Latest news with #BBC2
Daily Mirror
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Inspiration behind harrowing new drama Unforgivable as it lands on BBC
Unforgivable official trailer for BBC drama Unforgivable, the new BBC2 drama, has already proved to be a talking point due to its very sensitive narrative, with the whole feature drama centring around grooming and sexual abuse. For esteemed screenwriter Jimmy McGovern, tackling the taboo subject through the harrowing drama is something he feels needed to be done. He is hoping viewers will walk away from the production with a new sense of education and perspective, that they otherwise may not have had before. Jimmy is a firm believer that child abusers "should be held to account and also punished for their crimes", stating that to the BBC that he would personally find it "very hard to forgive" if the same harm came to his own family. Jimmy McGovern opens up on the "truth" behind Unforgivable (Image: CREDIT LINE:BBC) The new 90-minute series which is set in Liverpool, follows the Mitchell family whose lives have been shattered by the devastating consequences of sexual abuse. As a family, they are now living with the aftermath and the reality that the perpetrator, Joe, played by Bobby Schofield, is now being freed from jail with rehabilitation after serving just a two year prison sentence. Bobby Schofield plays perpetrator Joe (Image: BBC / LA Productions / Kerry Spicer) Anna Friel plays Anna Mitchell, the sister of Joe but also the desperate mother who will stop at nothing in protecting her two children, with her eldest son played by Adolescence actor Austin Hayes. The pain spirals through the entire family with David Threlfall playing a key role of Anna's father, who is angry after realising she'd reached out to her abuser brother Joe. Unforgivable creator, Jimmy, had one main aim to ensure that every character within the family had a voice at the table to further highlight the toll and emotional hold such an awful crime can have on everyone involved. With the adaption being so raw and close to the bone, it really is no wonder that thoughts are turning to whether there is a deeper truth hidden within Jimmy's compelling drama. Anna is desperate to protect her two children but is conflicted as her brother Joe is the person who committed the crimes (Image: BBC) The Cracker and Time writer opened up on what had inspired him to pen something so dark-routed, revealing there was an element of truth within his creation. Speaking about his thought process and how the idea blossomed, he confessed: "I received a letter from a woman who works with sex offenders and wanted to speak to me. "She spoke no holds barred about her job and working with sex abusers. She told me certain facts and figures that are quite unbelievable, so I want people to watch the film and learn things about child abuse. I felt compelled to write about it." Jimmy has never shied away from discussing the topic of abuse and had even written past productions such as Priest and Broken, that follow in similar vein. Addressing the link in his writing style, he explained to BBC: "I've always been quick to condemn child abusers, as we all are and as we all should be. "This is not a film that goes easy on child abusers at all. I wanted the audience to hear a few of the things I'd learned. I think we should be ultra cautious whenever we're dealing with abusers. I'm a father and a grandfather, I would find it very hard to forgive somebody who had done that to me or my family." The drama has landed on BBC's streaming platform this morning at 6am and will air tonight, from 9pm on BBC2, with the compelling story already proving to be a drama not to be missed.
Daily Mirror
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Anna Friel pays tribute to 'amazing' Unforgivable co-star she's now 'a big fan' of
Emmy Award winner Anna Friel is about to showcase her acting talents in BBC's newest drama Unforgivable, alongside a hugely stellar cast Anna Friel is once again returning to screens and Liverpool - a city that she has always held dear after her acting career took off massively following a stint on the hugely popular British soap opera Brookside, in 1993. She played the role of Beth Jordache, portraying the first openly lesbian character in a soap, including the famous kissing scene with Nicola Stephenson, who depicted Margaret Clemence. Since then, she has gone on to achieve huge fame in shows such as Deep Water, Pushing Daisies and also won an International Emmy Award for Best Actress for her part in ITV's Marcella. Now, the critically acclaimed actress, will form part of the incredible cast in BBC's powerful drama Unforgivable. The new 90-minute series penned by the brilliant Cracker screenwriter Jimmy McGovern, sees her take on the role of Anna Mitchell. The story is Liverpool-based and centres around the lives of the Mitchell family who have been dealing with the devastating consequences of grooming and sexual abuse. Anna's brother Joe, played by Bobby Schofield, is the person who has committed the awful crimes and has been released from prison after serving a two year jail term. Alongside Anna and Bobby, Line of Duty actress Anna Maxwell Martin, takes on the role of Katherine, a former nun, who is helping Joe to rehabilitate through therapy. Adolescence star Austin Hayes, stars as Anna's eldest son and David Threlfall, plays the role of Anna's father, who becomes angry after realising she'd reached out to her abuser brother Joe. Each character has a unique role to play with showcasing how sexual abuse can completely ripple through a family as they all attempt to regain a sense of normality after facing the aftermath of such a devastating crime. The drama has landed on BBC's streaming platform this morning at 6am and will air tonight, from 9pm on BBC2, with the compelling story already proving to be a drama not to be missed. Away from the launch of the much talked about feature, Anna Friel has paid tribute to her Unforgivable co-stars and explained what life was really like behind-the-scenes. Speaking about her relationship with the star-studded cast, she had nothing but praise to air for her on-screen peers. In a conversation with BBC, she said: "I loved my scenes with David Threlfall, he became a new friend in my life." The former soap star added: "I hadn't met Anna Maxwell Martin before, but I've always thought she's an amazing actress and it was wonderful to find she's an amazing person. "We didn't have any scenes together apart from in the courtroom, but I'm a big fan. Bobby provides such a complex performance." Unforgivable will air on BBC Two at 9pm this Thursday and will be available on BBC iPlayer from the same day.
