CATCH UP TV IN CASE YOU MISSED IT...
Fearless TV3 Player, until July 14, episode 1 This started on BBC and is now in full swing on TV3, with the chance to catch up online if you’ve missed it. Written by Patrick Harbinson, one of the brains behind Homeland and 24, this has all the hallmarks of his usual approach, and is as good on the personal and psychological as it is on the wider drama.
Helen McCrory (left) is Emma Banville, crusading human rights lawyer who specialises in overturning miscarriages of justice, and has a pleasantly complicated home life (unspecified unfinished business with her elderly parents; hate figure for the tabloids because of the wrongfully-convicted ‘paedophiles’ she sets free; wants to adopt with her photographer partner; lives with the wife of a Saudi doctor who is being sought by MI5). Her latest case is Kevin Russell, who has spent 14 years in prison for the murder of schoolgirl Linda Simms, a crime he swears he did not commit. Banville uncovers enough discrepancies and evidence of coercion to get a retrial.
At which point, enter Michael Gambon, looking sinister and craggy, and putting a call in to an unnamed American woman on a ‘secure line’. Throw in MI5 who are buzzing away in the background and keeping a very close eye on Banville for possibly-nefarious reasons of their own, and it all looks like adding up to something both gripping and stylish. How To Adult RTE Player, episodes 1-3 We kind of want to hate Stefanie Preissner, for being so young, so smart, so productive, but actually, it’s not possible. She’s too self-deprecating and self-aware for that, not to mention disarmingly honest (anyone who starts a sentence with “Without sounding like a complete tool...” is OK with us). In this online-only series — each episode is 10 minutes long — Stefanie gets to grips with the kinds of things she wishes she’d learned at school, including how to get a mortgage, the right approach to exercise and diet, and the cost of being old. Along the way, she makes a variety of her best disbelieving faces.