From sensational true crime to boat journeys into frickin’ cold places, British television produced some banger productions in 2021. Here are the best UK TV shows of the year, picked by Clarisse Loughrey.
Landscapers
What a relief to find Landscapers in the hands of Will Sharpe—the artful, discerning filmmaker behind this year’s Victorian biopic The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. The inspiration for the four-part series seems primed for a bit of true crime sensationalism: in 2014, Susan and Chris Edwards were jailed for life for the murder of Susan’s parents, Patricia and William Wycherley. Their bodies had laid buried, undiscovered, in the back garden for 15 years, while Susan and Chris steadily siphoned the Wycherleys’s savings and pension payments. But Sharpe has made use of an entire palette of emotions—the strange and the sad, with a streak of dark humour—in order to find the humanity in this brutal crime.
We Are Lady Parts
Originally commissioned as a single, speculative pilot for Channel 4’s Comedy Blaps strand, Nida Manzoor’s sitcom about an all-female, all-Muslim punk band is the very best kind of riot. It tells the story of Amina (Anjana Vasan), a talented guitarist who finds both a creative outlet and a supportive network in bandmates Saira (Sarah Impey), Ayesha (Juliette Motamed), Momtaz (Lucie Shorthouse) and Bisma (Faith Omole). These women are messy, proud and gloriously loveable; good luck getting “Bashir with The Good Beard” out of your head any time soon.
Uprising
On 18 January, 1981, a house fire at 439 New Cross Road left 13 young Black people dead. A petrol bomb had been thrown from the window of a passing car—aimed at those inside, who were celebrating a birthday party. Two years later, one of the survivors took their own life. Steve McQueen’s documentary on the attack, and the protests that followed, forms the next chapter in his incisive and necessary campaign to rectify mainstream (white) culture’s efforts to sideline British Black history. “13 Dead, Nothing Said,” the slogan at the time went. Uprising, much like McQueen’s Small Axe films, finally brings the truth into the light.
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This Way Up season 2
The follow-up outing of Aisling Bea and Sharon Horgan’s comedy-drama has shown us something we’re quite unused to in stories about mental illness: what happens after the worst is over. While the first season saw Aine (Bea) caught up in the aftermath of a nervous breakdown, we now get to see her actually start to put the pieces together and find a way to cohabitate with her own depression. She finds room both for a rocky, but promising, romance with Richard (Tobias Menzies) and to be there for her sister Shona (Sharon Horgan). It’s a refreshingly hopeful show, where it counts—and funny as hell, too.
It’s A Sin
Watched in record-breaking numbers on All 4, Channel 4’s streaming service, It’s A Sin is one of this year’s great conversation starters: a portrait not only of the joy and resilience of the LGBT+ community in 80s London, but of the devastation it suffered at the hands of the AIDS epidemic. A five-part miniseries from Russell T Davies, it’s served as a winning showcase for its young and talented cast—
including Olly Alexander, Nathaniel Curtis, Lydia West, Omari Douglas and Callum Scott Howells.
Starstruck
New Zealand comedian Rose Matafeo has put a witty, warm and thoroughly millennial spin on Notting Hill’s tale of the nobody who falls for a somebody. Jessie (Matafeo) has a one night stand with a man named Tom (Nikesh Patel), who she slowly realises is actually one of the world’s most famous actors. She, on the other hand, is, as her flatmate informs her, “a little rat nobody”. Starstruck both uncynically embraces its romcom origins while giving us a heroine who isn’t just another workaholic ditz with a job at a fashion magazine and an unrealistically large apartment.
The North Water
Shot on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, this five episode series is said to be the furthest north a television drama has ever dared to venture. Andrew Haigh, known for directing 45 Years and Weekend, adapts Ian McGuire’s 2016 novel with a keen eye for the primitive brutality, frost-bitten isolation and intense claustrophobia of life on a 19th century whaling ship. Jack O’Connell stars as a disgraced ex-army surgeon who joins a risky expedition up to the Arctic, only to realise that the true danger doesn’t live out in the waters, but onboard—in the form of ruthless harpooner Henry Drax (Colin Farrell).
Stath Lets Flats season 3
Jamie Demetriou’s crass, deeply inept estate agent Stath has been offering audiences a glorious cocktail of cringe and schadenfreude since 2018. And series three has hardly let up on the buffoonery. On top of the usual struggle of renting out London’s ugliest apartments, Stath is now juggling the prospect of imminent parenthood, after it was revealed the unborn child of his colleague Carole (Katy Wix) was actually the result of their (instantly regretted) one night stand. With a cast bursting at the seams with comedic talent—including Demetriou’s own on-and-offscreen sister, Natasha Demetrious—Stath Lets Flats remains one of the funniest shows on UK television.
Stephen
Over two decades have passed since ITV first aired The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, a two hour drama shot by the acclaimed Paul Greengrass. It ended with the reminder that those who murdered 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence on 22 April 1993, simply for being Black, had not been charged. Years later, a public inquiry ruled that the Metropolitan Police investigation was incompetent and that the force was institutionally racist. Stephen, divided into three parts, offers some much-needed closure on the case. Or is there really closure to be found when the pain of Lawrence’s loss can never be taken away? That’s the heartbreaking question that’s carefully probed over the course of the series, aided by magnificent performances from Sharlene Whyte, Hugh Quarshie and Steve Coogan.
The Pursuit of Love
A welcome indulgence for those who love a period romance, Emily Mortimer’s adaptation of the 1945 Nancy Mitford novel is full of arch pleasures and luxurious costumes—inspired by Cecil Beaton’s portraits of young socialites and drenched in diamonds borrowed from the Bulgari archives. The three-part drama follows the wild escapades of Linda Radlett (Lily James), an upper-class woman with some rather romantic ideals when it comes to the matter of marriage. She becomes an object of fascination to both her more practical cousin Fanny Logan (Emily Beecham) and their incandescently eccentric neighbour Lord Merlin (Andrew Scott).
