Blue Lights, Taylor and How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge): TV highlights this week

Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue (Saturday 27/09/25, BBC One, 9.25pm)

Words by Sarah Morgan

As William Shakespeare once so wisely said, “what’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Nevertheless, it does come in handy to have an eye-catching title for your latest TV series – it’s bound to make potential viewers sit up, take notice and, hopefully, tune in.

Perhaps that’s why prolific writer Anthony Horowitz, who turned 70 earlier this year, chose to call his latest six-part thriller Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue – if that doesn’t grab your attention, surely nothing will. In the past, he’s penned the Alex Rider novels and three James Bond books, as well as numerous other bestsellers. On TV, he’s best known for creating Foyle’s War, but that might change after his latest project airs.

“(It’s) an ingenious, original and suspenseful murder mystery multiplied by nine,” smiles Sue Deeks, Head of BBC Programme Acquisition, when discussing the show. “It is absolutely guaranteed to keep viewers riveted to their screens until the very end.”

Thankfully, the plot does indeed sound just as enthralling as the title suggests and begins with the crash of a small aircraft in the Mexican jungle. Nine passengers and members of the crew are found dead by a rescue team, their bodies removed and stored in a local morgue. However, it soon becomes clear that nothing is quite what it seems – only one of them was killed during the accident, the rest were murdered later. But whodunit, and why?

During a variety of flashbacks, clues will be revealed as audiences get to watch the survivors’ final hours, which take place during searing heat and involve trying to deal with dwindling supplies, danger from the local wildlife and, of course, the killer in their midst. We’re promised a shocking ending too.

Fans of the noughties TV adventure Lost are sure to find it intriguing, although the show promises to be hugely original in its approach. It also features a wonderful cast led by Will & Grace star Eric McCormack. Those who joined him on location (it was shot largely in the Canary Islands) include Great Pottery Throw Down host Siobhán McSweeney, Icelandic star Ólafur Darri Ólafsson of Trapped and The Tourist fame, Happy Valley’s Adam Long and Star Trek: Discovery’s David Ajala.

“Our story has a universality which makes it perfect for the BBC,” claims Jill Green, CEO of production company Eleventh Hour Films. “We are thrilled to have assembled a global cast that will bring total authenticity to this original drama.”

Michael Wright, head of fellow backers MGM+, adds: “Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue is a clever and wildly entertaining, edge-of-your-seat thriller. Anthony Horowitz has spun a masterfully inventive web of deception and intrigue that keeps audiences guessing until the very last axe falls.”

And don’t worry if, after watching the entire run, you’re desperate to see more from Horowitz – the BBC is soon set to air an adaptation of his bestselling novel Marble Hall Murders, the third to feature Lesley Manville as book editor-turned-sleuth Susan Ryeland.

Eva Longoria: Searching for Spain (Sunday 28/09/2025, BBC Two, 8.20pm)

Words by Richard Jones

After going Searching for Mexico in 2023, deciding the destination of her next gastronomic pilgrimage was easy for Eva Longoria.

In an interview with Condé Nast Traveler in May, the Desperate Housewives star admitted taking inspiration from her father.

“My dad’s always like, ‘You know, we’re from Spain’. And I was like, ‘No, we’re not, dad. We’re from Mexico’. And he’s like, ‘No, the Longorias are from Spain’, which makes sense with the conquest and colonisation.”

Eva hails from royal blood that traces back to the ancient kingdom of the Visigoths and is proud of her Spanish origins and heritage.

And in this new eight-part series, she explores how the land, its people and their culture have shaped its cuisines.

From homemade tapas, fresh seafood delicacies, rustic paellas and beyond, the actress, who turned 50 in March, will enjoy some of Spain’s most iconic dishes and look at how the country is propelling the future of fine dining.

“I felt like I was at home,” she says about the trip.

“I was really curious and engaged in the history of gastronomy in the country, but also the history of the ingredients and how things ended up there and colonisation and how did that help, and Franco’s dictatorship and how did that have an effect on food.

“I do live part-time in Spain. I live in Marbella in the south, but just visited very, very superficially. So to go to Spain in this way, with the show, really dig in deeply, was a gift.

“Everyone needs to eat, and I want to go find the best places. And now with social media and lists and content ads and magazines, you can plan out what you want to do and you can plan out your cultural experience through food.”

Eva begins her journey by wandering around Barcelona, Catalonia and the Costa Brava region, a Mediterranean hub of creativity and cuisine, where world-class chefs push the boundaries of Spanish food.

