CHANNEL HOPPER with PAUL BRADLEY
Paul Bradley.
The Rapture BBC1, Sunday, 9.00 p.m.
Ann Droid BBC1, Friday, 8.30 p.m.
The Killings At Parrish Station Now TV/HBO Max
Out Of Time: Pompeii With Tim Hiddleston Disney+
THE RAPTURE
The Rapture is on BBC.
A lot has been made about the timeliness of BBC’s new Sunday night drama The Rapture: after all, it’s a show about the world burning up because of climate change. But the very first minute of the first scene made me suspicious: we’re introduced to a crime scene at a family home, where a murder has happened long enough ago that the police are already there and have cordoned the place off…and it’s only then that the chief suspect (the victim’s daughter) races out of the house trying unsuccessfully to escape.
Anyway, that suspect, Bethany (played by India Amarteifio) is soon sent to Gabs Fox (Ruth Madeley), a psychologist who is herself only returning to work after a car accident that killed her husband and left her disabled. Bethany not only protests her innocence, but claims to see visions of the coming apocalypse. This relationship, tense as it is, is the centre of the first episode, and would be enough on its own – but on top of it we also have a scheming fossil fuel executive, a shadowy activist network, a will-they-won’t-they romance, and a sinister cult led by Bethany’s father Leonard (Sam Hazeldine).
It’s a lot. It could still work if it felt like a genuine drama, rather than a checklist of modern worries and some very preachy dialogue. Bethany herself, although well performed, is one of the show’s problems: she’s meant to be clever and unsettling, but mostly comes across as sullen and arrogant, making it hard to invest in the mystery surrounding her. In fairness, it’s not actively embarrassing like some shows, but rarely rises above serviceable – which is a shame since it has topical subject matter in spades.
ANN DROID
Sue Johnson stars in BBC show Ann Droid.
The trailer for BBC’s new AI-comedy Ann Droid was a puzzle too. On one hand, the people involved – mainly Diane Morgan and Sue Johnston – are worth watching; but on the other it looked a bit broad, something that might get attention for its subject (AI robots in 2026) rather than any real wit. Still, initial puzzlement is often par for the course for Morgan: her style isn’t exactly suited to a thirty-second cut. So I had a look; for you, dear reader, for you.
Ann Droid centres on Sue (Sue Johnston), a recent widow whose self-absorbed son Michael (Paul Ready) buys her a second-hand, slightly outdated eldercare robot named Linda (Morgan) to help around the house. Sue wants nothing to do with her at first, but, as is the way with these things, Ann’s clumsy literalism begins to charm Sue and the two slowly, reluctantly bond.
The comedy is mostly quite broad, and some of the clueless-robot-in-the-house gags are exactly what you’d expect. But it often works because of Morgan’s deadpan delivery, the same skill that made her so good in Cunk On Earth; it helps her wring laughs out of moments that would fall completely flat with a lesser performer.
What surprises is that there’s a real heart in the series. The opening episode does grief before it does jokes, sometimes in ways that feel frankly terrifying: “I don’t know how I’m going to do this last bit,” Sue admits at one point, genuinely movingly. This groundwork does pay off, allowing the second half to mix humour (Morgan’s delivery) and emotion (Johnston’s acting) fairly successfully. It does look like a typical Friday night sitcom, and the laughs are patchy; but it’s surprisingly tender at times, and, you know, while it admits that robots are not for everyone, it asks us not to forget how awful humans can be too.
THE KILLINGS AT PARRISH STATION
The Killings at Parrish Station.
You know that faint distraction you feel when watching any Australian programme, where you’re too busy asking where you know that actor from to follow the plot? Because Australia, like Ireland, only has about 9 actors, and they all appear in everything. Well, HBO’s bleak new thriller, The Killings At Parrish Station will give you that feeling a lot. And there’s the music too. Surely we’ve heard it before? Wait…it’s not the The X Files, is it?
It’s not. But, presumably deliberately, it gives us a clue about what might be going on here, behind the customary unimpressed Australian tones. It begins with a gruesomely grounded 1987 outback murder at a radio telescope base, but soon becomes far stranger, layering in a modern-day true-crime podcast framing device (those irritatingly glib modern presenters are spot-on), decades-spanning mystery, and hints that the ultimate explanation might sit somewhere outside conventional reality. Even by episode two the show is more interested in atmosphere than tightly earthbound plotting…a bit like, yes, The X Files (it even has a male/female detective partnership).
And yet it keeps you watching, partly because that atmosphere is initially quite strong, whether in the boiling outback or in the confined hospital ward. And the performances are strong, with, for example, Mia Wasikowska and Heather Mitchell playing the same detective, Georgia Cooke, thirty-seven years apart. Rather than giving too much away in advance, that time-jumping structure gives it an emotional throughline even when the plot gets a bit shaky, and brings a sense of impending loss even early on. I did feel a bit bad for Alan Dale, who crops up in the present day: he’s got real presence, and he’s been in plenty of things since 1990, but he’ll always be Jim Robinson to most of us.
At times the dialogue has a nicely lived-in, cynical quality; but at other times you start to suspect this would be a one-episode story if anyone at any point just answered a question. But everyone smokes and grumbles, grounding the whole thing and keeping us intrigued even as the plot drifts towards the outlandish. So yes, it might get a bit silly as it goes, but so far (it’s only 6 episodes long) its realism and creeping dread is sound enough.
OUT OF TIME: POMPEII
Out of Time Pompeii with Tom Hiddleston.
Speaking of creeping dread, how does the combination of Tom Hiddleston and National Geographic sound? Well, between them they have at least come up with a genuinely interesting idea: Out Of Time With Tom Hiddleston sets out to retell the story of the volcanic eruption in Pompeii in 79CE by focusing on three real people who actually, verifiably survived the day. Naturally, it mixes historical research with, hey ho, dramatised reconstruction. As a concept, it’s intriguing: using an actor to imaginatively walk in the dead’s shoes could make it feel more real than usual, and we rarely get to hear how survivors lived afterwards. And in fairness to Hiddleston, he does seem properly engrossed by the subject, even studying classics after a visit to the site as a teenager.
The trouble is the cringe, though I suppose we expect that from Hiddleston: delivering every sentence like an emotional climax, lingering distractingly in the background when we should really be focused on the person in the foreground whose life he’s tracing. The solemnity and the theatrics (that finger twist, those scripted interactions with experts) make it just too ridiculous too often. There is some real information here, of course, and, again, the subject is great; but sadly they’re all buried under a cascade of hot air.