Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
The best of ALL4/MY5/UKTV PLAY
PORTERHOUSE BLUE RIP-ROARING ADAPTATION
Malcolm Bradbury adapts Tom Sharpe’s classic novel for this superb swipe at the Oxbridge elite. The incoming master of Porterhouse college is played by Ian Richardson, inheriting a seat of learning that is all pomp and ceremony, and very little brains. David Jason steals the show as head porter Skullion, while John Sessions is Zipser the postgrad who is lustily obsessed with his buxom cleaning lady. It’s rip-roaring good fun. All4
TIPPING THE VELVET VICTORIAN ROMANCE
LAST CHANCE TO SEE
Sexually explicit but also joyful and fun, this three-part adaptation of Sarah Waters’s bestseller caused quite the stir when it first aired in 2002. Rachael Stirling is the young woman coming of age as a lesbian in Victorian England, with Keeley Hawes, Anna Chancellor (right) and a then unknown Benedict Cumberbatch in support. It wasn’t the first time we’d seen a lesbian romance on our screens, but this was infinitely more camp and colourful than 1990’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and despite its salacious reputation, it’s really a romance at heart. Until 23 June, UKTV Play
YELLOWSTONE MODERN WESTERN
Kevin Costner is an A-lister who is well-suited to Westerns, thanks in no small part to his Oscar-winning epic Dances With Wolves, and his return to the genre for this US series came with justifiably loud fanfare. Costner (above) stars as the patriarch of a large ranch in contemporary Montana – Wild
West tensions have been replaced by the more civilised concerns of family feuding and encroaching development. The first two seasons are available until 18 July on My5. Season 1-3 and spin-off 1883 will be on Paramount+ from 22 June – see page 21.
BEFORE WE DIE CRIME THRILLER
Based on a Swedish series of the same name (also available to watch in full), this dark crime thriller doesn’t waste any time getting to the violent action. Lesley Sharp is Hannah Laing, a detective whose messy
personal life is about to get a whole lot more tangled – and it all starts with an act of seriously tough love involving her son, Christian (Patrick Gibson). European gangs are bringing new lows of violent organised crime to the streets of Bristol, and Christian is in far deeper than he realises. All4