Among the dishes she helps prepare is suquet, a traditional Catalan seafood stew, which she says is inspired by one of the region’s culinary stars.

“That’s where Ferran Adrià, probably the most well-known chef of Spain, comes from,” she says.

“He had El Bulli for many, many years. Number one restaurant in the world, a year waiting list, and it wasn’t easy to get to.

“He has since closed, but he has many disciples that worked in El Bulli and he really created the molecular gastronomy movement.”

Unsurprisingly, Eva’s favourite part of the series is the sixth episode when she returns to the majestic mountains, orchards and seas of her ancestral roots.

She says: “Asturias is its own episode because it’s is an amazing region in the north that is known for its cheese and dairy.

“The best milk comes from Asturias. It’s a mountainous region and it’s cold, it’s hard living. They’re trying to repopulate. People are now going back. It’s a very rural place, like I said, cows and dairy and sheep, and they make great cheese that rivals French cheese.

“And the town Longoria is still there. It still exists. I have distant cousins that are there, and so to be able to break bread in our ancestral home that still had the Longoria family crest above the door was crazy.”

Blue Lights (Monday 29/09/25, BBC One, 9pm)

Words by Sarah Morgan

Happy Valley’s Sgt Catherine Cawood, played so memorably by Sarah Lancashire, may be the greatest fictional woman copper of all time (yes, even better than the lead in Juliet Bravo), but she’s getting a run for her money from Grace, who was a rookie police officer when we first met her during the opening episode of Blue Lights’ first series.

Played by Sian Brooke, she’s a single forty-something mother of a teenage son who decided to give up her career as a social worker to join the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).

The project is the brainchild of Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, who also penned the hugely acclaimed three-parter The Salisbury Poisonings. They met while working on the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Panorama before switching to fiction, eventually setting up their own production company, Hot Sauce Pictures, in Belfast, where Blue Lights takes place.

“Every writer wants to explore their own place and their own society as authentically and as honestly as they can,” say the duo. “We feel enormously grateful to BBC drama for letting us do that with Blue Lights. And to do it with a cast boasting so much talent makes it even more exciting.

“At its heart, this is a show about personal, institutional and social change, and we want each series to reflect that in its own way.”

“Everywhere we went, we definitely had a warm welcome, it was great,” says Nathan Braniff, who plays Grace’s younger colleague Tommy Foster, when asked about filming in the city. “We got a lot of people coming up because they’ve seen the cameras and they’ve seen the police uniforms and sort of put two and two together that it was Blue Lights. It was nice, having people being so positive.”

This time around, Grace, Tommy and their cohort Annie are now two years into their roles, so are far more experienced – and they’re about to be tested like never before.

“The world that Declan and Adam have created has expanded even more and you begin to understand the complexities of the crimes the characters are encountering in their day-to-day jobs,” claims Brooke.

The trio are about to enter the murky world of organised crime. But it’s not necessarily the violent hoodlums and enforcers involved that will cause them the biggest problems – it’s the white collar villains, such as dodgy accountants and lawyers who make their paymasters’ schemes work, who take centre stage.

What’s more, they are willing to do anything to cover their tracks – even targeting the police and their loved ones.

Cathy Tyson and Michael Smiley join the cast, while the six episodes have been directed by Jack Casey and former Coronation Street and Waterloo Road star Angela Griffin.

Will Grace and co live to fight another day, or have the writers got something shocking up their sleeves? Whatever the case, we’re promised plenty of drama, determination and edge-of-the-seat excitement – matters Catherine Cawood never shied away from either.

Taylor (Tuesday 30/09/25, Channel 4, 9.15pm)

Words by Rachael Popow

On Friday, October 3, Taylor Swift releases her new album, The Life of a Showgirl.

It’s not like her fans have been starved of content – her previous album, The Tortured Poets Department, only came out 18 months ago, which was all the more impressive as she was then in the midst of her record-breaking Eras world tour at the time.

Despite that, The Life of a Showgirl is one of the year’s most anticipated records, destined to be analysed by fans and the media alike as they work out what it can tell us about where Taylor is right now. The recent announcement that she’s engaged to American football star Travis Kelce has only heightened the excitement.

But how exactly did Taylor Swift come to be one of the world’s biggest stars, someone whose every utterance, lyric and social media post is scrutinised for clues? Or for that a matter a self-made billionaire at 35, who is also the first woman to be named Time’s Person of the Year twice? That’s what this two-part documentary sets out to discover.

It’s directed by Guy King, whose previous credits include The Fall, Bombing Brighton and Our Falklands War, and who clearly doesn’t see making a documentary about a pop star as that big a pivot.

