Even if 2022 hadn't been the first year in a while without lengthy bouts of furlough, I still wouldn't have been able to watch all the great telly available this year. For starters, I don't have access to all streaming services, while several shows I know I'd like are still waiting, unwatched, on my Freeview box at the time of writing, which is where the likes of The English and the second series of The Outsiders, The Great and Gentleman Jack, for example, are patiently biding their time.
Other tried-and-tested favourites did force their way into my spare time, however. INSIDE NO.9 remains, for my money, the best anthology series of all time. Now on its seventh series, and with a tally of 43 original stories, it's inevitable that some episodes will work better than others, but each of this latest clutch continued Shearsmith and Pemberton's unique knack of mixing uneasy comedy, sinister atmosphere and a sense of a screw being slowly tightened. The primary school-set Mr King had shades of The Wicker Man, A Random Act Of Kindness was a rare foray into sort-of sci-fi, and Kid/Nap (with the show's two creators taking a backseat in acting terms) once again proved that the duo can still enthral when supernatural/horror aspects are eschewed in favour of crime. The highlight, though, was series closer Wise Owl, with 70s-style public information films gradually revealing a heartbreaking story of a life ruined.
In comedy, TASKMASTER remained a balm for troubled times, both of this year's series throwing up all manner of unpredictable hijinks. STARSTRUCK returned for another lovely series tracking the on-off relationship between creator Rose Matafeo's Jessie and Nikesh Patel's movie star Tom. DERRY GIRLS bowed out with an emotional final series that fully justified its status as one of the most-loved shows of the past half-decade. In terms of traditional sitcoms, GHOSTS is surely now established as the best of its kind on UK telly, and its fourth series continued to mine absolute gold from both premise and cast; an episode which featured the departure of one of the main characters proved unexpectedly moving, despite a running joke about oral sex. We also caught up with both seasons of Armando Ianucci's AVENUE 5, with another great ensemble cast (led by Hugh Laurie) aboard a space cruise gone horribly wrong. With Ianucci's classic trope of people in authority being really shit at their jobs, it managed to be incredibly stressful, like a galactic Lord Of The Flies, but with various adult incompetents, dimbulbs and arseholes rather than kids. Oh, and with more jokes.
Some comedies, of course, are barely comedies at all. Dylan Moran's STUCK was unflinching in its portrayal of a midlife relationship that isn't really working anymore, its depressing tone undermining any laughs despite the winning presence of Morgana Robinson. I HATE YOU, on the other hand, was barely a comedy because it was a pissweak effort of shit student humour unworthy of the talents of creator Robert Popper (Look Around You, Friday Night Dinner) or stars Tanya Reynolds (Sex Education) and Melissa Saint.
A better example of genre-crossing comedy came from AM I BEING UNREASONABLE?, which saw Daisy May Cooper (also the best thing in Tim Key's THE WITCHFINDER this year) breaking out from any typecasting in a show that was a little like Motherland reimagined as a psychological thriller. Top marks also to CHEATERS, which saw Susan Wokoma and Joshua McGuire have a one-night stand in Finland, before returning home to find that they live across the street from each other - with their respective partners. The show's formatting - eighteen episodes of ten minutes apiece - ensured that the story moved at a gripping pace, while finding room to explore sexual behaviours (not just the titular infidelity, but also bisexuality and voyeurism) without making any of its four leads unlikable or villainous. While I try and avoid spoilers in these things, it may not be a surprise that things do not entirely end well - though this is a series I would very much like to see more of. As is Australian teen parenting show BUMP, which did everything you'd want from a second series - moving the story on while expanding more on the lives of its characters. More focus on its adult cast provided welcome developments, with Paula Garcia's Rosa in particular moving from two-dimensional nightmare to a fully-rounded (and increasingly sympathetic) character. On the flip side, the teenage cast got some Skins-style party scenes in, and even comparatively minor characters like Madison got their turn in the spotlight. A third series has been commissioned, and I can't wait.
Tipping from drama-leaning comedy to blackly humorous drama, we find SCREW, a prison-set series starring Jamie-Lee O'Donnell (excelling in a very different role to her Michelle in Derry Girls) and Nina Sosanya. Its acidic wit and taboo-smashing subject matter felt like a close relation to Paul Abbott's peerless No Offence, while its claustrophobic set-up ensured that tension simmered throughout. Going from a locked-down location to wide open spaces (and swapping hemispheres to boot), THE TOURIST took another Northern Irish star (Jamie Dornan) and plonked him in the middle of the Australian outback. Quite literally - his intially-unnamed character is found in a car wreck in the middle of nowhere, waking up in hospital with no memory of who he is or how he got there. As his past is slowly revealed, we find ourselves in a tangled story of crime, double-crossing and lost love where no-one is quite what they appear - apart from Danielle Macdonald, whose break-out performance as rookie cop Helen Chambers is the heart and soul of the show.