Irish Times
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Review: Mix Tape is bit of a mixed bag while Bookish combines cosiness, craft and class
This week saw the conclusion of Mix Tape ( BBC 2), a drama that follows its protagonists Dan and Alison across two timelines. One covers the beginnings of their teen romance, amid the grim glamour of late-1980s Sheffield . The other timeline, many years later, finds them living entirely separate lives in near middle-age. Teenage Dan and Alison are fresh-faced sweethearts, schoolmates who bond over music and angst, exchanging devastatingly cool mix tapes featuring a roll call of new wave bangers. Older Dan and Alison have grown into writers – he is a music journalist, she is a novelist - separated by 10,000 miles, but united by a sense of ennui and a sudden urge to reminisce about their time together. Will they reunite and attempt to rekindle that old flame? Well, yes, but the show is predicated on us pretending we don't know this from the outset, so let's keep that mystery alive. While watching the show's first two episodes , broadcast last week, I took the latter timeline to be 'the present', but that left me in a bit of a muddle. The decor, clothing and phones seemed broadly contemporary, but the burden of maths forced me to reckon with the fact that this 'nowadays' section must be set about 10 years ago, or else our heroes are looking extremely sprightly for 55-year-olds. I tried to confirm this by freeze-framing a shot of Facebook used in the show, which does suggest it takes place in 2015/16. (If this is true, then I guess my first clue should have been that every adult in this programme is still using Facebook). READ MORE This is, after all, a friend-request romance, that genre of drama in which events are set into motion by social media notifications. In this case, it is when Older Dan, still living in Sheffield, is alerted to Alison's massive new book deal. We learn he has not heard of her for many years, because she lives in a different TV show that's set in Australia. There, she drinks balcony wines with her handsome doctor husband in their showroom apartment, where they fret over the behaviour of their daughter, whose teenage rebelliousness chimes somewhat with Alison's own. In the years since she stopped exchanging mix tapes with Dan, she has also become fully Australian, a detail that may seem a little convenient given the actor in question is Australian herself. Speaking as someone who moved to Dublin for college and thereafter developed a traitorous dollop of Leinster atop my Derry twang, I cannot possibly comment. A lot of this show reminded me of my own life at 18. Not merely because I made desperately try-hard mix CDs for girls I fancied, but because I did so on the mean streets of Ireland's capital, where all of the mix-tape era Sheffield scenes were filmed. I don't want to mire this article in tedious pedantry about a TV show's shooting locations, not least since much was made of it when the show debuted last week, but it is unavoidably comic to witness establishing shots of Yorkshire's urban exteriors cut directly to the pristine streets of Ranelagh or Rathmines. Things entered an even more discombobulating realm in this week's episodes when we discover that Young Alison subsequently moved to actual Dublin to work in a pub in Temple Bar. Having journeyed there to find her, Young Dan spots her in a tryst with another man and takes an emotional moment on the Ha'penny Bridge. At that point, action cuts abruptly to his older self back in Sheffield, a juxtaposition which may have carried more declarative oomph were it not very clearly filmed 20 minutes' walk from said bridge, at the Dean Hotel on Harcourt Street. [ The Narrow Road to the Deep North review: Unflinchingly savage war tale starring Ciarán Hinds is a gruelling watch Opens in new window ] All such quibbles aside, it's quite watchable in an emotional, tear-jerky way, even if its plodding pace didn't raise my heartbeat too often. The soundtrack is certainly great, but the show chooses to presume as fact, rather than demonstrate how or why, the music they fell in love with was earth-shatteringly, groundbreakingly important. The paper-thin characterisations of our heroes' respective partners also seem explicitly geared toward giving us, the audience, license to let said spouses be discarded like decrepit band merch. 'You never forget the boy who makes you your first mix tape,' Alison tells her daughter in a car ride, which is a neat summation of the show's themes of love and art transcending time and distance. It does, however, seem like resolutely useless advice to give a 16-year-old girl, since the curation of mix tapes should be as relatable to a teenager as talk of whale oil lamps or penny farthing maintenance. Perhaps kids were still doing this in 2015. It's all so long ago, I can't quite remember. Trekking further into olden times, we find period murder mystery Bookish (U&Alibi) – or, rather, I found it, but you may still need directions. That's because Mark Gatiss (co-creator of the BBC's Benedict Cumberbatch-minting blockbuster, Sherlock) has returned to crime with this caperish series for U&Alibi, a channel with such an impressively prolix history of rebrands, I'll offer a brief summary for the uninformed. Originally launched as UK Arena in 1997, it was then renamed UK Drama, then UKTV Drama, then Alibi and, as of last November, the gloriously inscrutable 'U&Alibi'. Since the fourth of those five brandings, the channel has focused solely on