Coffee-Table Notes

If the best things come in threes, the third and final series of Guilt completes an unholy trinity to savour. Since it first aired in 2019, Neil Forsyth’s dryly dark Edinburgh set drama has charted the fallout of what happened when Mark Bonnar and Jamie Sives’ Leith-based brothers Max and Jake accidentally ran someone over. With lawyer Max doing a spell in choky while record shop anorak Jake decamped to Chicago, series two saw Max embark on further murky adventures, with Emun Elliot’s hapless Kenny in tow.   With the siblings reunited, series three sees them ditch the job lot of fezzes purloined for Moroccan Monday at their Chicago bar to make a prodigal’s return to Leith. Beyond Kenny’s stress related sperm count and talk of vegan raves, Edinburgh’s banking fraternity are brought to the fore.   “ It’s very much driven by the brothers again,” says Forsyth of Guilt 3 over Zoom. “I think it was good for them to have that time apart in series two, because having them back togethe...

Louise Ironside is a writer of substance. This was more than evident in the episode of Call the Midwife penned by the Edinburgh-born playwright and former actress, and screened two Sundays ago as part of the latest series of BBC One’s hit TV drama. This wasn’t just for the content of Ironside’s episode of the 1960s-set look at life in and around an east London hospital run by nuns. It was also about what happened following its broadcast. First of all, Labour MP David Lammy tweeted how the episode ‘has got me in pieces’, singling out a remarkable performance by Annette Crosbie as a former suffragette. Then came the news that the head of blood donation campaigns for the NHS had been in touch with the programme’s makers to let them know that within a day of it being shown, the programme had prompted a 46% increase in people in the UK registering as donors. This wasn’t the result of some Brechtian polemic. Call the Midwife is a prime time mainstream drama watched weekly by upwards...

Fans of long-running cult American fantasy series Supernatural will have spotted a new arrival in its tenth season, currently airing on E4 in the UK. The red-haired woman called Rowena may not have said anything during her first appearance sitting in her hotel room at the end of the episode, Soul Survivor, which aired last month. The two men hanging from the ceiling above her impaled by stakes, however, spoke volumes about her demonic intent. As fans of the show will find out when Rowena makes her presence fully felt in the season's eighth episode, Girls, Girls, Girls, on November 25 th , what turns out to be a 400 year old matriarch with some very important progeny also speaks with a Falkirk accent. This comes in the form of thirty-six year old actress Ruth Connell, who was last seen on these shores playing Mrs Beaver in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh back in 2008, but who now seems to have entered an even more fantastical realm. ...

It's been quite a year for Freya Mavor. This time twelve months ago, the Edinburgh teenager had just made her professional acting debut as part of the third generation of Skins, E4's iconic yoof-TV drama about a bunch of mad-for-it youngsters coming of age in an orgy of sex, drugs and taking things too far. With the sixth and possibly final series of Skins currently airing, Mavor returns to her role as Mini McGuinness, the gang's queen bee bitch, whose good looks and motor-mouthed put-downs are a brittle front for the frightened and not entirely unpleasant little girl within. Since sashaying onto the small screen, Mavor's public profile has rocketed. Aside from Skins, in which she resumes her relationship with a slutty mum played in a wonderful piece of casting against type by Clare Grogan, Mavor has become something of a Scots style icon. Not only did she become the face of Pringle Scotland for the company's spring and summer 2011 campaign, Mavor was bestowed with ...

Bryan Elsley is used to getting down with the kids. As co-creator, writer and executive producer of Skins, the potty-mouthed teenage rites of passage drama which returns for its third series next weekend, Elsley has already bridged the age gap. He did, after all, devise Skins with his twenty-something son, Jamie Brittain, who lent more than a whiff of authenticity to the episodes he wrote. First thing on a Monday morning, however, Elsley’s demographic has gone even lower, as he takes precious time out of press duties to look after his year old daughter. Once at work, however, Elsley is happy if understandably cautious about the forthcoming reinvention of a programme which has clearly been a labour of love over the last three years, and which was utterly deserving of its BAFTA Scotland win last year. “I’m feeling a little bit nervous about it,” Elsley says in a quiet but still detectable Scots burr. “Because we’ve completely changed the cast of the show, that might seem quite strange, ...

Freya Mavor is finding it hard to fit in interviews this week. The seventeen-year old is into extreme essay writing for her final year dissertation on organ donation which forms part of her studies in religious and moral philosophy at an Edinburgh independent school. As if her studies weren’t making life hectic enough, Mavor is dashing between Edinburgh, London and Bristol to promote the new series of Skins, the in-your-face yoof TV drama she’s just joined as part of the third generation of young upstarts who muscle into series five of the programme, the first episode of which airs on E4 next week. In the programme, Mavor plays Mini McGuinness, whose willowy blonde good looks may have all the boys swooning over her, but whose queen bee demeanor masks a more vulnerable side. For someone who’s never acted professionally before, Mavor’s screen debut is pretty striking. “I was very apprehensive about what it was going to be like”, Mavor says of filming on location in Bristol....