Latest news with #Tom
Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Unforgivable on BBC2: Shocking but powerful, this was even tougher to watch than Adolescence
Don't say you weren't warned. As if the title weren't stark enough, the opening scene of Unforgivable served notice that writer Jimmy McGovern was intent on piling horrors upon miseries. Anna Friel, as harassed single mother Anna McKinney, arrived at her teenage son's school to be informed the boy had broken another pupil's jaw. We never learned why, because Tom was refusing to speak. While she was pleading with the head teacher not to suspend her son, Anna's father phoned to say her mother had just died. Far worse was to come, as she discovered her estranged brother, Joe, was about to be released from prison on probation - after serving his sentence for sexually abusing Tom. Traumatic family dramas that tackle deeply upsetting, taboo topics are dominating the market for serious television this year, following the success of Adolescence on Netflix. But Adolescence featured the familiar elements of a police thriller, with gripping interviews that slowly led us to a shocking truth. Anna Maxwell Martin, pictured, played a nun, Katherine, who gave Joe a room in a hostel for repentant sex offenders, and tried to help him come to terms with his past Unforgivable was much more difficult to watch. We discovered early on that Joe (Bobby Schofield) really had groomed and assaulted the boy, and that the grief and shame of it had driven his mother to an early grave. Bare backside of the night It's been quite a week for naked behinds on telly. After the acres of rear ends in BBC1's The Narrow Road To The Deep North, Danny Dyer discarded his bath towel on Mr Bigstuff (Sky Max). But did he use a stand-in? Was that a stunt bottom? The courage Schofield must have needed to play this part is remarkable. Gradually, we realised Joe had experienced abuse himself as a boy, at the hands of the local football coach who was also a family friend. As he unburdened himself of this secret to therapists, he wept and shook with self-loathing - earning a degree of sympathy, but never becoming likeable. It was a powerfully brave performance, but Joe remained sullen, self-pitying, manipulative and disloyal, unable to think of anything but the suffering he had both caused and endured. Anna Maxwell Martin played a nun, Katherine, who gave him a room in a hostel for repentant sex offenders, and tried to help him come to terms with his past. When she revealed she had breast cancer, he seemed barely interested. McGovern didn't seem to care that much either: we learned next to nothing about her treatment or her prognosis. Given the general tone of despair throughout the hour-and-three-quarters of the one-off episode, I suspect it didn't end well for her. The only note of hope was that Joe's father, Brian (David Threlfall), lived to the end of the story. That never seemed likely: grey-faced and breathless, he looked like a heart attack dressed up in a shirt and trousers. Threlfall is used to making himself look ill for roles. For nine years, he played the walking cadaver Frank Gallagher in Shameless. It's an odd thing that, however sick and seedy his characters appear, Threlfall always survives to the credits... whereas Sean Bean, the epitome of burly Northern health, is invariably killed off. Work that one out.