crime, mostly British-made listings-fillers culled from the yellowing pages of decades-old copies of the Radio Times. Bookish, created, co-written and starring Gatiss, is one of the few full originals they've produced, and its premise seems curiously familiar; in period London, eccentric bookseller Gabriel Book – it's that kind of show – supplements his day job by solving murders alongside his wife, Trottie. He bears a letter from Churchill that grants him license to step into crime scenes and intrude on interrogations, in the manner of some sort of London-based amateur genius sleuth who works with the constabulary – a scenario I'm sure has some form of literary precedent I can't quite put my finger on. The action takes place in 1946, rather than the Victorian era, although you may never quite banish the whiff of Baker Street from your nostrils while watching. [ What does the future hold for popular BBC show Masterchef? Opens in new window ] Gatiss is capable as ever in the lead, waspish and arch without quite tipping over into panto territory, and thankfully given more interiority to work with as the show goes on. The script is sharp and Bookish doles out its soft-scoop mysteries with a restraint that's admirable, if occasionally frustrating. Fans of Gatiss's work with League of Gentlemen or his Ghost Stories For Christmas may sometimes wish, as I did, for something a little nastier than the cosier-than-thou fare on offer here. This is, for the most part, glacially gentle programming, albeit suffused with just enough quirk, charm and subliminal darkness, to raise it above the duvet-lined trenches of, say, Death in Paradise, or – God forbid – the treacly, incident-averse morass of Heartbeat. For all its tropey trappings, Bookish is more cleverly written, and a good deal more handsomely mounted, than you might expect from a channel that sounds like a wifi password. U&Alibi may have just cracked the riddle of combining cosiness, craft and class. Turns out the answer was hiring Mark Gatiss, but you needn't be Sherlock Holmes to work that one out.
Rhyl Journal
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Rhyl Journal
Hairy Biker Si King opens up to Robson Green in TV show
Si shared why he loves the North East 'more than anywhere else in the world' as the pair toured Northumberland before Robson took on a daring challenge The synopsis reads: "The actor is joined by Hairy Biker Si King on his quest to find new ways of spending time in the great outdoors. "Taking the scenic route north to Chillingham, the pair head out to visit the estate's famous wild cattle". Hairy Biker Si King documents the global outrage that followed the felling of the world-famous Sycamore Gap tree. Listen to Felled: The Sycamore Gap Story on @BBCSounds 🔉 Sadly, it's a repeat. The episode was first broadcast in 2023. But still, it's a chance to see Kibblesworth's favourite son appear on the box. Hexham-born Green took King along for his final North East adventure, which saw the pair head to Chillingham in Northumberland. Robson and Si embarked on a picturesque tour of Chillingham Castle, where they encountered the famous wild cattle that roam the grounds - one of the rarest animals on the planet. In the episode, you can see King full of pride for his home region as he opened up about how it had shaped his identity. "We, you and I, are products of this earth," he told Robson, gesturing to the beautiful Northumberland countryside around them. Recommended reading: "It's where our compassion comes from - it's where our crack and our humour comes from. "And in that sense, the emotional connection, I know it better than anywhere else in the world - and I love it more than anywhere else in the world." Episode 15: Robson Green's Weekend Escapes will be on Wed 23 Jul 6:30pm - 7pm on BBC2
South Wales Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- South Wales Guardian
Hairy Biker Si King opens up to Robson Green in TV show
Si shared why he loves the North East 'more than anywhere else in the world' as the pair toured Northumberland before Robson took on a daring challenge The synopsis reads: "The actor is joined by Hairy Biker Si King on his quest to find new ways of spending time in the great outdoors. "Taking the scenic route north to Chillingham, the pair head out to visit the estate's famous wild cattle". Hairy Biker Si King documents the global outrage that followed the felling of the world-famous Sycamore Gap tree. Listen to Felled: The Sycamore Gap Story on @BBCSounds 🔉 Sadly, it's a repeat. The episode was first broadcast in 2023. But still, it's a chance to see Kibblesworth's favourite son appear on the box. Hexham-born Green took King along for his final North East adventure, which saw the pair head to Chillingham in Northumberland. Robson and Si embarked on a picturesque tour of Chillingham Castle, where they encountered the famous wild cattle that roam the grounds - one of the rarest animals on the planet. In the episode, you can see King full of pride for his home region as he opened up about how it had shaped his identity. "We, you and I, are products of this earth," he told Robson, gesturing to the beautiful Northumberland countryside around them. Recommended reading: "It's where our compassion comes from - it's where our crack and our humour comes from. "And in that sense, the emotional connection, I know it better than anywhere else in the world - and I love it more than anywhere else in the world." Episode 15: Robson Green's Weekend Escapes will be on Wed 23 Jul 6:30pm - 7pm on BBC2
