television
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Stylish Television: Moonflower Murders
The eagerly awaited sequel to last year’s hit Magpie Murders is now showing on BBC1 on Saturday nights. Moonflower Murders again pits literary editor Susan Ryland into the world of fictional detective Atticus Pund in order to solve a murder and disappearance in real life. Susan, who had a very love/hate relationship with Pund’s creator, the author Adrian Conway, once again has to navigate the clues left in the book to try to find the missing hotelier Cecily, who, after reading the Pund book, Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, believes that there may have been a miscarriage of justice in a murder that took place in her family hotel, and…
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Stylish Television: Rivals
Jilly Cooper’s raunchy books were real favourites of mine when I was a teenager. Imogen was my personal fave, but I also loved Rivals and Riders, which are amongst her most infamous reads. Now Rivals has been turned into one of the best TV shows of the year. It is currently available to stream on Disney+, and I binged the whole series in 2 days last week. It is, quite frankly, unmissable. It is my favourite television of 2024. Rivals is flashy, trashy and oh so watchable. The characters are memorable, the performances are wonderful. From David Tennant chewing up the scenery with relish in his role as the ‘bad…
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Stylish Television – Death And Other Details
I love a good murder mystery. And when the mystery is a string of murders, taking place on the most beautiful, Art Deco cruise liner (based on the Normandie maybe?), then I am totally sold. Add a beautiful, glamorous cast, a fiesty heroine, and a brilliant tongue in cheek performance from Mandy Patinkin, who I totally loved as Sol in Homeland, and you have the unmissable ‘Death and other Details’ something that has filled my ‘Only murders in the building’ gap this early Spring. The premise of Death and Other Details is initially quite simple. A cruise ship that is packed with specially invited guests is the scene of the…
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Stylish Television: And Then There Were None
‘And then there were none’ is one of Agatha Christie’s most famous books, one that is often voted her very best story, and it was the first of the recent BBC TV adaptations when it came to the screen in 2015. It’s stage version is currently touring the UK, and I am very excited about going to see it in Birmingham on Wednesday (I saw a previous version a few years ago and you can read that review here.) As a precursor to this, I have just re-watched the BBC version, which is now available on i player. There have been many versions of And then there were none, including…
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Stylish television: Witness For The Prosecution
When I posted about Ordeal by Innocence last week, I was asked if I had ever watched the BBC version of ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ that was on the television at Christmas 2016. This prompted me to rewatch this, as all the BBC Agatha Christie adaptations are now on the iplayer, and I was once again struck by just how brilliant Agatha was as a writer, and also by how dark and different this adaptation is to the much loved 1957, Billy Wilder film. Witness for the Prosecution was originally an Agatha Christie short story, one which was then turned into a play. The BBC adaptation goes back to the…
