The Assassin review – Keeley Hawes's menopausal hitwoman drama is perfectly crafted TV
Keeley Hawes, who just gets better and more impressive with every outing, is that menopausal assassin, in the aptly named six-part series The Assassin. Julie is her name and trying to live quietly in Greece and spurning every overture of friendship in the village is her game. Alas, she is called by her handler Damian, after 10 years of quietude, to perform one more time. This happens just as her son Edward (Freddie Highmore, absolutely shining in what is essentially a light comic part in a bloody, murderous caper) comes to visit for the first time in four years too! Even hitwomen have to juggle home and work demands. Oh, and Edward's gone vegan since they last spoke and she got wagyu steaks in for tea. Handlers and kids, eh? Anyway, Edward's here to ask her about the fortune that landed in his account when he turned 30 and if it's anything to do with the father she has always refused to tell him about. She, more or less, tells him to shut up and eat his goddamn tofu.
The Assassin is perfectly crafted preposterousness. It is stylish, witty, tightly written, even more tightly paced and takes the job of massively entertaining us at every turn with the proper amount of seriousness. It establishes its various plotlines swiftly and has us looking forward to their intersection whenever we have enough attention to spare, given that excellent things – from barbed exchanges between unmaternal mother and exasperated son to endless action sequences – are always happening in front of us.
Obviously the main plot revolves round Julie. She soon realises the man calling is not her real handler (just in time to stop her killing the woman he has given as the target, which turns out to be doubly lucky for her, in a twist which adds much to the preposterousness and, I hope, the gaiety of the viewing nation). Then, after a massacre of almost the entire village by a very bad sniper trying to kill her, she sets herself the task of finding out what's happened to the real Damian and hopefully finding out why she is now a marked woman and more and more people are trying to kill her.
This first involves pretty much commandeering the yacht belonging to her former target, Kayla (Shalom Brune-Franklin) and her berk of a brother Ezra (Devon Terrell), scions of a mega-rich mining family owned by a man called Aaron Cross (Alan Dale. One day 'Him from Neighbours! My God, he's doing well!' will not be my first thought when I see him, but that day is not yet here), and trying to get to Albania. An old colleague, Sean (Jack Davenport), arrives on a jet ski. Is he here to help or hinder? We, and a variety of weapons, soon find out.
Meanwhile! Another plot strand is unfurling in a Libyan prison. Its newest inmate is a Dutch man called Jasper (David Dencik), who possibly has dirt on Cross that will get him out of said Libyan prison but not before he has added – with the help of the terrifying Russians who 'adopt' him in jail – his quotient of gory set pieces to the series. He, or most of him at least, eventually escapes and disappears into the desert to find Plot A.
Meanwhile again! Plot C begins in London, with the astonishingly unexpected but always welcome advent of Gina Gershon as a mysterious woman called Marie who attends an art class in order to draw a picture of someone we recognise as Edward and a speech bubble coming from his gobsmacked gob the narratively fertile phrase 'You're my father?' Aaaaand scene!
It's so much fun. Hawes is so good, so funny, Highmore so nimble and perfectly pitched and everyone else – including Gerald Kyd as villager Luka, who survives the massacre and follows the woman who is clearly his best hope of safety to the yacht, where they bond over middle-aged medication – turning in brilliant performances. Do not come looking for realism or social commentary or anything else that clearly has no place here – or I will smash your head in with a rock, like Julie does to her adversaries, especially if I've not replaced my HRT patch on time. Consider yourselves warned.
The Assassin is on Prime Video now.