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Anna Friel steals every scene in Jimmy McGovern's Unforgivable
Liverpool-born TV luminary Jimmy McGovern first rose to prominence – after a stint on soaps like Brookside and Corrie – with Cracker, a detective series starring Robbie Coltrane as a misanthropic criminal psychologist. Since then, he has become the great chronicler of Britain's ills. From the Hillsborough disaster to the Iraq war, via inquisitions on joint enterprise, unemployment, and disability cuts, he has run the gamut of social failings. And a recurring theme, running from 1994's Priest to 2017's Broken, is the legacy of child abuse, a subject he explores in profound detail, again, in BBC Two's Unforgivable. Joe Mitchell (Bobby Schofield) is in prison, having been found guilty of sexually assaulting his 12-year-old nephew, Tom (Austin Haynes). Tom's mother, Anna (Anna Friel), struggles with Tom's increasingly erratic behaviour, while grieving for her and Joe's mother, who has just died. When Joe is released from prison, he is offered a second chance by a group of Christians, led by Katherine (Anna Maxwell Martin), who believe in rehabilitation and offer Joe a chance to, if not start again, resume some sort of quotidian existence. 'Isn't forgiveness selfish?' she asks Joe, as they explore how he can rejoin society. But Joe isn't really looking for absolution; he's looking for answers. And here, the long, multi-generational shadow of abuse casts its shade. 'No one's perfect,' family friend Paul (Mark Womack) consoles Anna's widower father Brian (David Threlfall), who, in addition to losing his wife, is estranged from his paedophile son and watching his daughter's family life disintegrate. In a way, he's right. All of McGovern's characters are dealing with the fractured messiness of life (even Maxwell Martin's God-botherer has breast cancer, 'the nun's disease'). This panoply of personal disasters gives rise to some brilliant acting from the assembled ensemble of McGovern regulars. Schofield is transformed from his roles in This City Is Ours and SAS: Rogue Heroes, imbuing Joe with a magnetic, itching discomfort. Friel, meanwhile, steals every scene she's in as a desperate, but still poised, mother. The material is red meat to fine actors, and they eat it up. Whether it's so nourishing to audiences is debatable. There is no challenging McGovern's willingness to gaze into the abyss – he has been doing it for more than 30 years now – but is the abyss gazing back? As it progresses, Unforgivable tries to engage with the cyclical nature of abuse ('Some men who abuse have themselves been abused,' Katherine informs Joe) but ends up feeling simplified and rushed. A complex, nuanced narrative that might've stretched over the course of a multi-episode mini-series is, here, condensed into 105 minutes. Joe's dual role – as both victim and abuser – is one that oscillates, the very instability of its nature forming the crux of how these crimes are perpetrated and then covered up. But the constraints of the plot dumb this down somewhat, and the narrative becomes increasingly procedural. 'I could cope with the lying,' Joe laments, as he picks at old wounds. 'But all this truth? It's too much for me.' McGovern has worked with non-fiction in the past (Sunday, for example, is about Bloody Sunday), but more often he builds, like Ken Loach, stories as composites of abstracted case studies. At its best, this approach adds an intimacy that true life portraits can struggle with, where the interiority is limited by the strictures of fact. But, at other times, it can feel like these characters are only being imagined into life in order to put them through intense suffering. Unforgivable is undoubtedly a sympathetic piece – even Joe is afforded a reluctant dignity – but it is also a concatenation of personal miseries. Sunlight, it seems, doesn't often fall on Merseyside. For some, it will be enough simply to give these tough issues an airing. 'Important' is an easy adjective to apply to a McGovern drama. But for viewers to endure a couple of hours of fairly unrelenting gloom, there needs to be a spark beyond great performances and plausible writing. Unforgivable feels like an endurance test, whose message – that empathy must prevail – could've been expressed with more dynamic light and shade.
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Unforgivable review – Jimmy McGovern's mesmeric new drama is even better than Adolescence