He says: “Taylor Swift is an unprecedentedly powerful 21st-century voice for women and young people. Under the microscope of social media since the earliest days of MySpace and Tumblr, she came of age during a new feminist wave. With her fame came controversy, which she so skilfully wrestled to the floor. We’re excited to tell her story.”

It’s a tale that begins in 1989 (later the name of one of her albums), when Taylor was born in West Reading, Pennsylvania. By the time she was 11, she was determined to become a country music star, and when she was 14, her stockbroker dad transferred to his company’s Nashville office to help her follow her dreams.

The move paid off – the precociously talented teenage singer-songwriter released her debut album in 2006 and was soon a country pop phenomenon. However, this documentary argues that it was the 2009 MTV Awards, when Kanye West infamously interrupted the 19-year-old’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video, that catapulted her to a new level of fame.

It also made her the underdog – even then-President Barack Obama waded in to condemn Kanye’s outburst – but as her star rose further, she began to lose control of the narrative and came in for some less flattering coverage.

The second episode shows how Taylor seemingly stepped away, going dark on social media, before returning newly defiant and determined to reclaim and rewrite her story.

It worked – the documentary builds towards the Eras Tour, which was attended by more than 10 million fans in 21 countries. If that wasn’t enough of a triumph, she then announced her engagement to Kelce.

It seems like the perfect ending to an all-American fairy tale, but where Taylor can possibly go next?

Grand Designs (Wednesday 01/10/25, Channel 4, 9pm)

Words by Rachael Popow

Kevin McCloud is back with a 26th series of the property show, but just what is that makes Grand Designs so enduring? As the latest episode reminds us, as well as given us a chance to have a look round some truly remarkable buildings, it also provides a lot of human drama.

As veteran viewers will know, at the beginning of the episode, the housebuilders are usually confident that will they bring their ambitious projects in on time and on budget, and then things start to go wrong…

If you’re wondering why they never seem to learn their lesson, Kevin believes that it’s the nature of the format. If these people weren’t optimists, they wouldn’t want to build their own house in the first place.

Speaking ahead of a previous series, he explained: “Of the people we’ve filmed, I think the most common mistake is one which is so bound up with human nature and over-confidence. Those of us who are blessed with a degree of normal self-doubt are hugely nervous of the idea of embarking on a project like this.

“And so those that do, tend to be pretty well-empowered individuals. The majority of people we film have a degree of self-belief, that’s what’s got them there in the first place. That brings with it a belief that I hear again and again, which is; ‘This project is going to come in on time and on budget.’ And my answer is; ‘I’ve never really seen a project do that.’”

It seems that tonight’s episode won’t necessarily be the exception that proves the rule, but it does show that some things have changed since Grand Designs first appeared on our screens all the way back in 1999.

Kevin says: “Sustainability and the ecological performance of buildings was a fringe interest back then. We’d have our token eco-home in each series. Now, all of them are super-insulated, all of them are way beyond building regulations, because if you’re going to build a house for yourself why would you not want a zero-energy build.”

Sustainability is at the heart of tonight’s Grand Design as Kevin meets artist Sarah, who after 40 years of mainly living in the southeast of England is now returning to her roots in the northeast after buying an exposed, three-acre plot.

She has plans to build a radical home and creative hub combined, complete with a studio and gallery for displaying and selling art, and hopes to construct it from hempcrete.

Made from the stem of the hemp plant, cannabis sativa, mixed with lime and water, it’s super-sustainable and will give the house a dramatic earthy look. However, it’s also relatively unknown and unpredictable.

As Sarah’s inexperience as a project manager begins to show and the critical hemp process proves increasingly tortuous, the £330,000 budget starts to spiral and the success of the project hangs in the balance.

Sharon & Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home (Thursday 02/10/25, BBC1, 9pm)

Words by Rachael Popow

Although his fans knew he had been dealing with health problems, Ozzy Osbourne’s death on July 22 at the age of 76 still came as a huge shock.

Not only had many of his followers believed that he was essentially indestructible, but the news came just two weeks after he’d played a triumphant homecoming gig with the band that made his name, Black Sabbath.

And it wasn’t just rock fans who mourned his passing. He may have helped to pioneer the genre of heavy mental and infamously bitten the head off a bat that a fan had thrown on stage (although in Ozzy’s defence, he had assumed it was a toy), but in the 2000s, he reached a whole new audience thanks to the reality show The Osbournes.

