Michael Samuels makes the long kind of British television drama: one life or two, told across decades, from the diaries and the letters. He is good with actors and with the people they hand a part to, and less sure what to do with the clock.
Fi1m perspective
The thing we remember from Any Human Heart (2010) is two men in one frame who are the same man. Michael Samuels puts the young Logan Mountstuart and the old one in the same room and lets one look at the other, and what should be a gimmick turns out to be the best idea in four hours of television. He does it sparingly. That is the measure of him as a director: a good instinct, used with restraint, inside a form that does not always leave room for it.
He came up through the soaps, EastEnders and Brookside in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and then moved into the single drama with The Falklands Play (2001) and The Curse of Steptoe (2007). Any Human Heart is where his particular subject settled. Since then he has kept returning to lives that run across years or generations and to material that started on a page or in a record: Man in an Orange Shirt (2017), two love stories, one post-war and one now; The Windermere Children (2020), about child survivors of the Holocaust brought to the Lake District, drama with the survivors' own testimony folded in. He wrote as well as directed Mrs Mandela (2010), and he went to crime with The Fear (2012), four parts with Peter Mullan and Richard E. Grant. The work has continued into the mid-2020s with Close to Me (2021), Coma (2024) and The Trial (2025).
What he does well is the handover. Three actors play Logan in Any Human Heart, Sam Claflin, Matthew Macfadyen and Jim Broadbent, and Samuels makes them one person without asking anyone to do an impression of anyone else. He is comfortable with a large cast and a long story, and he trusts a good face in close-up. He has shot three projects with the cinematographer Wojciech Szepel, and the look of his dramas is steady and unshowy, which suits them. What he does less well is time. Any Human Heart has most of a century to get through and it hurries where it should linger, and that complaint, conventional television pacing, is the one reservation that follows him around. He is not a director who stops the clock. He keeps it running at the speed the schedule allows.
The moment that got us was not the showy one. Tim Murrell, the editor, keeps cutting back to Broadbent at a table with the notebooks, so that every blunder the young Logan makes is watched by the old man who has to live with it, and by the third episode we found ourselves dreading those cutaways and needing them. That is Samuels at his best: a plain device, held to, which turns a life into something a viewer has to answer for too.
We have reviewed only the one. It is the one to start with, and it is the one where he comes nearest to being more than reliable.
Biography
Michael Samuels is a British television director, producer and screenwriter. He directed the four-part drama series Any Human Heart (2010), adapted by William Boyd from his novel, which won the BAFTA Award for Best Drama Serial.
His other credits include the series Man in an Orange Shirt (2017) and the biographical television film The Windermere Children (2020), for which he received a BAFTA nomination for Best Single Drama. He has also directed The Fear (2012) and episodes of series including Black Work (2015) and Close to Me (2021).