f'We pray for it every day, but it's man's will that gets done, not God's.' Thus speaks a former nun, pretty much an emblematic character of a Jimmy McGovern drama, delivering an emblematic line. McGovern has always been a chronicler of pressing social issues, from police incompetence and corruption (Hillsborough) to government failures and cover-ups (Sunday, Reg), class struggle (Dockers), disability (Go Now), religious hypocrisy (Priest, Broken), violence (Anthony, Time) and the brokenness of systems supposedly set up to help our most vulnerable (Care). But whatever the issue under examination and – usually – excoriation, there is the profounder concern of how far from grace we have fallen. From there, McGovern asks: what would it take for us to rise again? His latest creation, Unforgivable, takes child sexual abuse as its subject. McGovern has brought together trusted members of, in effect, the repertory company he has gathered over the years – including Annas Friel and Maxwell Martin – to tell the story of an ordinary family trying to cope with the aftermath of a terrible act; the abuse of a young teenager, Tom (Austin Haynes), by his uncle Joe (Bobby Schofield, playing the character as unmonstrously as he is written, making his actions and the ramifications all the more awful for it). Tom is now getting into trouble at school and is virtually mute, answering only yes or no to direct questions, and Joe is about to be released from his short spell in prison. Tom's mother – Joe's sister – Anna (Friel, in an absolutely wonderful performance) is a mass of rage, despair and shock, with no time to process any of it as she fights to keep her job, her inevitably neglected other son out of trouble and Tom from descending further into mental ill health. Anna and Joe's mother dies soon after the story begins and the first moral quandary arises – should he be allowed to attend her funeral? Would she – the only family member to visit him in prison – have wanted it? Their father, Brian (David Threlfall), forbids Joe to come. When Anna later bumps into Joe in the cemetery, in breach of his licence, she reports him to his parole officer, who redraws the boundaries of the exclusion zone rather than recall him to prison. What would you have done? Small questions pave the way for larger ones. Where do you stand on the fact that, as Anna points out in fury, Joe has had access to copious amounts of therapy in prison and now lives in a special halfway-house-cum-rehab-facility, run by a former nun, Katherine (Maxwell Martin), while Tom has had nothing? McGovern's work is always grounded in detail, especially that relating to systemic inadequacies; we sit with Anna through the GP's explanation that there is a 21-week waiting list for even 'the worst' children to be seen. It takes a suicide attempt to get Tom even that far. Eventually, we move to the question inherent in the title: can Joe be forgiven? How much weight do we give his assertions of self-loathing? Should we feel touched by his apparent remorse? Should Anna? How much should Brian let love for his son govern his actions when the rest of his family has been devastated? When it emerges that Joe was abused at the same age as Tom, it is not a plot twist to sway our sympathies – McGovern is an unsentimental and unmanipulative writer – but to force us to think more deeply. Does it make him less culpable for his actions? Or more damnable, because he knew the effect one act can have on a life? His abuser also harmed others who did not perpetuate the cycle, so what do we do with that knowledge? Space is left for any conclusion. None of us knows God's will, whether you believe in him or not. Unforgivable has none of the agitprop that can creep into McGovern's always impassioned work and there are faultless performances throughout, including from Mark Womack, a sleeper agent of an actor who delivers invariably to mesmeric effect. It is an altogether richer, more subtle and more sophisticated creation than, say, Adolescence, to which it is likely to be compared; as such, it is unlikely to be adopted as a pseudo policy document by the government. More's the pity. It has an immeasurable sorrow at its heart and offers no answers. It leaves you feeling that this is exactly as it should be; exactly as it must be. Unforgivable aired on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer now
The Irish Sun
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Irish Sun
Worried Tom Jones fans receive update after 85-year-old singer was forced to cancel gig at the last minute
CONCERNED Tom Jones fans can breathe a sigh of relief ahead of his next scheduled performance. The 85-year-old singer was Advertisement 3 Sir Tom Jones had to cancel a gig in Germany earlier this week Credit: Getty The concert in Bremen has been rescheduled for Monday night, the day after his Discovery Festival date at the Dundee Waterfront. The venue organisers have reassured ticketholders the show will go on, saying: "We have no concerns ahead of Tom Jones's show on Sunday 27 July.' The Voice star has been wrestling with an upper respiratory infection and apologised for postponing his Bremen gig at such short notice. In a statement, he said: "Hello to all the fans in Bremen. Unfortunately, I must postpone my show this evening, as I've contracted an upper respiratory infection that needs treatment and rest. Advertisement READ MORE ON TOM JONES "I know this is really disappointing and will cause inconvenience to you all, and I'm very sorry about that. "But the show will now go ahead on Monday 28th July, so I look forward to seeing you then. All tickets will remain valid for the re-scheduled date. "Until then, thank you for your understanding. Love, Tom." Disappointed fans wished the singer Sexbomb singer a speedy recovery. Advertisement Most read in Music Latest One wrote on X: "I always keep u n my prayers. 