As we're on to crime, let's head way back up north to SHETLAND. Now on its seventh series, this excellent drama is possibly somewhat taken for granted, not the subject of online hype or social media's equivalent of watercooler chatter, but I suspect watched by more viewers than the majority of programmes discussed above. Like Unforgotten, this is a show more concerned with gradual revelations through old-fashioned detective work than with violence or car chases; like the Nordic Noir it feels as close to spiritually as it is geographically, it likes to take its time and develop its characters. This time, we get eco-terrorism, dodgy ex-coppers, graphic novels and secret identities, all wrapped up in a story as enthralling as ever, as well as the show's most nailbiting cliffhanger to boot. It was well-known in advance that this would be Douglas Henshall's last run as DI Jimmy Perez; but how would he leave? And would other beloved characters make it through in one piece?
I seem to be getting into giving directions, so let's swoop down to Liverpool and THE RESPONDER. I suspect much of the attention paid to this admirably downbeat police drama centred on the accuracy or otherwise of Martin Freeman's scouse accent as lead character Chris Carson, but it would be a shame if this distracted from his performance as a man barely managing to stay atop a moral abyss (and to be honest, the accent sounded fine to me, not jarring with the genuinely Liverpudlian tones of Ian Hart's old mate/antagonist Carl Sweeney). With much of the action taking place a) at night and b) with Carson behind the wheel, there were shades of Taxi Driver, although the amount of aerial shots of city roads did occasionally make it feel like we were watching Traffic Cops or something.
Sorry, but I'm getting into this now: if Chris was to get into his cop car and hit the M62, it would take him about two and a half hours to get to Sherwood Forest, where he might find himself in one of the year's most remarkable dramas. SHERWOOD - to which you might have guessed I was referring - was, on the face of it, a murder mystery, but was really about the longterm rifts left behind in communities (and families) by the 80s miners' strikes and the way they were policed. The cast list must be one of the most stacked with renowned telly thesps to be assembled in years - David Morrissey, Lesley Manville, Alun Armstrong and Adeel Akhtar are amongst the topline cast, but pretty much every new character that appears onscreen will be someone you recognise. Concerned neighbour that finds a body? Oh look, it's Charles Dale out of Casualty and The Lakes! The story that's told, however, is so involving that you soon stop noticing the starry actors and/or checking IMDB to confirm that suspicious taxi driver guy was in Line Of Duty, etc. Weirdly, in its reckoning with a recent-ish past that never really went away, it rather reminded me of Hugo Blick's Black Earth Rising, albeit with the focus on Nottinghamshire rather than Rwanda. Or maybe that was just because both series featured a shady character putting a gun in their mouth rather than facing the consequences of their actions. You'll have noticed that I'm not using a Top 10 format, but Sherwood would have come in third place if I had.
Another great new crime drama took us back up to Scotland, this time in the company of KAREN PIRIE. Frankly, it probably would have had me at the use of Arab Strap's The Turning Of Our Bones as its theme - an appropriate title, given that the story centred on the reopening of a murder case from 1995 with, wouldn't you know it, repercussions on the present day. Lauren Lyle gives a good account of herself as the titular detective, and while there's a reasonable chance you'll be onto the culprit before their eventual reveal, this is a show which could yet have the staying power of a Shetland.
A show which I hadn't expected to return was THE CAPTURE, but its second series provided a welcome sequel to its 2019 debut. That first instalment centred on the concept of 'correction' - the tampering of CCTV footage being used covertly by security services to create false evidence. This time round, the stakes were higher and the tech even more terrifying, as shown in an opening sequence where apparently invisible assassins strike. Holliday Grainger is once again an engaging protagonist, while the brilliant Paapa Essiedu joins the cast as a politician whose life and career are upended by realtime deepfake sabotage. The twists, tension and action levels all suggest that this could continue as a Line Of Duty-style stalwart, with each season having a central guest star. Oh, and there was the slightly meta circumstance of the BBC studios being one of the show's significant settings, including a delicious dig at The One Show from Indira Varma's fictional Newsnight host Khadija Khan. Grainger was also back in STRIKE; I'd steered clear of the novel for perhaps obvious reasons, but this remains a quality detective series, even if Tom Burke's titular private eye was in slightly morose sad-sack mode this time round.
