GRANTCHESTER, STV, 9pm
I vaguely remember Grantchester’s first series so can’t have been particularly impressed by it. The idea of a sepia-toned drama about a crime-solving vicar was enough to either bore me or confuse me: crime-solving vicars taking tea in 1950s Cambridge? It must be Sunday night.
But I’ve approached this second series with new eyes because the vicar, Sidney Chambers, is played by James Norton, and in the past year he has been transformed. He’s no longer just some actor in some crime drama, but is the devilish, brilliant, frightening Tommy Lee Royce from Happy Valley, as well as the swooningly handsome Bolkonsky in the recent War and Peace adaptation. Yes, nice little Grantchester deserves to be re-assessed with such a star in its lead role.
Despite its sentimental setting of genteel post-war Cambridge, tonight’s episode contains very harsh, and very modern, themes. Sidney is arrested and accused of sexual assault, and he despairs of clearing his name, saying “there’s no smoke without fire. Isn’t that how these things work?” We see that today’s world of tabloid allegations and social media rumour is equally as judgemental as small-town 1950s England ever was.
RAISED BY WOLVES, C4, 9pm
Caitlin and Caroline Moran’s sitcom about their unconventional childhood in Wolverhampton returns tonight.
Life in the Midlands might already be a tussle with brutality but what happens when your internet is cut off and you find yourself stuck in Wolverhampton unable to do Google Image searches for Benedict Cumberbatch both with and without his hats? Or, if your sexual tastes run that way, for “Andrew Marr on his moped”?
Their mother, Della, cancels the family’s internet as it’s too expensive so the frantic siblings are forced to use the grimy PCs at the local library where a romantic escapade awaits the irritating, hysterical Germaine.
Meanwhile, Della, still in her jumpsuit and glaring at the world like a mean cowboy surveying the dusty, deadbeat town he’s just moseyed on into, goes on an expedition to the “poor woman’s IKEA” ie, a local skip where the family might forage through the junk for something useful.
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