24/7 so now u have 2 listen 2 ur body and just slooow down…much [love heart emoji] 4 u Sir. Another added: "Take care of yourself get well soon." Sir Tom Jones vs. Engelbert Humperdinck: The 40-Year Feud A third tweeted: "Get well very soon Sir Tom xx." Sir Tom is currently touring Europe and has more shows in the UK and Spain coming up. Advertisement Last year, he spoke about how grateful he is to still be performing after more than 60 years in the music business . He told "When I am singing I am like, 'How the hell is this coming out of me?' Honestly. "If the voice was not there I am sure I would be going 'Urgh, I don't want to do so many shows' but I love it as the voice is still working!' Advertisement Later this year, Tom will film an episode of BBC One's In My Own Words, telling his life story. An insider said: 'The new BBC Arts series made a big impression when it first aired last year, bagging some seriously credible names to profile. 'And they've performed the same feat for the follow-up season, drawing some of the biggest stars from the entertainment and creative industries. 'Though they'll have to come up with some formidable talent to top having Sir Tom on the line-up. Advertisement "A look back at his incredible life will certainly make for interesting viewing for a generation of fans of The Voice, who only know him as a mentor on the show. 'They'll probably be completely stunned when they see his incredible career outlined in detail, from singing with Elvis Presley to recording the themes for James Bond films.' 3 The Voice star apologised to fans Credit: ITV 3 He's due to be back on stage this Sunday in Dundee Credit: AFP Advertisement
Scottish Sun
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Worried Tom Jones fans receive update after 85-year-old singer was forced to cancel gig at the last minute
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) CONCERNED Tom Jones fans can breathe a sigh of relief ahead of his next scheduled performance. The 85-year-old singer was forced to cancel a show in Germany at the last minute on Tuesday after falling ill. Sign up for the Entertainment newsletter Sign up 3 Sir Tom Jones had to cancel a gig in Germany earlier this week Credit: Getty The concert in Bremen has been rescheduled for Monday night, the day after his Discovery Festival date at the Dundee Waterfront. The venue organisers have reassured ticketholders the show will go on, saying: "We have no concerns ahead of Tom Jones's show on Sunday 27 July.' The Voice star has been wrestling with an upper respiratory infection and apologised for postponing his Bremen gig at such short notice. In a statement, he said: "Hello to all the fans in Bremen. Unfortunately, I must postpone my show this evening, as I've contracted an upper respiratory infection that needs treatment and rest. "I know this is really disappointing and will cause inconvenience to you all, and I'm very sorry about that. "But the show will now go ahead on Monday 28th July, so I look forward to seeing you then. All tickets will remain valid for the re-scheduled date. "Until then, thank you for your understanding. Love, Tom." Disappointed fans wished the singer Sexbomb singer a speedy recovery. One wrote on X: "I always keep u n my prayers. 24/7 so now u have 2 listen 2 ur body and just slooow down…much [love heart emoji] 4 u Sir. Another added: "Take care of yourself get well soon." Sir Tom Jones vs. Engelbert Humperdinck: The 40-Year Feud A third tweeted: "Get well very soon Sir Tom xx." Sir Tom is currently touring Europe and has more shows in the UK and Spain coming up. Last year, he spoke about how grateful he is to still be performing after more than 60 years in the music business. He told The Mirror: "Well, thank God my voice is still working. I am 83 years old. I mean I can't believe it, but it is true. "When I am singing I am like, 'How the hell is this coming out of me?' Honestly. "If the voice was not there I am sure I would be going 'Urgh, I don't want to do so many shows' but I love it as the voice is still working!' Later this year, Tom will film an episode of BBC One's In My Own Words, telling his life story. An insider said: 'The new BBC Arts series made a big impression when it first aired last year, bagging some seriously credible names to profile. 'And they've performed the same feat for the follow-up season, drawing some of the biggest stars from the entertainment and creative industries. 'Though they'll have to come up with some formidable talent to top having Sir Tom on the line-up. "A look back at his incredible life will certainly make for interesting viewing for a generation of fans of The Voice, who only know him as a mentor on the show. 'They'll probably be completely stunned when they see his incredible career outlined in detail, from singing with Elvis Presley to recording the themes for James Bond films.' 3 The Voice star apologised to fans Credit: ITV
