W1A
BBC2
Twenty-seven minutes into the first episode of the new series of W1A (23 April, 9pm), I suddenly grasped that it wasn’t about to end. It had kicked off with an hour-long special! Hmm. I wasn’t as pleased as I might have been. You need quite a lot of plot to make a show of this kind work over 60 minutes: a royal visit that gets stymied by loopy BBC security procedures probably won’t do it, funny though rising bollards undoubtedly are in the right circumstances. And there’s the important matter of one’s blood pressure. Endure the incontinent burblings and management doublespeak of Siobhan Sharpe, Tracey Pritchard and David Wilkes for too long and you may need to spend the weekend sedated in a dark room with only the unabridged audiobook of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for company.
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