Christopher Stephens Why 2016 could be the best TV year EVER
From a pipe-smoking Rowan Atkinson to a stellar new rival to Doctor Who...
The New Year fireworks have only just begun, as 2016 starts with an explosion of superb drama. This weekend sees a triple bill of stupendous new shows, with the Napoleonic epic War And Peace starring Lily James, broadswords and monsters in Beowulf, and the return of Britain’s bestloved detective, Morse, in endeavour, along with other old favourites including Mr Selfridge, Death In Paradise, Father Brown, Midsomer Murders and Silent Witness.
As for the rest of the year: Massive budgets and unlimited ambition are the hallmarks of the headline-grabbing serials in 2016, as A-list stars jostle for roles in sumptuous costume dramas, elaborate fantasy adventures and shocking crime sagas.
Screenwriters have seized on the world’s classics from h.G. Wells to Le Carré and homer to Anthony Trollope for inspiration. Actors who seemed destined never to be seen on UK television again are here — including hugh Laurie as an international arms dealer in The Night Manager, Rowan Atkinson as French detective Maigret, and Dame Judi Dench as the mother of two medieval english kings.
You’d better buy a bigger telly. You’re going to need it . . .
WAR AND PEACE
(BBC1, Sunday, 9pm)
Why you should watch: It promises to be the greatest TV spectacle ever. WAR And Peace is a baggy monster, an immense, sprawling book. Greta Scacchi, who plays Countess Rostova (mother of the heroine, Natasha, and just one of a stupendous star cast) says she had to tear her copy of Tolstoy’s novel in two, because the whole thing was too big to carry around.
So the major question is how screenwriter Andrew Davies has crammed a decade of Napoleonic battles, glittering social whirl and class upheaval into just six episodes. The writer, who is 80 next year, is our greatest adapter of classic novels, the man who brought Pride And Prejudice and The Way We Live Now to TV.
War And Peace is certain to feature his trademark erotic scenes — Davies can never resist sexing up the classics. It’s rumoured that the incestuous brother-sister relationship between a prince and princess is explicitly depicted here, and the trailer is packed with illicit kisses and glimpses of bedroom scenes.
Davies is helped by a BBC budget that baulks at nothing. Battlefields thronged with thousands of soldiers in resplendent uniforms, palaces filled with women in exquisite gowns, country estates and city mobs, carriages in the snow, family banquets and nights at the opera...this production promises to outdo the most epic imagination.
And look at the stars. Lily James is the impulsive Natasha, desperate for romance. James Norton is arrogant, moody Prince Andrei, and Jim Broadbent is his foul-tempered father. Gillian Anderson plays a dazzling society hostess, Anna Pavlovna Scherer, and Rebecca Front is the penniless aristocrat Anna Mikhailovna, cadging every favour she can to boost the career of her vain son Boris (Aneurin Barnard).
Then there’s Adrian edmondson as Natasha’s air-headed father, Tom Burke as the psychopathic Dolokhov, Tuppence Middleton as the sexually rapacious hélène and Stephen Rea as her conniving father, Aisling Loftus as the orphaned innocent Sonya, and at the centre of the tale the absentminded, super-rich Pierre — played by New Yorker Paul Dano.
It is a vast story, perhaps the biggest in all literature. But at its heart, there is a simple love triangle between two men and a girl, with the guarantee of broken hearts and friendships.
BEOWULF: RETURN TO THE SHIELDLANDS
(ITV, Sunday, 7pm)
Why you should watch: Because it’s swashbuckling adventure with lavish special effects. BRITAIN’S earliest and bloodiest epic poem has inspired a 13-part TV series starring Kieren Bew as Beowulf, the medieval warrior who vows to slay a man-eating monster.. and in doing so antagonises the monster’s much nastier mother.
But this version promises many more slavering horrors for the mercenary Beowulf and his companions to battle, brought to life by vivid computer graphics.
David harewood plays Scorann, a sword-wielding chieftain, and hollywood star William hurt is King hrothgar, unable to protect his people from the marauding creatures. Joanne Whalley, Ian PulestonDavies and Gregory Fitoussi co-star, with the lantern-jawed David Bradley (instantly recognisable to Game Of Thrones fans) also appearing.