So, whether people knew him as the self-styled Prince of Darkness or as a loveably befuddled TV dad, his death caused an outpouring of grief, with tens of thousands of people lining the streets of Birmingham for his public funeral procession.

Now, there’s another chance to pay tribute to Ozzy as the BBC brings us Sharon & Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home, which charts the final chapter of his life.

Shot over three years with Ozzy, his wife Sharon and their children Kelly and Jack, it was originally intended to document the couple’s decision to leave Los Angeles after 25 years and return to the return to the English country house in Buckinghamshire, where they once brought up their family.

Ozzy planned to spend his retirement there, and the film shows him surrounded by a growing army of grandchildren as well as a pack of dogs.

Before giving up gigging though, Ozzy wanted to perform one last time for his fans.

However, as the film shows, he faced numerous obstacles.

As well as a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, Ozzy underwent a succession of back surgeries following a fall, which left him in extreme pain, frequently struggling to walk. As Kelly poignantly puts it, his family had to adjust to the realisation that the ‘Iron Man’ isn’t actually made of iron.

But while he may have been dealing with health problems, Ozzy’s humour and determination remained intact.

Ben Wicks and Colin Barr, Executive Producers at Expectation, say: “It was an incredible privilege to spend the last few years with Ozzy, as well as Sharon, Jack and Kelly. Ozzy wanted to make it back to the UK and appear on stage one last time – our film is an inspiring and poignant account of him fulfilling that dream.

“Ozzy was loved by millions around the world not just for his music, but for his sense of mischief and his honesty all of which we saw plenty of in the final years of his life.

“But one thing shone through even more brightly to us, and that was Ozzy’s intense love for his exceptional family who were by his side through it all.”

How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge) (Friday 03/09/2025, BBC One, 9.30pm)

Words by Richard Jones

After starting out as a voice artist on Spitting Image in the 1980s, creating some of British comedy’s most memorable characters and impersonating a handful of high-profile real-life people, Steve Coogan is used to playing second fiddle to those he depicts.

And the comedian and actor is isn’t afraid to admit that his most famous creation, a certain Mr Alan Gordon Partridge, will always be more in demand than he is.

“Alan’s definitely more popular than me,” Coogan said when he was asked if he’s jealous of Partridge’s universal appeal in a recent interview with The Guardian.

“That’s a given. He also wants to be liked by as many people as possible. I don’t care about that.

“When something has really gotten under my skin, rather than get broadsided for it, I’ll have Alan be the champion of the thing I loathe, but in a funny way. ”

With that in mind, Coogan also admits that he shares a fair few characteristics with Alan, as well as his face.

“I do accept that Alan is an unfiltered, unedited version of me,” the Lancastrian, who turns 60 later this month, says.

“Some of his world view I fundamentally disagree with. But there will be something that I’ll be glad to put the Alan wig on so I can say it out loud.”

It’s been 34 years since Coogan and Armando Iannucci created the hapless sports presenter for BBC Radio 4’s On the Hour.

And now, Partridge is back in How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge), which has had fans giddy with excitement since it was first announced in early 2024.

The last time we saw the broadcaster on TV was four years ago, when he lost an opportunity to interview Princess Anne on This Time with Alan Partridge.

Now, this new six-part follows Alan as he attempts to reintegrate into British life after spending 12 months in Saudi Arabia.

But what begins as a documentary about homecoming soon morphs into something more personal as he realises that the happiness he thought he’d feel back in Norwich just hasn’t materialised.

The result is a mental-health documentary, as Alan sets off on a quest to understand his funk and share his findings with the nation.

As usual, he has one eye on his career – if How Are You? ends up in him being seen as a mental-health champion for the middle-aged, who’s also a good fit to present other issues-led documentary strands, so be it.

Over the next few weeks, Alan asks if talking helps or is it better to just shut your mouth, and considers if we need the company of other people (or dogs).

He also spends some time with Mother Nature in the Peak District, before a tragic death leads to a moment of catharsis.

As the series begins tonight, we see Alan leaving a lucrative career voicing radio commercials behind and making a bravely personal and personally brave return to television.

There’s also some behind-the-scenes footage with his long-suffering assistant Lynn (Felicity Montagu), while Alan also attempts to reconcile with Sidekick Simon (Tim Key).

As well as resurrecting Partridge, Coogan is also being praised for his recent depiction of former Republic of Ireland football manager Mick McCarthy in sports biopic Saipan.

But although he appears to have the gruff Barnsley-born boss down to a tee, it’s unlikely that any of his impersonations or characters will ever be as popular as a certain broadcaster from Norfolk.