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New Statesman
2 hours ago
- New Statesman
Berlin's dark past and me
The platform was empty. It was a serene scene: the rain had stopped and the air smelled green, the trees showering droplets each time the wind blew. My mother and I carefully stepped around the puddles as we read the plaques on the very edge of the platform. 18.10.1941 / 1251 Juden / Berlin – Lodz. 29.11.1942 / 1000 Juden / Berlin – Auschwitz. 2.2.1945 / 88 Juden / Berlin – Theresienstadt. The Gleis 17 (Platform 17) memorial at Grunewald station on the western outskirts of Berlin commemorates the 50,000 Jews who were deported from the city to concentration camps by the Nazis. There are 186 steel plaques in total, in chronological order, each detailing the number of deportees and where they went. Vegetation has been left to grow around the platform and over the train tracks, 'a symbol that no train will ever leave the station at this track again', according to the official Berlin tourist website. Were we tourists? I wasn't sure. I paused at one plaque in particular: 5.9.1942 / 790 Juden / Berlin – Riga. My great-grandmother, Ryfka, was one of the 790 Jews deported to Riga on 5 September 1942. She was murdered three days later. Her husband, Max, had been arrested and taken as a labourer to the Siedlce ghetto the previous year. In 1942 he was shot and thrown into a mass grave. When I told people we were taking a family trip to Berlin, many brought up Jesse Eisenberg's 2024 film A Real Pain (released January 2025 in the UK), in which Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play mismatched cousins on a tour of Poland, confronting the inherited trauma of their grandmother's Holocaust survival story. But when we first started planning our trip six years ago, that wasn't the idea at all. It wasn't supposed to be about Max and Ryfka. It was about their daughter, my grandmother, Mirjam, and my grandfather, Ali, whom we called Opa. Opa's ancestry enabled us to claim German citizenship. My mother, sister and I started this process in 2017 without really thinking about it. The UK had voted to leave the EU, and Brits with relatives from all over were looking for ways to retain an EU passport. The Global Citizenship Observatory estimates that 90,000 Brits have acquired a second passport from an EU country since 2016, not counting those eligible for Irish citizenship. Article 116(2) of the German Constitution states: 'Persons who surrendered, lost or were denied German citizenship between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945 due to persecution on political, racial or religious grounds are entitled to naturalisation.' The same applies to their descendants. Mirjam died in 1990, before I was born, and Opa in 2003 – both British and only British citizens. But we had his voided German passport, his birth certificate, the notice of statelessness he'd received when he came to England in 1936. It took two years, but on 3 June 2019, the three of us attended the embassy in Belgravia and were solemnly dubbed citizens of Germany. We received our passports a few weeks later. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe My mother wanted to celebrate with a trip to Berlin – the city where her parents grew up, and which my sister and I had never visited. Five years later than planned, thanks to Covid travel bans, we made it, honouring Opa by sweeping through immigration on the passports he had posthumously gifted us. I was prepared for the attempts at schoolgirl German, the arguments over bus timetables, itineraries and whether or not it was acceptable to fare-dodge on the U-Bahn. What I wasn't prepared for was being struck down by tears on a suburban street, faced with the reality of how exactly I had come to be there and what my presence meant. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin. Photo by Jon Arnold Images Ltd My grandfather's family made it out of Nazi Germany. So did my grandmother and her siblings. Her parents did not. Max and Ryfka were typical middle-class Berliners, owners of a profitable cigarette factory. They had three children: Fanny, Mirjam and Harry. The family lived in a five-storey apartment block with a dramatic art nouveau facade – an open-mouthed deity staring down as residents came and went – on Thomasiusstrasse, on the edge of the Tiergarten city park. Around the corner, in the same affluent neighbourhood, lived the boy who would become my grandfather, Ali. They used to play together as children. Two decades, multiple emigrations and an internment in Canada later, Ali married Mirjam. My mother was born two years later. I know all this thanks to her, her sister and their cousins. A few years before the Brexit vote, they had set out to consolidate everything we