The vast majority of shows I've mentioned so far have been British made and/or set, as will be more to come, and in a year where the BBC and Channel 4 have been explicitly under threat from whichever shower of cultural annihilators have been in the cabinet that week I really do feel the need to defend public broadcasting; yes, the streamers and commercial stations can come up trumps, but several of the shows listed above wouldn't have been made - or at least not to the same quality - anywhere else.
Anyway, there is space in my viewing for epic sci-fi/fantasy blockbusters too, and after belatedly getting Netflix and catching up on its first three instalments, I think this year's STRANGER THINGS was the first one I've devoured on its original broadcast. Of everything I've covered, this is probably the one where my opinions are basically redundant, given the high volume of discussion around, and clear cultural significance of, a show which can get 2022's teenagers worshipping 80s metalheads, listening to Kate Bush and rolling twenty-sided dice. I'll cop to some initial doubts about elements of this fourth series, but everything I was concerned about turned out to be a bonus. For example, part of the terror of the Demigorgons was their very unhuman nature - no words, no explanation, just remorseless killing - whereas Vecna's humanoid form and verbosity intially lent towards a campness that felt out of place. Of course, as we learnt more about events that took place before Season One (which I'll not discuss for fear of spoilers), it all made sense. And I was concerned that the splintering of the core cast into three, and then four, locations meant that some of the team dynamic might be lost, but in fact it allowed the action to take place on an even more epic scale than before. Eddie Munson playing Master Of Puppets in The Upside Down? OK, that was ridiculous, but if it sends a few thousand 21st Century kids down an 80s thrash rabbit hole? That's not so bad. My least favourite characters (Mike, Will) were mostly sidelined, Hopper got to be a whole 'nother level of badass, Murray was an unlikely action hero, and Sadie Sink probably gave the best performance of the whole damn cast as Max. The last couple of episodes were preposterously long, but dammit if I'm not still fully signed up for whatever comes next.
The other hugely-dissected sci-fi franchise of the year (in TV terms, at least) was the venerable DOCTOR WHO. The end of the Jodie Whittaker/Chris Chibnall period came in the form of three specials. New Year's Day's Eve Of The Daleks was a clever timeloop story set in a Manchester storage facility, and featured the excellent Aisling Bea as a guest. Easter Sunday's Legend Of The Sea Devils was a throwaway tale of piracy and classic monsters in the early 1800s China seas. October's The Power Of The Doctor was the big-ticket finale, though, assembling the Biggest Bads (including Sacha Dhawan as a brilliantly unhinged Master, trying to do for a certain Boney M song what Max Mayfield did for Running Up That Hill) and a swathe of returning companions ranging from the very recent (Vinder from 2021's Flux) to the, well, record-breakingly old. This era of Who hasn't been without its controversies, some of which were almost certainly deliberate baiting of anti-woke bores, but this was an admirable farewell that cemented Whittaker's place in the pantheon. And given that her creative collaboration with Chibnall started with Broadchurch, it was good to see that show's Nige make a cameo role in the opening sequence, while the regeneration sequence took place atop Durdle Door, just a few miles down the Jurassic Coast from the fictional town's real-life West Bay setting. Maybe there was some other Broadchurch connection in that final scene, but I can't think what. Or Who...
Regardless, two former Doctors starred in smart original dramas in 2022. Steven Moffat's INSIDE MAN featured David Tennant, alongside Stanley Tucci, Dolly Wells, Lydia West and Lyndsey Marshal in a tricksy morality tale. It's hard to discuss without spoilers, but the central hook is how far a decent man might go to protect his family. Meanwhile, Tucci's character is a sort of Death Row Sherlock, a wife-killer who is somehow allowed to take on cases from his prison cell. Including one concerning a missing woman in England... When given the right material, Dolly Wells will absolutely shred everyone else on screen, and even in this company that general rule applies here. A post-credits sequence could line up a second series, or offer just one last twist.
Meanwhile, Peter Capaldi's absolutely terrifying face was being absolutely terrifying on THE DEVIL'S HOUR, which somewhat resembled a series-long Inside No.9 story, with some time-bending parallel universe shit going on and Jessica Raine holding the threads somehow. Nikesh Patel plays a vaguely eccentric detective (it will only spoil things mildly if you choose to imagine this role as something he's playing as Tom from Starstruck; the idea that this is a show-within-a-show is probably easier to grasp than some of the actual concepts it tackles), with Alex Ferns as his vaguely cliched shambling sidekick (I dare say he's done plenty of other stuff, but if you haven't seen Ferns since his role as Trevor in Eastenders, it will take you more than a, er, little mo to recognise him).
Time to mention a couple of shows that didn't quite fit into any themed paragraphs. The second series of THE TERROR (subtitled INFAMY this time round) dealt with the shameful internment of Japanese-Americans post-Pearl Harbour, but mixed in old country superstitions to create an involving (and often very violent) blend of social history and J-horror.
