The Inheritance
Mondays, 9pm Channel 5
Rating: 
On paper, Channel 5’s new four-parter The Inheritance has everything going for it, including a great cast and gripping premise.
What happens when a parent dies and their will reveals that their children are excluded and everything has been left to a person that nobody in the family even knew existed?
A cuckoo in the nest of a grieving family is the stuff of nightmares, and provides a perfect plot.
What’s not to love about squabbling siblings slugging it out as we discover, slowly but surely, that they are not as close as old family videos (used as a flashback device) have led us to believe?
Kathryn Fleet says Channel 5’s new four-parter The Inheritance has ‘everything going for it, including a great cast and gripping premise’
When dad Dennis (Larry Lamb) is found dead on the floor of the family home, his children – Daniel (Robert James-Collier), Sian (Gaynor Faye) and Chloe (Jemima Rooper) – are surprised when the coroner tells them he died of alcohol asphyxiation; as far as they knew, he barely drank.
What’s not to love about squabbling siblings slugging it out?
The bigger shock is that he’s left everything to Susan (Samantha Bond), who, it turns out, is not only his wife – the siblings are still mourning the death of their mum – but has been his partner for the past 14 years.
UK critic Kathryn Flett reviews The Inheritance, on Channel 5, available to watch on Mondays 9pm, and she gave it three stars
‘Perhaps if you’d bothered to spend more time with him, then this wouldn’t have come as such a shock!’ Susan observes. Although, in fact, this is not such a ‘shock’ to all of the siblings, who, it turns out, have their own agendas.
Daniel has plenty of incentive to get his dad’s new will overturned: a chef whose restaurant is in trouble, he has taken a £20k loan from sinister, intimidating Glen.
Not only will Glen soon be charging Daniel £2k a week interest on the loan, he has a deeper vested interest in the family.
Meanwhile, Dan’s sister, single mum Sian, connects with the estate agent who values the family home, but is he more keen on his cut of the £600k sale than on Sian? And why is sister Chloe playing her cards so close to her chest?
As Susan (who gets all the best diva lines) puts it, ‘For a family that claims to be so tight it really seems you know, or care, very little about one another.’
As an only child I’m always riveted by sibling rivalries; I treated Succession like a documentary!
The Inheritance could turn out to be a corker – I’m halfway through – but the thing stopping me from giving it a four-star review is that, thus far, everybody is pretty ghastly, so there’s nobody to root for.
Daniel’s dumb, Chloe’s sneaky and as for Sian… she let her son watch his phone during his grandpa’s funeral, so that’s her out of the will straight away, right?!
Fishing? Ted the Terrier’s the reel star
Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing
Sundays, 9pm, BBC2
Rating: 
Flett reviews Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing and says it’s a ‘warm, gentle, very funny show’
Here’s an observation based on years spent in the company of two sons and two stepsons: while glasses of ‘lady petrol’ are sufficient for most women to kick off a heart-to-heart, men are often more comfortable if they’re doing something while they’re talking.
Or in other words, if female friendship is mostly about just being, male friendship is about doing.
I think this theory also explains the success of TV shows in which displays of male friendship masquerade as something else.
In Top Gear/The Grand Tour, for example, that ‘something else’ is cars, while in Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing it’s clearly… Ted, the Patterdale terrier!
As Paul and Bob’s free-reeling friendship is only occasionally interrupted by actual fish, it’s easy for those of us who are happiest sitting on a riverbank with a flask to enjoy this warm, gentle, very funny show, which is back for a sixth series.
Last week’s conversation revolved around making small-talk and why fishing is great for mental health, while a couple of ‘chunky chub’ were caught in the River Wye — and, as usual, the dog stole the show. Happy tenth birthday, Ted!
I holidayed in France in June and it rained non-stop. Then I came home… and it continued! For everybody feeling cheated by Summer ’23, When Beach Holidays Go Horribly Wrong (My5) provided schadenfreude.
But while the tornadoes in Ibiza were indeed terrifying, one woman’s footage of her daughters on a sewage-strewn Lincolnshire beach showed we also have seaside horror stories here. Trust me, I live on the coast.
A literary double act
Mel Giedroyc tours literary sights with local Martin Clunes, who reveals that his mother banned Blyton when he was a youngster
There’s more banter than literature in Britain By The Book (ITVX). In Dorset, which inspired writers as diverse as Thomas Hardy, Enid Blyton and Ian McEwan, Mel Giedroyc tours literary sights with local Martin Clunes, who reveals that his mum banned Blyton when he was a youngster.
He reads The Famous Five beautifully, but it’s actually Mel who reads the audiobook of Five On A Treasure Island, a book she effectively just promoted.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk