CHRISTOPHER STEVENS on last night's TV: Starving peasants? These actors are ... trends now
The Gallow's Pole (BBC2)
The Great British Sewing Bee (BBC1)
David has walked from Birmingham, that much is clear. ‘I walked from Birmingham,’ he told his sister-in-law Gwen.
‘He walked from Birmingham,’ Gwen told her sister Grace. ‘He walked from Birmingham?’ Grace repeated, checking she’d got her facts straight. Later, Gwen’s husband asked David where he’d been. ‘Birmingham,’ David announced.
There must be something in the Yorkshire water, on The Gallows Pole (BBC2), because an hour later Grace was still confused. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked David. Guess what he replied.
Either the entire extended family in this 18th-century village are suffering from acute short-term memory loss, or the actors are struggling with their dialogue.
The Gallows Pole is loosely based on a novel by Benjamin Myers, which itself is based on the historical legend of a gang of starving weavers at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, who turned to forgery and counterfeiting.
Michael Socha stars as David Hartley in The Gallow's Pole (BBC2) alongside Sophie McShera as his wife Grace
Not that you’d guess any of that from the first of this three-part series, which, to put it mildly, took a while to get going.
Soaps tend to kill off characters callously. But the EastEnders (BBC1) death of Lola (Danielle Harold) from a brain tumour has been handled with deep sensitivity — and the grief of husband Jay (Jamie Borthwick) was almost too much to bear.
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The first five minutes consisted of a man walking from Birmingham in a blood-drenched shirt, dragging a bag of blacksmith’s tools behind him and fending off hallucinations of demons with stags’ antlers.
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