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All hail a rollicking, occasionally true history of Catherine the Great, Sky’s spooky Elizabethan gem, and the simple pleasures of a quiet winter walk
The Great (Channel 4) | All 4A Discovery of Witches (Sky One) | sky.comStaged (BBC One) | iPlayerDeath in Paradise (BBC One) | iPlayerWinter Walks (BBC Four) | iPlayer
The Great was just as it said, and lends one hope for the grimmest January most of us have ever encountered. Creator Tony McNamara has approached Russia’s past not with a forensic scalpel. Instead, as an Aussie, and as he did with The Favourite, he’s taken a gleeful and sizeable beachball to the sandcastle of history. Never mind the fact that that very castle is built on shifting sands, normally by the victors or the preening. I’d like to think, especially given the recent trauma over The Crown, which extended unto our culture secretary and thus heralded a new touchstone in pygmy intellectualism, that McNamara just thought: “Dash it”. Or whichever Australian epithet you might deem more apt. “It’s a deuced drama, dash it. We are making it up, the scripts and sets and everything. The actors are doing what their job entails, to act.” Continue reading...