know about the family – sifting through documents, photos and letters, sharing recollections of their parents, writing down everything so the story would not be forgotten. I know, for example, that the basement of the house in Thomasiusstrasse was used for meetings of their Zionist youth movement long before emigration became an urgent issue. I know when and how the siblings fled Berlin to what was then British-occupied Palestine: Fanny going first to Denmark in July 1937, then to Palestine in February 1939, where she worked at the first haute couture fashion house in Israel. Mirjam left in April 1936 via a boat from Italy. She studied horticulture before eventually marrying Ali in 1951 and moving to England. Harry arrived in Palestine on 1 September 1937, his 16th birthday. And I know, from the letters we have, how often and how seriously all three urged their parents to sell the cigarette factory and leave Berlin, before it was too late. On the pavement outside the apartment block on Thomasiusstrasse, set into the cobblestones, gleamed the Stolpersteine. Any visitor to Berlin will find the streets scattered with these 'stumbling stones', small brass plates, each one a memorial to a victim of the Nazis who lived at that address: their name, year of birth, where and when they were killed. The commemorative art project, begun in 1992 by artist Gunter Demnig, has spread across Europe: there now are more than 116,000 stones, in 31 countries. The Stolpersteine for Max and Ryfka were laid in August 2014. My mother and her family attended; a clarinettist played klezmer music. There are eight stones for that single apartment block. The day before we visited, my mother had booked us on a tour of the Jewish quarter. Our guide told us that the aim of the Stolpersteine initiative was to compel confrontation and reflection, causing passers-by to stumble, both figuratively and physically, over this dark period of European history. Berlin is forthright about confronting its past – using art and architecture in innovative ways to do so. At the Holocaust memorial by the Brandenburg Gate, visitors get lost in an unnerving maze of concrete slabs. At the entrance to the Jewish Museum, the floors slope and the walls are set at odd angles, making the space difficult to navigate with confidence. The 'Garden of Exile' just outside the museum, designed by the Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind to capture the disorientation of the refugee experience, is similarly slanted and boxed in by columns. The day we visited, it was raining again, the uneven cobbles slick and treacherous. The garden was empty. I slipped – and through my perhaps disproportionate tears realised there was a lot more to my new German passport than I had imagined. Everyone knows about the Holocaust. Six million Jews, more than a quarter of a million Gypsies, millions more Poles, Soviets, homosexuals and people with disabilities, systematically exterminated at death camps. I had always known that my family was in some way linked to it all, that the Holocaust was why we were in Britain in the first place, that I wouldn't be here were it not for my maternal grandparents being 'denied German citizenship… due to persecution on political, racial or religious grounds'. Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled the Nazis. Every Jewish family I know has a story: of how their ancestors escaped, and what happened to the ones who didn't. I knew long before I visited Berlin that there is nothing special about my family's history. But I had always seen it as just that: history. The Jewish Museum's core exhibition charts the history of Jews in Germany from medieval times to the present day. The final section looks at descendants of Holocaust victims and refugees who chose to restore their German citizenship – and why they made that decision. Why had I done it? To get an EU passport after Brexit. To make it easier to work abroad one day. To give my future children the option to live anywhere in Europe. To skip the queues at immigration. All valid reasons. And all, suddenly, entirely inconsequential Staring at the memorial plaques on Platform 17, sitting on the steps of the apartment block on Thomasiusstrasse, losing my footing in the Garden of Exile, I felt myself slot into the narrative, the next chapter of a story that is both unfathomable and at the same time utterly unexceptional. Opa died when I was 12. He was so proud of being British. I never asked him how he would feel about us using the trauma of his past to become German for the sake of convenience. I'd always thought he'd like the idea of us reclaiming his rightful heritage, but in Berlin it seemed less clear. But I do think he would have liked the fact that we were all there in Berlin, on the streets where he and his wife grew up, laughing and crying together, realising our mother-and-daughters getaway had ended up a lot like Eisenberg's A Real Pain after all. The three of us lost in reverie outside the apartment block, picturing my grandmother coming and going. A sign by the door was engraved in looping gothic script. It looked like a memorial plaque. We struggled to decipher first the letters, then the German. Eventually we resorted to Google Translate, and discovered in lieu of the profound message we had expected, a polite request for guests to please wipe their feet. [See also: Rachel Reeves' 'impossible trilemma'] Related