Filmed on the North-east coast, the show is billed as ‘a Western set in the Dark Ages of Britain’s mythic past’. Fans of The Last Kingdom as well as Lord Of The Rings should find lots to enjoy here.
WALTER PRESENTS
(C4 and online, from Sunday) Why you should watch: Because murder doesn’t stop at the english Channel. ADDICTS of BBC4’s Saturday night Continental crime sprees, with double bills of shows such as The Bridge, Arne Dahl and Spiral, know there is more TV noir made in europe than terrestrial channels in the UK can hope to broadcast.
But for viewers with a broadband connection Channel 4 is launching an ingenious solution, through its All4 website. Box sets will be issued online, starting with the acclaimed thriller Deutschland 83, set in a divided Germany before the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The first-ever German language series to be screened in the U.S., it was called ‘slick’ and ‘engrossing’ by critics, and the first episode also begins on C4 on Sunday at 9pm.
The Danish supernatural thriller heartless and the Swedish drama Blue eyes will follow. Future box sets are promised, not only from europe but from South America and Israel, too, all chosen by Walter Iuzzolino, an executive with C4’s partner Global Series Network — which explains the odd and egotistical series title, Walter Presents.
There’s no faulting Walter’s enthusiasm, though: ‘We live in the golden age of serial drama,’ he says, ‘with French and Scandi thrillers gripping audiences in their millions. This is the perfect time to introduce UK viewers to a much broader choice of the very best box sets from around the world, which they never knew existed.’
And best of all — it’s free.
JERICHO
(ITV, Thursday, 9pm) Why you should watch: It’s Britain’s answer to the Wild West pioneers. The Yorkshire dales are transformed into Victorian england’s own Wild West in this story of a shantytown and the navvies who built a railway viaduct across the wild Pennines. Call The Midwife star Jessica Raine plays a desperate mother, Annie, widowed and left homeless after the death of her gambler husband.
Annie and her teenage children take refuge in Jericho, a kind of frontier town, where hard-drinking brawler ‘happy’ Jack Laggan (Mark Addy) rules the work gangs and Lace Polly (Lorraine Ashbourne) runs the town brothel.
hans Matheson is the local roughneck who befriends Annie, while Clarke Peters is the railway agent with a mysterious past who offers her help she cannot afford to refuse.
The scenario is based on real history: hundreds of workers died, blasting through the Pennine granite to build the Ribblehead Viaduct. Writer Steve Thompson describes it as a British Western, and ITV hope the series could run for five years.
They’re aiming for a ‘Poldark effect’, with millions of viewers swooning as hunky hans strips to the waist for plenty of pick-wielding and dynamiting. ‘It’s very filmic,’ promises Jessica.
MAIGRET (ITV, spring)
Why you should watch: Because we’ve never seen Mr Bean do drama. ROWAN Atkinson is equally
beloved as the other-worldly bumbler Mr Bean and the sardonic Edmund Blackadder. He’s been the useless spy Johnny English, a brilliant satirist with Not The Nine O’Clock News, and a West End star as Fagin in the musical Oliver!
But he hasn’t made a TV series for 20 years, since the Ben Elton sitcom The Thin Blue Line. And this is his first foray into crime drama, as the stolid, pipe-smoking Parisian police inspector Jules Maigret, hero of 75 novels by billion-selling Belgian writer Georges Simenon. Atkinson is a wealthy man, and an actor who will take only the roles he really loves, so this double-bill of twohour specials — Maigret Sets A Trap, and Maigret’s Dead Man — promises to be a loving homage to one of the great detectives.
‘I have been a devourer of the Maigret novels for many years,’ says Rowan, ‘and I’m very much looking forward to playing such an intriguing character, at work in Paris during a fascinating period in its history — the Fifties.’
Maigret has been portrayed on TV by actors including Rupert Davies, Richard Harris and Charles Laughton, but the last British star to play the detective was Michael Gambon in 1993.
