Throughout the pandemic millions of us have been turning to home fitness routines to help keep us healthy and sane, exchanging the gym for the living room and the pitch for the garden. In this enjoyably accessible film, journalist and blogger Mehreen Baig sets out to not only discover the secret of getting fit with the minimum effort but also to get to the root of other questions. Helping her are a number of top UK sports scientists who have plenty of great tips to offer, especially on how to maximise the health benefits of the individual effort you put in, and the surprisingly big gains from using tech to maintain your motivation and, most importantly, how to stop yourself from giving up.
A shock opening, a forensics coup and a no-surprise arrest get the concluding part of this decent true-crime drama off to a gripping start. Despite the schmaltzy premise, the authority of the leads carries the film. Annabeth Gish, Julia Roberts and Amy Holden James add glitz to the goofball charm, playing a trio of waitresses with complicated love lives and unsatisfied ambitions.
Robson Green begins his journey in, counter-intuitively, Wallsend, and reaches Hexham at the climax of this first episode of three. Along the way he tries out Geocaching with boyish enthusiasm, has a dip in the Tyne, chats to fellow travellers and enjoys a genuinely moving reunion with a former colleague from his days in the shipyard. Gabriel Tate. But when will we receive them, and who will have the jab? George Clarke visits more unlikely architectural transformations, this week casting his eye over a camping pod that looks β albeit only loosely β like a giant conker, a hotel disguised as a tree and, most remarkably, a Victorian circus wagon resurrected by a master craftsman with muscular dystrophy.
Still, this will pass a chilly January evening just fine. The Max Ritcher soundtrack is soaringly good, and the supporting cast β including Joaquin Phoenix and Oliver Reed β is exceptional. As with all their biggest series, Disney is keeping this spin-off from the Marvel universe tightly under wraps with no previews available ahead of release.
Set reports and early trailers suggest the series, which sees the couple living in the suburban town of Westview and trying to hide their super powers, could be both more interesting and more experimental than the Marvel films themselves. The witty trailers, which reference iconic marital sitcoms such as I Love Lucy before whizzing through tropes from the s to the s, suggests they have more than succeeded.