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
I'd never wear budgie smugglers – but I did once help smuggle a budgie
Incredibly, given all the trouble in the world, we were short of an item or two on my BBC radio show recently. Someone suggested something about budgie smugglers coming back into fashion. Hardly very Reithian, is it? On the other hand, we all need a break from the dark stuff. And anyway, it turned out there was plenty in the budgie smugglers story with which to inform, educate and entertain our listeners. For a start, we needed to define the term. I'd been banging on about budgie smugglers on the radio all morning when I got a text from my mum demanding I explain what the devil these budgie smugglers were. In fact, she was so unfamiliar with the term that she spelt it phonetically using her Croatian keyboard, which renders it 'bađi smagles'. So, to be clear, we're talking men's swimwear, with bađi smagles being the tight, not-leaving-much-to-the-imagination style, as distinct from rather more modest swimming shorts which, mercifully, have become the norm. The tight ones had fallen out of favour but now, someone read somewhere, they were making a comeback. Eyewateringly tight swimming pants have been referred to as budgie smugglers for barely a quarter of a century, the description originating in a 1998 Australian television series called The Games, which satirised the 2000 Sydney Olympics. We can only wonder what kind of twisted mind came up with it, or indeed what kind of gentleman's arrangement they saw that looked as if there might have been a couple of budgerigars down there. I for one have never seen such a thing and certainly have no desire to. I can't get past the thought of some fella, engaged in rearranging things, inadvertently releasing a couple – or would it be three? – relieved budgies, freeing them to live better lives. If the fashion comeback is for real, it'll be good news for the Australian brand, Budgy Smuggler. Shame on them for the spelling but we'll let that pass. Their website says they are 'On a mission to free the thighs of the world'. That's an interestingly demure take on the purpose of their gear. I've always taken these things to be less about freeing anything and more about a) packing things up rather too snugly and b) showing off what there is to be proud of, including, but not restricted to, the thighs. I, needless to say, am very much a swimming shorts man. If you'd given the matter any thought, I hope you'd have reached this conclusion. Take any man, and it's clear which way they lean when it comes to swimwear. Ronaldo's a smuggler all day long. I'd be staggered if a single pair of swimming shorts had ever seen the inside of his wardrobe. Lionel Messi, on the other hand, shorts all the way. Have a Google of this and you'll see I'm right. There is, to be fair, the odd shot of Ronaldo in shorts, but only in ones tailored tight enough to suggest that some kind of smuggling operation is indeed under way. Messi, though, is 100% standard shorts, bless him. In politics I have our prime minister in shorts, as is only right and proper. The only male member of the cabinet I can see in smugglers is Hilary Benn, for some reason. Across the floor, I can imagine Robert Jenrick keeping him company. Nigel Farage, shorts. Lee Anderson, definitely smugglers. Feel free to play this game at home. On the radio I was enjoying myself no end with all this when a listener texted in alleging that in France, budgie smugglers are mandatory! How I laughed! But it's true. Jump into a public pool wearing shorts and you'll be hauled right back out. Hygiene reasons, apparently. I'd have thought that shorts, allowing a bit more freedom and ventilation, would be healthier. But the logic is that you might have been in shorts all day before getting in the pool, whereas you're unlikely, even in France, to have been a man about town in your contrebandiers de perruches. You may by now be wondering if my level of interest in all this is entirely healthy. Well, the truth is, I once had a hand in a budgie-smuggling operation – that is, the smuggling of an actual budgie. I'm not proud of