DOCTOR THORNE
(ITV, spring)
Why you should watch: Because this is telly to wallow in. FANS of Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, and I am very much one, will be hugging themselves with happiness at the thought of this adaptation by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes. Trollope’s romantic sagas are less biting than Jane Austen, more subtle than Charles Dickens: he creates a world so inviting that we care deeply about the characters, because we long to share their lives.
Doctor Thorne is the third of the Barchester chronicles, set among the minor gentry who love and feud on their country estates around an English cathedral town.
Tom Hollander plays the village doctor whose penniless niece Mary is in love with the local squire’s son. But the squire’s ferocious wife (Rebecca Front) is determined that her boy will marry a wealthy heiress, and forbids him to see Mary. It’s an age-old theme, and perfect for costume drama.
Lord Fellowes is certainly pleased with the result. ‘As a lifelong devotee of Trollope,’ he says, ‘who is certainly the strongest influence over my work that I am conscious of, it is tremendously satisfying.’
THE NIGHT MANAGER
(BBC1, February)
Why you should watch: Because nobody does it better than Le Carré. HUGH LAURIE, who became the world’s highest-paid TV star in the medical drama House, returns to British television as an arms dealer, in this adaptation of John Le Carré’s 1993 crime novel.
Former spy and thriller writer extraordinaire, Le Carré was a towering figure in TV during the Seventies and Eighties, with his MI6 novels Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People — but this is the first time in 25 years that one of his novels has been filmed for television. Tom Hiddleston plays Jonathan Pine, an ex-soldier recruited by spymaster Olivia Colman to go undercover and infiltrate an international network of arms dealers. The novel was set in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, but this version, directed by Oscar-winner Susanne Bier, is set in the present day.
The cast also includes Russell Tovey, Tom Hollander, Alistair Petrie, David Harewood, Katherine Kelly and Neil Morrissey — a lineup so outstanding that it’s clear the acting world expects The Night Manager to become an instant classic. Everyone wants to be involved.
‘I loved The Night Manager when it was published,’ says Hugh, who wrote his own novel about arms dealers in the Nineties, The Gun Seller. ‘I am now thrilled and honoured to have the frontest of front row seats. All the moving parts are finely machined — we just have to not mess it up.’
ONE OF US
(BBC1, date to be announced)
Why you should watch: Because once you start, you won’t be able to look away. HARRY and Jack Williams, the brothers who wrote the child abduction thriller The Missing, set their latest murder story in the Scottish Highlands, where a double killing threatens to tear two families apart. Instead of focusing on the police investigation, all the emphasis of this four-part drama is on the grieving relatives and their suspicions.
Billed as ‘an intense morality tale which will keep the audience guessing until its devastating climax’, One Of Us stars Juliet Stevenson, Joanna Vanderham, John Lynch and Adrian Edmondson, as well as Georgina Campbell who won a BAFTA this year for Murdered By My Boyfriend.
Stevenson, last seen on TV as the oracle in Atlantis, says, ‘When I first read the script it immediately gripped me, as it’s such a unique and compelling story.’
DC’S LEGENDS OF TOMORROW
(Sky1, date to be announced)
Why you should watch: Because TV can’t get enough of comic book heroes. EVERY cartoon superhero you’ve ever heard of (and many you haven’t) star in their own shows now. It isn’t just young Batman in the excellent Gotham on Channel 5, or Supergirl on Sky — even forgotten crimefighters like The Flash and Arrow have been revived.
Now a host of names known only to the most avid comic fans are ganging together and coming to TV: Firestorm, the Atom, White Canary, Hawkgirl, Captain Cold and Heatwave — all from the pages of DC Comics — are doing battle against the supervillain, Vandal Savage.
The whole of humanity is at stake, naturally. But for British audiences, the biggest draw will be Arthur Darvill, who played the Tardis traveller Rory in Doctor Who, as a roguish fellow who roams through time and space. Doesn’t that sound a familiar character?
With Doctor Who currently in the doldrums thanks to its maddeningly complex plots and an overdose of philosophy, Legends Of Tomorrow could make time travel exciting again.