Already the subject of three landmark documentaries – not least the BBC’s seminal 1989 short John’s Not Mad – the remarkable and often gut wrenching story of John Davidson finds dramatisation this week in Kirk Jones’ I Swear. All emotion lives here. The tears, both joy and despair, are constant. Sure enough, this is a film that grabs you by the heart with astonishing ease and offers little let up. A deeply human script from Jones himself is triumph enough but it’s the powerhouse performances before the camera that nail the landing.
You’d be hard pressed to find anything in this third and final Downton outing that lives up to the ‘Grand’ of its title. The stakes could scarcely be lower – ‘How are you getting on with Mary’s plan to plumb the cottages?’ – while a third act village fate never really feels like the culmination of fifteen years of storytelling. Certainly, its direct predecessor found more pathos in the departure of the late Dame Maggie Smith. Such is not to say that fans of the long-running, period soap will want for more. Downton’s Grand Finale makes for an outstandingly tepid watch but not without charm.
Richard Osman’s “The Thursday Murder Club” screams – or, rather, ahems – Sunday night on the BBC. It’s so obvious that a character in the erroneous, Netflix-funded, Chris Columbus movie that has actually been produced even jokes about the consanguinity. This is not to demean the quality of Osman’s, deservedly popular, storytelling but to acknowledge the extreme particularity of his prose. Hollywood cannot hope to tap into Osman’s very British niche and so Columbus’ film is fine watch but bland and transparently softened for international sensibilities.
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