toby jones

The four-part drama stars Lucy Boynton (Murder on the Orient Express) as the real-life 1950s London club manager, then the youngest in the capital.

Ellis later found an entirely different kind of fame, becoming the last woman in Britain to be hanged, after shooting her partner David Blakely. The drama is based on A Fine Day for Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story, the biography by Carol Ann Lee.

A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story follows the impresario’s story through clubland and the abusive relationship she had with Blakely.

The first was the RTS Craft and Design Awards, where she was nominated for the Makeup Design – Non-Scripted Award. The second? Seeing Madonna perform with her assistant, a treat for a series of hard work.

From The Likely Lads to Men Behaving Badly, British comedy has long mined male friendship for its comic potential. In 2014, BBC Four’s Detectorists delivered a new and unexpected take on the relationship between a couple of blokes. It upended what used to be a pretty macho world to give audiences something completely different.

In 2009, soldiers from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment found themselves the subject of a major inquiry into allegations of torture and the murder of Iraqi prisoners.

The inquiry lasted five gruelling years and eventually concluded that the allegations were untrue and “deliberate and calculated lies”. A decade after the story made headlines, the high-stakes investigation and the wider theme of morality in war is being dramatised in BBC Two’s Danny Boy through the eyes of one of the soldiers involved in the case, Brian Wood.

Leading the charge is Defending The Guilty a courtroom drama from Kieron Quirke (Cuckoo). Katherine Parkinson (Humans) plays Caroline, the cynical and experienced pupil master of Will (played by Flower's Will Sharpe), an idealistic pupil barrister. Will must navigate his way through the complexities of the justice system, to fight it out with several other hopeful contenders for a single job at the end of training. Expect cut-throat exploits and plenty of back-stabbing.

Written, directed and starring Mackenzie Crook (Andy), Detectorists will return this year with six new episodes.

Also starring Toby Jones (Lance) and Rachael Stirling as Becky, Andy’s wife, the new series continues on from the Christmas Special that saw Lance battling the ‘curse of the gold’ after finding an Anglo-Saxon treasure.

The deal between BBC One and Agatha Christie Productions Ltd follows the critical success of 2015’s Christmas drama And Then There Were None, adapted by Sarah Phelps and starring Poldark’s Aidan Turner.

Bringing together the creative team behind the broadcaster's recent retelling of Christie's And Then There Were None, the new two-part drama will be produced by Mammoth Screen and written by Sarah Phelps.

Starring Toby Jones as solicitor John Mayhew, the plot follows the court case of Leonard Vole, heir to a large fortune, who is charged with killing his benefactor Emily French.