Pat Stacey’s weekend TV picks: Will the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman be a dream or nightmare?

Tom Sturridge as Morpheus, aka Dream, aka the Sandman, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death in Netflix’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s revered comic book series

Beavis and Butt-Head are stuck in 2022 in a new series on Paramount+

Tom Sturridge as Morpheus, aka Dream, aka the Sandman, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death in Netflix’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s revered comic book series

Beavis and Butt-Head are stuck in 2022 in a new series on Paramount+

Tom Sturridge as Morpheus, aka Dream, aka the Sandman, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death in Netflix’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s revered comic book series

Pat Stacey

August 05 2022 02:30 AM

Tonight Neil Gaiman’s work can be tricky to wrangle on to the screen.

The first season of American Gods was superb. The second was beset by behind-the-scenes turmoil: showrunners sacked, budgets cut, actors quitting, scripts being rewritten on the fly.

By the time the improved third one arrived, numerous viewers had deserted it and the series was axed.

Everyone will be hoping the long-awaited The Sandman (Netflix), based on Gaiman’s groundbreaking comic book and trapped in development hell for years, will fare better.

Tom Sturridge plays Morpheus, aka Dream, aka the Sandman, who’s the king of dreams and nightmares. Having been imprisoned for over a century by charlatan occultist Sir Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance), he escapes into the real world.

The large, starry cast features Gwendoline Christie, Boyd Holbrook, Jenna Coleman, David Thewlis and Stephen Fry. Actors voicing CGI characters include Mark Hamill, Patton Oswalt and Lenny Henry.

Even Morpheus might have a few nightmares after meeting creepy murderer Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser) from Black Bird (Apple TV+). Getting close to Larry in an attempt to extract a confession from him is certainly taking its toll on Jimmy Keene (Taron Egerton).

In the finale of what’s been a riveting miniseries, Jimmy is reaching breaking point, while Larry is becoming suspicious. One of the finest dramas of the year.

The world’s favourite morons are back. The brand new run of Beavis And Butt-Head (Paramount+) follows on directly from this year’s hit film Beavis And Butt-Head Do The Universe, in which the boys were time-travelled from 1999 to 2022. They’re still here, and still as gloriously stupid as ever.

Arsenal is the latest Premier League club to open its doors to the merciless cameras of All Or Nothing (Amazon Prime). Given how the 2021/22 season went, it might be wishing it hadn’t.

The captain was stripped of his armband, the new manager seemed out of his depth, and the club, having briefly flirted with relegation, failed to qualify for European competition for the first time in 27 years.

Another week, another true-crime drama series based on a podcast. The Bain Family Murders (More4, 9pm & 10pm) is about the unsolved murders of five members of a dysfunctional New Zealand family in 1994, although the focus is on events in the years leading up to the slaughter.

Video of the Day

The whole series will be on All 4 after this double bill.

Tomorrow

Duran Duran: Radio 2 in Concert (BBC2, 9pm) shows Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and the Taylors, Roger and John, aren’t ready to be labelled a heritage act just yet.

Yes, this highlights package from their Christmas 2021 BBC Radio 2 concert features the best-known hits, but there are also collaborations on new songs (rather good ones, too) with rapper Ivorian Doll and Blur’s Graham Cox, both of who are guests here.

Beavis and Butt-Head are stuck in 2022 in a new series on Paramount+

It’s back a bit further in time for the 2012 feature-length documentary Paul Simon: Under African Skies (Sky Arts, 8pm), about the making of Simon’s brilliant but enormously controversial 1986 album Graceland.

Timed to coincide with the start of the new Premier League season, candid camera-style comedy series Micah Richards’ Player Pranks (Sky Max, 10pm) can’t help sparking squirm-inducing flashbacks to Rio Ferdinand’s dismal World Cup Wind-Ups on ITV in 2016.

You’d be better off checking out the free streaming platform Fifa+, which features a ton of documentaries devoted to both the men’s and women’s game, including all but a few of the official World Cup films from the 1952 competition onwards.

In the first of tonight’s double bill of the lively SurrealEstate (Sky Sci-Fi 9pm & 10pm), ghost-catching estate agents Luke and Susan (Tim Rozon and Sarah Levy) deal with an unusual client: a horror novelist who actually wants to live in a haunted house.

Sunday

Despite being filmed entirely on location in Amsterdam, the first season of the revived and revamped Van der Valk (UTV/ITV, 8pm) in 2020 felt about as authentic as a plastic tulip, while sour-faced Marc Warren as the eponymous detective was nothing like the character in Nicholas Freeling’s novels.

In the first of three feature-length mysteries, he’s hunting a murderer who leaves passages from Dutch philosopher Spinoza at the crime scene. I’ll take the 70s series with Barry Foster, currently running on Talking Pictures TV, any day.

I’ve you’ve been enjoying The Newsreader (BBC2, 9pm & 9.50pm), ending tonight, the good news is a second season is currently in production.

It bows out with a tense double bill that sees Noelene making a fact-checking error that could get her the sack and ageing anchor man Geoff’s scheming wife Evelyn making Lady Macbeth look as guileless as Rose from The Golden Girls.

With the single exception of Peter Jackson’s magnificently moving They Shall Not Grow Old, colourising old footage has never added much value to a history documentary.

The subject matter of India 1947: Partition In Colour (Channel 4, 9pm) is strong enough without gimmicks. It’s a two-part look at a harrowing event, the trauma of which lingers 75 years on.

Still on history, a heartily recommended repeat is Spitfire (Sky Documentaries, 7pm), a stirring film about the most iconic warplane of all.