Martin Compston’s Glasgow thriller makes city look like Los Angeles
The Glasgow-set thriller Fear (Amazon Prime Video) opened with an aerial shot of the city's motorways that managed to make the old place look like LA under cloudy skies. It was a promising sign of good things to come. Not, alas, for the family at the heart of this three-part chiller.
Martyn and Rebecca (Martin Compston and Anjil Mohindra) had traded their titchy place in London for a huge pile in the west end. How mum, dad and the children marvelled as they walked into the fitba pitch-sized hallway with its soaring ceilings, little knowing what horrors were to come, and we don't mean the heating bills. Before the kettle was unpacked, downstairs neighbour Jan (Solly McLeod) was on the doorstep, bearing the gift of homemade biscuits.
From there, awkward but not shy Jan progressed to lentil soup, pizza, and suggestive remarks about vanilla slices. By the end of episode one he was raising more red flags than the organiser of a military parade in Moscow. The interloper who wrecks the peace is a familiar tale.
Too familiar, you might feel. Even the title brought to mind the daddy of all such chillers, Cape Fear (Mitchum, not De Niro). What made this drama a cut above was its determination to go beyond the cliches.
This inventiveness, the quality of the production, plus a cast including James Cosmo and Maureen Beattie as Martyn's mum and dad, made for a belter of a thriller. A Cruel Love: the Ruth Ellis Story (ITV1, Wednesday) had a difficult job from the off. The story of the last woman to be hanged in Britain has been told so many times you had to wonder what new information or interpretation could justify another drama.
Watching anything with Toby Jones in it, here playing Ellis's solicitor, John Bickford, is never time wasted, and so it proved here. Bickford had been a war crimes investigator, which gave him insight into how victims of abuse, which Ellis had been since childhood, attempted to cope with trauma. Lucy Boynton (Miss Potter, Ballet Shoes) was too fresh faced to play the sharp-featured Ellis, but otherwise she was highly convincing as yet another butterfly crushed on the Establishment's wheel.
Imagine: The Academy of Armando (BBC1, Monday) opened with Alan Yentob (below with Iannucci) pointing out that he had spent ten years trying to get a sitdown with the creator of The Thick of it. Wonder what Malcolm Tucker would have said about that. Turns out all Yentob had to do was wait till Iannucci had a play, his stage version of Dr Strangelove, to punt, and there you had it, an Imagine special.
Those who had worked with Iannucci down the years had no such hesitation in coming forward. From Peter Capaldi to Julia Louis-Dreyfus via Steve Coogan they queued round the block to praise his methods and how much they had learned from him. A few of them joked about the titular "academy" and Iannucci's usual advice to performers and writers.
This mostly consisted of three words, "shorter, funnier, better", which said it all, really. They should have made that the title: Armando Iannucci, shorter, funnier, better. Yentob pulled off some coups, including a rare interview with Chris Morris, Iannucci's oppo on On the Hour and The Day Today.
There was a lovely section on his growing up in Hillhead and the time spent in the library - "my saviour". Yentob's film, one hour and 15 minutes long, was an unabashed love-in for Iannucci, but I can't say I minded. For all the laughs delivered he deserves the praise.
With Love, Meghan (Netflix), the new lifestyle series presented by Meghan Markle - or "Meghan Sussex" as she corrected a pal - brought the media sisterhood out to show its support. Or maybe not. How dare the American wife of a British royal waft around her luxurious home in California, arranging flowers and making preserves while the rest of us endure a miserable British winter and buy our jam at Tesco?
Much as I'd like to defend the Duchess - she has as much right to spout piffle as any other "lifestyle adviser", of which there are gazillions - she is exhausting company. 
Except it is not her beautiful home. It was filmed, the credits told us, at "a" California estate. Wasn't the Netflix fee enough to cover access to the Sussex gaff?
Her first visitor was Daniel, a make-up artist she met on Suits. No sooner had the poor guy arrived than he was up to his eyes making candles, cooking spaghetti and decorating a lemon drizzle cake. Meghan kept strict control of everything and was always on hand to mop up any spills, her pale linen outfit as spotless at the end of a scene as the beginning.
As unintentionally amusing as it was, it was also rather sad. I diagnose a bad case of TMT (too much time on her hands) Syndrome. Fortunately there's an easy cure for that - get a job.
With love, Alison.