Fiona Mollison

As the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel has only a single remaining vacancy - posing a rooming predicament for two fresh arrivals - Sonny pursues his expansionist dream of opening a second hotel.

6.6/10
6.5%

1992 BBC adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel of 1907 concerning the mostly inactive spy Alfred Verloc, who is ordered by his superior Mr Vladimir to carry out a terrorist act. Verloc reluctantly plans the operation, seeking help from The Professor. Verloc is also an informant for the police and the Assistant Commissioner and Chief Inspector Heat add additional pressure on Verloc and his attempts to carry out his plan. Verloc’s subsequent actions gravely affect his wife who is devoted to her mentally unbalanced brother Stevie.

A young American widow is mysteriously drawn to a historic castle in the Scottish Highlands and finds herself at the center of a 200-year old ghost story.

5.5/10

The plot is set on a group of bank robbers, who are both violent and successful, strangely getting away each time with an amount around the £60,000 mark, and often leaving behind cash in excess of this sum. The robbers are willing to kill their own team, to get away. As Jack Regan himself puts it after the first raid in the film: "I've never seen so many dead people". Armed with gold-plated Purdey shotguns, they evaded Regan and the Flying Squad for quite some time, before Regan finds encouragement from his Detective Chief Superintendent who was sent down for corruption because Jack wouldn't testify in court for him.

6.6/10

Strangers is a UK police drama that appeared on ITV between 1978 and 1982. After the success of the TV series The XYY Man, adapted from books by Kenneth Royce, Granada TV devised a new series to feature the regular characters of Detective Sergeant George Bulman and his assistant Detective Constable Derek Willis. The result was Strangers. The series began as a fairly standard police drama series with Bulman as its eccentric lead. Its premise was that a group of police officers have been brought together from different parts of the country to the north of England. There, the fact that they are not known locally gives them the opportunity to infiltrate where a more familiar local detective could not. Initially, the team consisted of Bulman, Willis and Linda Doran. Their local liaison was provided by Detective Sergeant David Singer; their superior was Chief Inspector Rainbow. Despite being based around a comparatively small team of detectives, a regular feature of the programme in its early years was that few episodes featured the entire team, with most using just two or three of the regulars in any major role.

8/10

A waiter hurrying from table to table in a crowded Italian restaurant picks up titbits of conversation from the varied clientele.