The BBC’s Prisoner 951 – the four-part dramatisation of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s incarceration in Iran between 2016 and 2022 – is a story told in jail cells. Small, grimy spaces where the very walls seem to crawl with despair.
It is into one such cell that Iranian-British dual citizen and Reuters charity worker Nazanin, played by Narges Rashidi, is placed – confused and terrified – after she’s arrested at Tehran airport following a trip to see her family. Her small daughter, Gabriella, is put into her Iranian family’s care and Nazanin’s nightmare begins: blindfolded journeys, Islamic Revolutionary Guard interrogations and trumped-up charges of trying to overthrow the Iranian regime. She is handed a five-year sentence that plunges her into anguish over her daughter: by the time she is released, Gabriella “will be over seven years old. She will have changed every year.”
In London, the Foreign Office instructs Nazanin’s accountant husband, Richard (Joseph Fiennes), to stay quiet. But he soon comes to believe her imprisonment is an Iranian bargaining tactic and that her release is contingent on the UK’s repayment of a £400m debt for military equipment owed from the 1970s .
The drama is based on the couple’s forthcoming book, A Yard of Sky, and writer Stephen Butchard (creator of the assured Liverpool crime drama This City Is Ours) and director Philippa Lowthorpe create urgency out of the hopelessness of Nazanin’s ordeal. Meanwhile, political stonewalling drives Richard to loudly campaign for his wife’s release. He joins her on hunger strikes: “I feel like now I’m fighting two governments,” he says. “The Iranians’ and my own.”
Brexit derails matters further. Boris Johnson, as foreign secretary (and later prime minister), makes things worse, incorrectly describing Nazanin’s work as “teaching journalism”. When she moves to a prison full of fellow female political prisoners, one inmate exclaims of Johnson: “He looks like he’s fallen out of a bush!” The politician’s appearances are confined to real news footage, while other Tories appear in the drama, including Liz Truss (Vivienne Gibbs), blankly yapping platitudes at Richard like a malfunctioning robot.
Relationships are maintained over the phone then via video calls once Nazanin is put under pandemic house arrest at her parents’ home in Tehran. In dream sequences, the couple find a way to be together.Gabriella is five when she’s finally returned to Richard in 2019, speaking Farsi and too big for her bed. Although the £400m debt is never officially acknowledged as the real reason for her imprisonment, Nazanin is released the day the money is paid.
Prisoner 951 is a Kafkaesque geopolitical hostage drama powered by fury and resilience. While Fiennes is strong as Richard, Rashidi gives one of the most compelling performances of the year – taking viewers with Nazanin on her harrowing journey every senseless step of the way.
After a three-year hiatus, Matt and Ross Duffer’s Stranger Things returns for its fifth and final series, with the first four episodes available (three more are scheduled for Christmas Day, with a finale on New Year’s Eve). The show was one of Netflix’s first global hits, and the fourth season remains the third most viewed in the streamer’s history, after Wednesday and Adolescence. Little wonder that Netflix briefly crashed as the new series was released.
Millie Bobby Brown stars in the fifth and final series of Stranger Things
Stranger Things started in 2016: the first series followed a group of small-town US kids on bicycles in the 1980s as they tried to find their missing friend Will (Noah Schnapp) and help a psychokinetic girl called Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) fight a supernatural domain, the Upside Down. Also starring Winona Ryder and David Harbour, it was Stephen King meets Steven Spielberg: a parable of lost American innocence tucked inside a sci-fi and horror nostalgiabomb. Now a military base is in Hawkins and the main child cast are inescapably – jarringly – young adults, with Mike’s kid sister Holly (Nell Fisher) brought to the fore. Linda Hamilton (from the 80s sci-fi classic The Terminator) appears, while Jamie Campbell Bower continues his swaggering turn as Vecna/Henry, dark prince of the Upside Down.
Stranger Things still suffers from the bloating effects of streaming television (the fourth episode is nearly 90 minutes long) . Recurring references to thatseries four Kate Bush Running Up That Hill viral moment denote lack of confidence. a galvanising, gear-shifting climax suggests it intends to go out with a bang, not a whimper.
In 1969, Kenneth Clark presented the acclaimed historical series Civilisation. The 2018 follow-up, Civilisations, was fronted by Mary Beard, David Olusoga and Simon Schama. Now there’s Civilisations: Rise and Fall on BBC Two. Its four episodes each focus on the collapse of a formidable ancient realm: Rome, Egypt, the Aztecs and Japan. The series employs numerous experts (historians, museum curators), artefacts from the British Museum and the format’s now requisite plethora of moody and silent dramatic re-enactments. Elsewhere, surprise guests pop up; former New Labour strategist Alastair Campbell talks about the corrosive effect of power in ancient Egypt, while the sculptor Antony Gormley reflects on Aztec art.
Parallels are drawn with the modern world: the treatment of refugees, the myopia of elites. But the recurrent theme is fragility: “No civilisation ever thinks it will fall.” With its re-enactments, the series could be too noisy and theatrical for some – all stirring music and flickering CGI flames – but it’s fast-paced and informative.
The revamp of The Beatles Anthology arrives on Disney+. This documentary was originally released in 1995, and the footage and audio have been restored and remastered with help from the team behind 2021’s The Beatles: Get Back – which used footage from Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 film Let It Be – led by The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson.
There’s also a new ninth episode, showing Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in the 1990s, reflecting on working on the anthology. Then in their 50s, they’re understandably deep in their anecdotage, though they can be a little bristly with each other too. Teased about his workaholic tendancies, McCartney smoothly pushes back: “I like the Beatles. I like to work with the Beatles. I’m not ashamed of that.”
Harrison died in 2001, and it might have been nice to see the present-day McCartney and Starr reflecting on losing him. Still, the new episode shimmers with creative energy. After Yoko Ono gives the surviving members tapes of John Lennon’s unreleased music (including Free as a Bird and Real Love), the Fab Three set to work with tangible joy. “John’s dead but we’re actually going to be able to play with him again,” says McCartney. Sitting in Harrison’s sunny Henley-on-Thames garden, they strum ukuleles, performing 1920s standard Ain’t She Sweet? Had all the Beatles survived, a reunion wouldn’t be hard to imagine.
Photographs by BBC/Dancing Ledge/Laurence Cendrowicz, Netflix