It is early days, and there is a long way to go — insert caveat of choice here — but I’m calling it anyway: Ann Droid (BBC One, Friday) is the funniest thing on television this year.
There have been so many trailers that I was worried the best gags had been used, but Diane Morgan (Motherland, Mandy) and Sarah Kendall have plenty more. Morgan also stars as the second-hand robot of the title, a machine foisted on Sue (Sue Johnston) after she faints due to low blood pressure. (She did NOT fall.)
Sue’s son Michael (Paul Ready, Motherland) is the one doing the foisting because he wants to move back in with his cheating wife. Sue is marginally less horrified by that than by the idea of living with a robot that will probably kill her (so rumour has it).
Beautifully played by all, Ann Droid goes to the heart of what it means to grow old and feel life becoming smaller with each day. Morgan is eerily good as the socially inept bundle of wires made to look vaguely human. She can do it all, from slapstick to pathos; ditto Johnston, who adds a layer of heartbreak to proceedings. I haven’t enjoyed a new comedy more since Here We Go arrived.
It is back to plain old humans in Lucky (Apple TV+), a slick tale of a woman hustler on the run.
Created by Jonathan Tropper (Your Friends and Neighbours), from the novel by Marissa Stapley, the seven-part series opens when the good times are still rolling for Lucky (Anya Taylor-Joy, The Queen’s Gambit). She and her husband Cary (Drew Starkey) are in a suite in Vegas with suitcases stuffed with cash.
When Lucky wakes to find her husband and the money gone, a series of cat-and-mouse chases begins. Lucky is after Cary. An FBI agent is after Lucky. A mob boss (Annette Bening), who also happens to be Cary’s mother, is also after Lucky. What Lucky wants is answers, particularly from her prison-inmate father, played by Timothy Olyphant (Justified).
Flashbacks fill us in on Lucky’s childhood and time spent as one half of a Paper Moon-style con artist partnership with her father. She doesn’t trust him, but she loves him all the same.
The character of Lucky, like the series as a whole, relies on a hefty suspension of disbelief. We have to buy that this slight young woman can fight off assassins, take on venomous snakes with nothing but a rock, and walk away from car smashes.
Taylor-Joy handles the part convincingly, her character even finding time along the way to do small favours for people, raising the question of whether she is naturally fortunate or whether karma is at work.
Like a too-hot Labrador, some of us have been desperately searching for signs that this sweltering summer of sport is coming to an end and the television schedules can get back to normal. One such signal is the arrival of The Great British Sewing Bee (BBC One, Tuesday).
Now in its 12th series, Sewing Bee first arrived on the coattails of Bake Off but soon found a nook of its own. Never as competitive as Bake Off, its pulling power is due in large part to judges Patrick Grant and Esme Young, Savile Row and Central Saint Martins, respectively. Sewing Bee without these two pros would be like Bake Off sans the tent.
Among the contestants are a barista, a rugby-playing teacher, an actuary and a heating engineer who makes clothes for his partner (nice life if you can get it). There is a Scot, of course — no Scotland, no party, remember. Emma from Midlothian, a classical soprano, adores bright colours, a style she calls “dopamine dressing”.
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The first task is to make a pair of summer shorts. Anna, the barista/vintage clothes devotee, wins that round. She also aces the job of turning an old barbecue apron into a bag. With only one round to go, it looks like the rest of them should just get their coats and leave Anna to it.
But it is not to be. Emma wins the round and the coveted Garment of the Week title for a swimsuit-and-trousers combo that Patrick deems “perfectly sewn and beautifully fitted”.
Two successions are taking place this month: the first involves Andy Burnham moving house; the other is Chris Packham taking over from Sir David Attenborough as the nation’s naturalist-in-chief.
Sir David is not officially retiring. Dear God, no. But with the television titan now 100, the passing of the microphone has to happen sooner or later. The five-part Evolution (BBC Two, Monday) is a suitably ambitious bid for the crown.
Packham opens in traditional wildlife documentary style, looking out on a misty savannah and waxing lyrical in voiceover. “Across our natural worlds,” he begins, “life has taken on countless forms — wondrous, strange and endlessly diverse.”
Had he always sounded so breathy? No time to ponder, because he is telling us that we will be exploring evolution through the “journeys” of five species, starting with the elephant. Cut to the Kibwezi Forest in Kenya, and Packham is with a small herd of them. “Look at that!” he cries. Packham never uses full stops around animals; only exclamation marks. “Look at the ears on this one! The size of a tablecloth!” The elephant, being far more polite, keeps its opinion of Packham’s lugs to itself.
How did evolution come up with something as complex, as beautiful, as enormous as this, Packham wonders. With the aid of a whizzy timeline and lots of CGI, he talks us through it: how everything begins with a giant mass of cells (a quadrillion, if you are keeping score); how these become other cells; all the way to LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor), the organism that links all living things on the planet.
LUCA survives and thrives, though it isn’t clear how. “Luca was the little engine that could,” says Packham. It is not a line you could imagine a certain other broadcaster using. But then Packham has to go his own way, be himself, because otherwise what is the point? Evolution doesn’t just apply to organisms.
Anyway, a lot of people like this Packham. This Packham is the punky, cheeky, funny younger brother we never knew we needed until he arrived, and now we are glad to have him.
Taggart, Rebus, Pirrie, Perez — who would dare try to join the already oversubscribed Scottish television detectives club? As it is, your ambitious DI can barely swing an oddball pathologist without hitting a grumpy chief inspector.
DI Monica Kennedy is the creation of crime writer G.R. Halliday, whose novel From the Shadows has been adapted into a six-part series The Dark (STV, Sunday).
We meet Kennedy (played by Laura Donnelly) in a cinema with her mum and young daughter. Also at the movies is a disgruntled customer from a past case. Kennedy, having none of it, threatens to “bury” the woman if she comes near again. As the DI earlier reassures her daughter during a scary bit in the film, “Monsters are scared of me.”
Kennedy has seen it all before, but even she has to wonder about the new case that falls to her. The body of a teenager has been found in a glen, posed naked as if to send a message. When another body is found, it looks like a serial killer is at work.
Though the location is not made clear, The Dark is set somewhere wild, bleak and unmistakably Scottish. With a scattered community and a lack of street lighting, it offers the ideal arena for a killer operating under cover of darkness.
The production takes the darkness theme a touch too far. Even peering into the gloom, I still cannot make out what is happening in some scenes. The brisk, expositional dialogue could have done with a lighter hand, too. “That will be the liaison officer, to take you to identify the body,” Kennedy tells a parent. Well, we didn’t think they were off shopping.
The cast includes some big names, among them Emun Elliott (Guilt, The Gold) and Helen Baxendale (Cold Feet) as bereaved parents.
By far the biggest reason to call by again tomorrow night is the villain, as yet unidentified but creepy as hell. As Nick Ross used to warn at the close of Crimewatch, don’t have nightmares …
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