Quiz - ITV review

Quiz, which ran for three episodes on consecutive nights last week, was perfect lockdown televiewing. A family entertainment show about family entertainment, with an ingenious crime and a bit of courtroom drama. Fittingly, for a show about quizzes, it posed a tricky question. Did Major Charles Ingram and his wife Diana conspire with Tecwen Whittock in 2001 in an attempt to cheat a million pounds out of the show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

I was a big fan of Millionaire in its early years. I've always enjoyed quizzes and the TV show I watch most regularly is University Challenge, where the contestants play for glory rather than cash. A lot of the popular quiz-type shows with big cash prizes leave me cold, but Millionaire fascinated me until it became too samey. Quiz showed how Millionaire began before showing how the Ingrams, and Diana's brother became obsessed with the possibility of winning a million. In short, the issue was whether strategic coughing by Whittock was what tipped Ingram off about the right answers.

Quiz boasted impeccable credentials, with a script by James Graham and direction by Stephen Frears. The Major was played by the always appealing Matthew Macfadyen and Diana by Sian Clifford, who was excellent in Fleabag. Especially brilliant - but when is he not? - was Michael Sheen, with an extraordinarily convincing performance as quiz master Chris Tarrant. The third episode was cunningly written so as to strike quite a good balance between the competing arguments - in effect, the allegation of fraudulent conspiracy versus the defence of innocence and eccentricity.

History relates that the Ingrams and Whittock were convicted of the crime. But they have always maintained that the conviction was unjust. I thought that Quiz was not only extremely watchable but also extremely fair to the accused. It didn't, for instance, highlight the fact that two years after they avoided prison in this case, Ingram was convicted of an unrelated insurance fraud.

Allied - 2016 film review

Allied, first screened last year, is one of the best new films I've watched in recent months. It's a wartime thriller which stars Brad Pitt and Marion Cottillard as a couple who are pitched together in the fight against Hitler. They meet in Morocco,where Pitt, playing a Canadian spy,called Max and Cotillard, playing a French resistance fighter called Marianne, pose as a married couple who risk their lives conspiring together in an assassination plot.

The killing of a senior Nazi goes according to plan, and by this time the pair have fallen for each other, turning their loving charade into reality. They go to England, marry, and Marianne gives birth to a child. Meanwhile Max's work in intelligence goes on. One day, however, he receives terrible news. Marianne is suspected of being a German spy.

Can this possibly be true? Can Max really trust the woman he loves? The moral dilemma is nicely presented, and the tension continues to mount. I thought the screenplay was very crisply written. When I investigated, it turned out that the writer, Steven Knight, was also a co-creator of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He's obviously keen on games of cat and mouse, and Allied is a very good thriller indeed.

Both the stars give strong performances, and rhey are well supported by a cast that includes the versatile Anton Lesser. Robert Zemeckis, a gifted director, does a good job with the material and there's a soundtrack by Alan Silvestri. Suffice to say that I found the film gripping from start to finish. Not all the critics loved Allied, but I did.