Year of warm hearts and hot new drama
WHAT a TV year! We saw Rose and Giovanni’s breath-taking 17-second silent dance on Strictly, Peppa Pig’s return to national prominence and Piers Morgan staging The Great British Walk-off on Good Morning Britain. ITV sacked him and promptly lost 65 per cent of the viewers. Shrewd management.
Meanwhile, millions embraced big-hearted comfort shows such as Gone Fishing, The Repair Shop and My
Yorkshire Farm – proving there is still a market for warmth, decency, skill and hard work.
With streaming services booming, the choice for viewers has never been greater.
So, it’s reassuring to note how many quality series are still being made by terrestrial and satellite broadcasters.
Here is my celebration of ten of the best TV shows of 2021.
In police drama, nothing came close to Unforgotten (ITV). Chris Lang’s dark, spell-binding story delivered more twists, and a much more shocking ending, than the misfiring Line Of Duty. It was Nicola Walker’s final turn as DCI Cassie Stuart; we will miss her piercing intelligence and relentless scorn. But take heart, there will be a fifth series, with a new partner for Sanjeev Bhaskar’s Sunny Khan.
Jimmy Mcgovern’s prison mini-series Time (BBC1) saw Sean Bean as guilt-stricken school teacher Mark freshly convicted of causing the death of a cyclist through drink-driving.
Stephen Graham was honest prison warden Eric forced to compromise his values and break rules to keep his own jailed son alive. Both suffered horribly.
Mark was brutally beaten for refusing to smuggle in drugs for the cell block kingpin; Eric was jailed for doing just that.
There was more terrific acting on Mare Of Easttown (Sky Atlantic). Kate Winslet excelled as tough, middle-aged detective Mare Sheehan in Brad Ingelsby’s wartsand-all love letter to his Pennsylvanian home town. As well as solving a griping whodunnit – the murder of a teenage girl – Mare dealt with divorce, a custody battle and her nightmare of a mother.
It was as authentic a portrait of Rust Belt life as we’ve seen on screen; and to do her bit for reality Winslet made the director reinstate footage of her “bulgy bit of belly”.
Far cheerier was The White Lotus (Sky Atlantic), a hilarious drama about hugely wealthy, obnoxiously entitled Americans on vacation in a five-star Hawaiian hotel – a slice of paradise they quickly turned into holiday hell. Writer Mike White’s privileged grotesques included spoilt rich kid Shane who drove hotel manager Armond into a spectacular, adults-only meltdown. These days there is more chance of finding a lateral flow test kit in a chemist than a decent, original TV comedy. But our funniest
British show Inside Number Nine (BBC2), remains consistently reliable. This sixth series saw writer-performers Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton spin clever half-hour yarns about diamond robbers, over-devoted fans, a lip-reader deployed to catch a cheating wife, and more.
The twists were fiendishly hard to guess and only Inside Number Ten (Downing Street) would deliver more farcical chaos.
Squid Game (Netflix) was notable for other reasons. At the heart of this South Korean drama was a gruesome game show where desperate, hard-up adults took part in murderous versions of children’s games. One competitor won an obscene amount of money. The rest died. The blood bath attracted more viewers than Bridgerton.
Clarkson’s Farm (Amazon) was another left-field hit, as Jeremy Clarkson turned his hand to farming his 1,000-acre Cotswolds estate. It didn’t start well. He spent unwisely, drove his tractor poorly and terrified his sheep – who he accused of “gumchewing insolence” – with a drone. We felt compelled to watch , and even to identify with, his plight.
The series made stars of his young advisor Kaleb and dry-stone wall-builder Gerald whose accent made him as incomprehensible to Clarkson as the great Stanley Unwin was to earlier generations.
My own favourite 2021 series was Wandavision (Disney+) a spin-off from Marvel’s Avengers film stable. Avengers heroes Wanda Maximoff and Vision resurfaced as newly-weds in a small town.
Each episode paid homage to old American sitcoms, with perfectly realised tributes to shows like I Love Lucy and The Dick Van Dyke Show, plus a large twinkle of Samantha from Bewitched whenever Wanda utilised her telekinetic abilities.
Showtrial (BBC1) was a crisply written, beautifully cast drama about two posh and unpleasant Bristol University students on trial for the murder of a former friend with more humble origins.
Céline Buckens and Tracy Ifeachor excelled as acid-tongued but damaged rich kid Talitha and her patient barrister Cleo. Naturally the bloke dunnit.
Finally, the much-lauded Succession (Sky Atlantic) – the darkly comic drama centred around Logan Roy (part Rupert Murdoch and part King Lear). This third season flagged a bit, and if you took away the swearing it’d be half the length; but the fall of son Kendall – left weeping in the Tuscan dirt after his mum’s wedding – and Logan’s triumph over his three children saved the day.
The year also saw more turkeys than Bernard Matthews, but let’s reserve a special roasting for Spitting
Image (Britbox) which, despite having 16 joke writers, generated nary a single belly laugh.