TOP TELLY TREATS
Christopher Stevens, Mail TV reviewer
Here comes Lockdown Season 3. The good news is that, by telly tradition, the third season is always the best. Game Of Thrones, The Sopranos and Breaking Bad are all proof.
The less good news is that terrestrial TV schedules are struggling. There are some great shows planned for this year, but many have been delayed by Covid restrictions.
So if you’ve been contemplating a plunge into video-on-demand, with a subscription to a streaming TV supplier such as Now TV, Amazon Prime, Apple+, Britbox or Hulu, there will never be a better excuse to indulge.
Netflix has the best shows, including the raunchy costume drama Bridgerton, starring Jonathan Bailey and Julie Andrews, and the chess thriller The Queen’s Gambit, with Anya Taylor- Joy.
BritBox, the online library of classic UK shows set up jointly by ITV and BBC, regularly adds more material. There’s plenty of glossy recent serials such as Belgravia and Sanditon, as well as stacks of first-rate crime drama: Endeavour, Des, Baptiste, Shetland and much more.
But it’s the old favourites that BritBox subscribers really seem to love. The service’s most popular shows over Christmas were Dad’s Army and Only Fools And Horses.
BBC iPlayer offers a generous selection of boxsets for free, with both modern classics such as the love story Normal People, and shows that are still airing — including Jenna Coleman in the Seventies crime docudrama The Serpent, and Traces, the forensic science thriller.
Among the shows coming up on ITV this month is The Pembrokeshire Murders, a true crime story starring Luke evans as a Welsh detective hunting a beauty spot killer.
And Keeley Hawes will star in Finding Alice, with Nigel Havers and Joanna Lumley as her parents.
Keeley plays a woman who finds her husband dead at the bottom of the stairs — and then discovers he was leading a double life with horrendous debts to some unpleasant people.
The biggest and strangest spectacle of the year promises to be a Broadway musical based on the scandals of the royal Family — Diana, Princess Of Wales (Netflix).
Originally scheduled to open last March but postponed when the pandemic closed the theatres, the show stars Jeanna de Waal as Princess Di. Filmed without an audience at the Longacre Theatre in New York, it is expected to air in May. But life will be back to normal by then . . . won’t it?