it, but it's time to come clean. In mitigation, this was in the 1970s and I was but a child. Auntie Lily and Uncle Sid, Lily being my grandad's sister, had long lived in Perth, Australia. But now they decided to live out their days back in Birmingham. They brought with them a budgerigar called Timmy. Timmy was a most excellent budgie. He'd tilt his head in a sweet way when whistled to, say the odd word, and fly around the front room without crapping everywhere. They loved Timmy. We all loved Timmy. But Lily and Sid didn't love life back in Birmingham, so resolved to return to Perth. Disastrously though, the rules were such that Timmy wouldn't be allowed back into Australia. Disaster. Lily – pardon the slight pun – hatched a plan. She'd smuggle Timmy back to Oz in her handbag. The Timmy training commenced. Day by day we accustomed him to ever longer periods of handbag time which, being a prince among budgies, he soon got the hang of. During the flight Lily planned to feed him and let him out for a quick flap when she went to the toilet. Departure day dawned. The jeopardy was very real. If, God forbid, they were rumbled and Timmy was to be confiscated, Lily even had with her something with which to euthanise him. Quite where she sourced this budgie poison, I know not. But off they went on a flight that still feels like the longest flight I've ever taken, even though I wasn't on it. The wait was awful. Then a three-word telegram arrived: 'All is well.' Oh, the joy. And the three of them lived happily ever after. I am now bracing myself for letters about some ghastly avian health calamity that subsequently came to pass down under, with the finger pointing at our Timmy as budgie zero. Please let it not be so. If it is, as my penance, I'll wear nothing but budgie smugglers, in and out of the water, for the rest of my days. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Sun
5 hours ago
- The Sun
We live in UK's ‘most beautiful village' ruined by tourists filming us through our WINDOWS & flying drones over gardens
LOCALS in a picturesque village say their town is being ruined by tourists who knock on their doors and take snaps of them inside their homes. Castle Combe in Wiltshire has been used as a backdrop for Hollywood blockbusters such as Stardust and Steven Spielberg 's War Horse and is a delightful day trip for sightseers. 5 5 5 Set within the Cotswolds, Castle Combe is routinely named as one of the prettiest villages in the country. Country Living listed the English village as one of the most picturesque places to visit in the country, writing: "This quintessentially English village is known as the 'prettiest village in England '. But residents in Castle Combe in the Cotswolds say their patience is running thin as visitors from around the world continue to disturb their peace. Around 400 people call the chocolate box village home, while 150,000 tourists pack into the idyllic area annually. Speaking to the Express, Hilary Baker, 69, a former police officer and bed and breakfast owner, urged visitors: "Give us a little bit of consideration." She added that drones have even been flown over the village, "filming children", but pointed out that this has been less of an issue recently. Ms Baker said: "That's what caused everybody to go, 'This is now beyond reasonable.' "Because our children are precious, you don't know who's on the other end of the camera. "I'm not casting aspersions, but you just don't know anymore. "It's out there in the ether before you can blink an eye." Our posh village is now ghost town strewn with empty homes Local Hilary, who has lived in the village for nearly four decades, was equally condemning of the behaviour of some visitors. She fumed: "If only they would stop and think, 'How would I feel sat in my garden minding own business with a drone flying 20 feet above my head?' "It could be four or five. I don't think they would cope with it either." "I was walking the dog and talking to one of my neighbours, when I saw this lady looking through my letterbox. "I said, 'Are looking for somebody? Can I help you?' They said, 'I'm just looking.' "I replied, 'People live here.' They said, 'Oh, do they?'" Another problem, the resident noted, is younger people using "suction cups" to attach their phones to his windows in order for them to take a photo of themselves. "They think it's part of the set of Disneyland," one anonymous local seethed. Jean Boucher, 86, a retired teacher, says she does not have much trouble with visitors, as her house is raised above the main street. But she added: "The whole world is full of tourists being a nuisance. "There are more people travelling, I suppose, and people are obsessed with photographing everything now." The Sun Online has reached out to Wiltshire Council for comment. 5 5
