A Nightingale. Television Review. (2021). full post

(614 words, estimated 2:27 mins reading time)

The Goes Wrong Show: Series Two. Television Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Henry Shields, Bryony Corrigan, Charlie Russell, Jonathan Sayer, Nancy Zamit, Dave Hearn, Greg Tannahill, Henry Lewis, Chris Leask, Ellie Morris.

British television comedy is in the middle of much need, and timely, renaissance, one that isn’t afraid of entertaining the populace, of holding true to value, and is fully versed in being witnessed as unique, adaptable, and fierce in its motives.

The Goes Wrong Show: Series Two. Television Review. full post

(435 words, estimated 1:44 mins reading time)