‘Bent coppers!’: it’s the endless refrain of Line of Duty this series, in any other show it would grate on you in no time at all – yet season five of Line of Duty just about gets away with it. The return of Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty follows comes after the amazing success of…
Arts
Game of Thrones: The Pantomime – An interview with cast and crew
‘It’s a real bugger to turn it into a pantomime, because the characters don’t really fit,’ remarks Sam Went, one of the two co-writers of Game of Thrones: The Pantomime. His voice comes through on the phone whilst at a table I’m seated with the show’s director, Susanna Jones, and actors Emma Gadson, Al Roberts,…
TV
True Detective Season 3 initial review
The third season of HBO’s crime anthology series True Detective bears a lot of weight on its shoulders. The show’s memorable first season, starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, was a stellar southern gothic story that delved into morality and the nature of good and evil. Meanwhile the second season, with a bigger big-name cast…
Film
God’s Own Country: love, nature and acceptance
God’s Own Country opens with a bleak landscape; a reluctant dawn illuminating a grey and isolated world, the wind whistling without pause, and the sound of protagonist Johnny (Josh O’Connor) retching after one too many the night before. It’s an inexpressibly sad and hollow scene. Johnny’s world, limited on the family sheep farm that he…
TV
The ones to watch in 2019
2019 looks set to be a big year for some of our favourite returning shows and for some fresh, new ones for us to indulge in. Perhaps the big one this year is the final season of Game of Thrones; season eight is scheduled to have a smaller episode count (only six) but some of…
TV
Christmas Highlights
Christmas TV often gets a bad rap; there’s too many repeats, not enough decent films on, and the comedy specials are cringeworthy. So, what is there going to be on the gogglebox this festive season that’s actually worth watching? Watership Down looks set to be the big event on BBC One this Christmas. A co-production…
TV
A Discovery of Witches: A rich, spellbinding show to sink your teeth into
A Discovery of Witches, starring Teresa Palmer and Matthew Goode, is based on the first book in the bestselling All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness. Upon seeing the initial trailer, I scoffed at it and looked upon it with scorn. Another vampire/supernatural romance? As if we need another one of them. Not only have we…
Film
Mississippi Burning and the White Gaze
Mississippi Burning is a tense historical thriller that tells the story of the FBI investigation into the murder of three civil rights activists during the Freedom Summer campaign by several KKK members. The film won an Oscar and has a fantastic cast, starring Gene Hackman as Agent Anderson and Willem Defoe as Agent Ward. Many…
Arts
Book review: Melmoth by Sarah Perry
Sat on one of the pews in the Unitarian Octagon Church, I cannot help but be in awe of the space. The Book Hive owners were quite right, we would not have all fit in the shop. Once upon a time, before Sarah Perry had become Sarah Perry, her book launches had been hosted in…
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