Blunt FORCE

 Emily Blunt is in the saddle as an avenging mother in an epic Wild West saga

- REBECCA FLETCHER, ALISON SLADE

NEW PERIOD DRAMA The English Thursday, 9 pm, BBC2 (box set, BBC iPlayer)

Emily Blunt casts off her practically-perfect role as magical nanny Mary Poppins as she takes on a very different part this week - a gun-toting mother out for revenge in BBC2's Western drama series The English.

'Westerns are a world I've never been in before,' reveals Blunt. 'It's such a mythic story place a world built on brutality, loss, and a need to reclaim who you are. I'd only read two pages of the script when I was completely captivated by this violent, dangerous yet romantic world.

SECRETS AND LIES

In the gripping six-part drama, Blunt plays Lady Cornelia Locke, an aristocratic Englishwoman who arrives in the American West in 1890, determined to find the man she holds responsible for her son's death.

Heading for the newly-built town of Hoxem, Wyoming, she meets a Native American ex-cavalry scout, Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), and the pair embark on a harrowing journey across a violent, bloody landscape.