Latest news with #BBC One
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Huge BBC detective series AXED despite cliffhanger ending in bitter blow to fans
The BBC has quietly axed a fan-favourite crime drama which starred a huge actress after just two series on air in a blow to fans. Originally launching in 2021, the show had built up a loyal audience and bagged an impressive 83% Rotten Tomatoes score. However, Annika won't return for a third series, days after it arrived in a primetime slot on BBC One last week. A spokesperson for UKTV said: 'We are incredibly proud of the success of Annika on U&Alibi, but there are no current plans for a third series.' Starring Nicola Walker, the show's first home was U&Alibi and was originally based on BBC Radio 4 drama Annika Stranded. The 55 year old played the role of Detective Inspector Annika Strandhed, the head of Scotland's Homicide Unit. Other stars who appeared in the drama include Jamie Sives, Katie Leung, Ukweli Roach, Paul McGann, Silvie Furneaux and Sven Henriksen. Despite Nicola's on screen success she keeps relatively quiet about her family life and marriage to fellow actor Barnaby Kay. It is not known where the couple met, but they have a son named Harry, who was born in 2006. The cancellation comes after it was revealed Nicola's other show Forgotten, which airs on ITV, is reportedly facing the axe. Its writer Chris Lang has admitted he wishes to step down after the upcoming series in a blow to fans. The crime drama follows detectives as they delve into cold cases however the latest season received criticism from viewers who blasted ITV for ' ruining' it with 'woke and nonsensical' storylines. And now it seems the future of the show has been called into question with Chris' involvement uncertain. Speaking in an interview with the Royal Television Society he said: 'I'll probably hand on the baton after this series. I'll still be involved, but I've written 42 episodes and don't want to repeat myself,' The Sun reported. The multi-award winning screenwriter added: 'I wouldn't write it if I didn't have something to say about the state of the nation. 'Because Unforgotten has an inherent and robust structure, that allows me space to hold up a mirror to British society — it's a Trojan horse show.' Nicola made her onscreen debut in Richard Curtis's Four Weddings and a Funeral as the folk singer who is performing at a ceremony while Simon Callow's Gareth fakes his own dramatic death in the pews. Since then, she has thrilled TV audiences with roles in top BBC and ITV dramas, with her first big gig in spy drama Spooks. Nicola played eccentric analyst Ruth Evershed in the show, who had to fake her own death after being suspected of murdering a prison worker.
Telegraph
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
David Attenborough's new series will haunt your dreams
Arachnophobes should avoid David Attenborough 's new wildlife documentary, Parenthood (BBC One) at all costs. Even if you don't mind spiders, this might haunt your dreams. In Namibia, an African social spider shares a nest with her 50 sisters. They hunt in perfect unison, advancing and pausing like an arachnid version of granny's footsteps. That is skin-crawling enough, but much worse is to come. This is a series about parenthood, you see, and the mother spider who has raised her 30 spiderlings makes the ultimate sacrifice to help them grow: exhausted from the strain of feeding her young, she mimics the vibrations of a distressed prey insect. They descend en masse and eat her. Her cousins do the same – that's 1,000 spiderlings turning on their mothers and aunts, and devouring them. These scenes come with crunchy sound effects and horror film music. There's probably a lesson in here somewhere about Gen Z destroying the generation that gave them everything, but let's move on. The rest of the episode is cuter. A Western lowland gorilla cradling an adorable newborn baby. Lion cubs in the Kalahari Desert. Some fluffy owl chicks do their best to fend off a roadrunner (as a child raised on Looney Tunes, I'm not sure I ever gave thought to the fact that roadrunners are real birds, so it was interesting to see one). Attenborough even throws in some poo jokes as the camera focuses on a hippo's behind in a river in Tanzania. Kids will love this bit. If you've not seen it yet, perhaps switch off the programme after this point, before you get to the spider matricide. Don't want to give the children ideas. Those scenes aside, there is nothing here we haven't seen before – or that's how it feels, anyway. We've been spoilt over the years by top-quality nature programming. It has the obligatory 'how we made it' section at the end, once a novelty but now standard. And something else we've experienced before: while the programme tells us that footage of a female boxer crab is shot on an Indonesian reef, a tiny note online reveals that it was partly shot in a 'specialist filming tank', as were other underwater scenes from later episodes. The BBC says there are good reasons for this – the fragility of the reef, and the challenges of filming such tiny creatures – but it's still not giving viewers the full picture. The series is mostly family fare, and more anthropomorphised than the landmark shows that remain Attenborough's high-water mark. Scenes of an owl inspecting a burrow are set to jaunty music and likened to humans checking out a new property. A female boxer crab is referred to as 'a supermum'. At 99, Attenborough's work is in providing narration rather than trekking around the world to see the animals in the wild. But there is no edge of frailty to his voice. In fact, he sounds decades younger than his age. Now that AI can clone and mimic how a person sounds, it wouldn't surprise me if someone does that with Attenborough after he's gone; generating his tones to give future wildlife documentaries a touch of class.