Past injustices have been getting a solid going-over on UK telly in recent years, and rightly so. Following Small Axe's investigation of the Black-British experience and It's A Sin's revisiting of the joys and horror of the 80s gay scene, THEN BARBARA MET ALAN told a similar story centred on the radical fight for disabled people's rights in the early 90s. I suspect this is the first mainstream British drama with a largely disabled cast, led by a brilliant Ruth Madeley as real-life activist Barbara Lisicki. There's a punk rock spirit to her group's actions, and as well as being a (hugely overdue) acknowledgement of an under-the-radar protest movement, it's also a moving story of love and loss. Madeley breaks the fourth wall regularly, but the most surreally affecting moment comes when she boards a bus populated by the rest of the cast (including characters who didn't survive) and meets the real Lisicki.
Before I get to my absolute favourite two shows of the year, time to indulge in my most unexpected treat. I don't usually go in for celeb travelogue bullshit, but MARTIN COMPSTON'S SCOTTISH FLING was pure joy. This show found wee DI Arnott and his real accent driving around his native land with Phil MacHugh (a Gaelic TV presenter who would surely have deserved equal billing if he had any south-of-the-border recognition). They make a slightly unlikely pair, but the laddish Compston and more sensitive MacHugh give every impression of being real life pals, and for all the people they meet and activities in which they partake - and there's everything from freestyling on an Aberdeen hip hop record to celebrating Beltane in Edinburgh with an ex-member of Test Dept, with hearty singing along to a bunch of classic Scottish tunes inbetween, plus plenty of sport for the uber-competitive Compston - where this show excels is in its rather moving portrait of modern male friendship. (Incidentally, this is also the subject of the Compston-starring Mayflies, which I've yet to watch - but if it's as moving as the novel from which it's been adapted, it'll be absolutely killer.)
And so on to my two (very different) favourites... THE SANDMAN might just be the best-realised comic book adaptation ever to hit the small screen (unless you're the sort of bore who gets unreasonably incensed by gender- or race-swapped characters). Neil Gaiman's original series was one of the most strikingly unique comic books of its time, right up there with the work of Alan Moore or Grant Morrison, and this adaptation captured its essence through excellent casting, cinematography and storytelling. Gaiman has said of his original idea, "I can’t do superheroes, but I could do god comics." And while central character Morpheus/Dream could be mistaken for the former, his existence as the latter makes for a much more complex concept than anything else in what we have to consider is a fairly superhero-saturated time. In keeping with the comic, this is a show not unafraid to take risks - and I'm not just talking about Jenna Coleman's turn as Johanna (not John) Constantine. Witness 24/7, a mostly Morpheus-free episode which finds John Dee holed up in a diner, with disastrous consequences for its staff and customers, or the surprise eleventh episode, featuring two standalone stories, one of which is animated. Perhaps the best episode, meanwhile, is The Sound Of Her Wings, featuring Morpheus's sister Death and the immortal Hob Gadling. Hob's tale is essentially unrelated to the ongoing storylines, but this is a series where time is taken and patience rewarded.
Finally, we have to talk about THIS IS GOING TO HURT. Another literary adaptation, though this time a fictionalised version of Adam Kay's best-selling memoir about his time as a junior obstetrics and gynaecology dcotor in the NHS, TIGTH pulls no punches in its depiction of the struggle of an under-resourced, under-supported NHS and the effect its working conditions have on those within it. Kay is unafraid to make the character based on himself (and played tremendously by Ben Whishaw) largely unsympathetic: arrogant, cavalier and selfish, taking potshots at those around him, including colleague Shruti and long-suffering partner Greg. The real-life Kay even gets to make a cameo as a cyclist who calls Whishaw's Kay a twat. But we also see the strain that has created this version of Kay: the long hours, the hospital heirarchy and its hypocritical superiors, parental pressures, guilt at medical mistakes... This isn't NHS bashing, far from it - in fact, the sixth episode, where Kay agrees to do a shift at a private hospital, is excoriating about the way the NHS has to pick up the pieces when the parasitic private sector can't manage. Meanwhile, the real hero of the piece is not Kay but (the fictional) Shruti. Kay addresses the viewer directly throughout proceedings, but the most devastating breaking of the fourth wall comes with six words from another character. I'm genuinely tearful just thinking about it, honestly.
The really scary thing is that book and series are set in the 2000s, and things are surely only hurting more a decade and a half later. Those who would underfund the NHS - the same people who would defund the BBC and Channel 4 - are only glimpsed in the series, but they are surely its unseen villains. Support striking healthcare workers - their fight is our fight too.
