BBC Four
howard.male
Thank goodness for selective memory, because although I remember that pop music had something of a mid-life crisis between the sequin explosion of glam rock and the spittle tsunami of punk rock, I had been blissfully spared comprehensive recall of all the grizzly details. That is until I watched what turned out to be another of those cheap-to-make caffeine-charged documentaries which goes off on so many tangents that it’s hard to recall what it was meant to be about in the first place. For last night’s look at what was described as a pivotal year for the BBC’s once-essential weekly viewing Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Whatever you think of Friends, you have to concede it was good in the sack. If there were jokes to be had about sexual fantasy, sexual abandon and sexual incontinence, they were had. The one with free porn, the one with Rachel dressing as Princess Leia for Ross etc. The one area they avoided was sexual inhibition. It was all very refreshing, all very welcome, unless you happened to be watching with addicted youngish daughters. I was appalled at all the sex. No doubt this was a case of conditioning: in the sitcoms I grew up with sex was a dirty word. Naturally they were all British.The British Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following yesterday's season-opening Australian Grand Prix, McLaren's team boss Martin Whitmarsh was extremely unhappy that his driver Jenson Button had been given a drive-through penalty. Button had overtaken a Ferrari by cutting a corner, and should have yielded the position back, but McLaren requested guidance from the race controllers. Instead, all they got was a punishment from the stewards which retarded Button's progress by 23 seconds. "I feel a bit harshly treated," moaned Whitmarsh.Increasingly, this sort of technical quibbling is what passes for "action" in Formula 1, but back in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
As preparation for this new account of Women in Love, I conscientiously picked up a copy of the novel for the first time since studying it at university. Big mistake. By half an hour into the drama I was in a state of some discombobulation. His adaptation may be called Women in Love but William Ivory has dipped back into The Rainbow, the novel’s preceding companion volume. At some point he seems to have lobbed both books into a cement mixer.The question is - why can’t he? After all, once upon a time they were both meant to be part of the same volume called The Sisters. You can’t muck about Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For those whose only knowledge of the form is the Royal Variety Performance, this programme (part of BBC Four’s variety season) gave a nice, if all too brief, overview. The first of a two-parter was presented by Michael Grade, whose family is variety royalty - generations of Grades were performers and agents, and latterly television executives.Grade is not a natural TV performer but knew to keep his pieces to camera to a minimum (clearly a memo that failed to reach Alan Yentob’s desk) and instead was happy to listen to the anecdotes - and joyfully there were lots of them. Ken Dodd, Roy Hudd, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
BBC Four's Britannia series keeps it simple - it tells the story in a straight line, illustrates it with as much archive material as the budget will allow, and interviews as many key protagonists as it can find. If the subject is strong enough, you'll get a good film out of it.And so it was with the reggae edition (part of the Reggae Britannia season), which took a brisk 90-minute march from reggae's arrival in Britain from Jamaica in the Sixties to the point where it disappeared into Soul II Soul's dub/soul/R&B mixture. They'd rounded up pretty well everybody who ever had a stake in Brit Read more ...
Veronica Lee
At first sight, “Afghanistan cricket team” might be labled along with “The kosher guide to cooking pork” or “How to keep your promises, by N Clegg”. But in 2008, Taj Malik, an Afghan player passionate about the game, decided to try to take his national team into the world’s elite level and this film (part of the Storyville strand), by three young film-makers, Tim Albone, Leslie Knott and Lucy Martens, followed their efforts over two years.As you might expect, Malik and co were not starting from a level playing field. As the gentle, ever-smiling coach (who rather touchingly believed the answer Read more ...
josh.spero
Aptly for a programme whose title invokes a show which is all style, no substance, the subject of Ronald Reagan: American Idol is image. What was Reagan really like? How much of his career as a Hollywood star did he carry into office? And why have certain images of Reagan endured? The first question, alas, is the one neither the film nor his biographers nor his family and friends have come close to answering.The film, directed by Eugene Jarecki and shown to coincide with Reagan's centenary, opens with an ancient clip of Reagan talking about the fictionality of what follows. This tactic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The way the BBC keeps knocking out these little biopics about the lives of various household names (John Lennon, Gracie Fields, Margot Fonteyn etc), you'd think there was nothing simpler than to get inside the mind of some complex public figure, deftly sketching in a bit of socio-historical background on the side with a bit of help from the props and archive department. And, as this low-rent effort to drill into the emotional life of the beloved comic actress Hattie Jacques amply demonstrated, you'd be completely wrong.Throughout most of its 85 minutes I was poised on the edge of my seat, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It’s not so much the children of mad celebs I feel sorry for as their animals. The private zoo stuffed with exotic, non-indigenous wildlife is a sure sign of money, power and hubris run riot. The tigers and chimps at the Neverland ranch became powerful symbols of Michael Jackson’s dislocation. Similarly, last night's Storyville told how an abandoned brood of pet hippos have come to define the worst excesses of the late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar.Escobar was not a conventional star, but he enjoyed all the trappings of celebrity: wealth, glamour, infamy. He was hailed as a hero at Read more ...
howard.male
A startling one in 10 British adults apparently went to a music festival this year. Given that I’m a music journalist and I didn’t, maybe I’m some kind of astronomically unlikely anomaly. I’d like to think so. But those familiar aerial shots of Glastonbury – not just a few fields but a sizeable expanse of Britain’s patchwork-quilt landscape, completely overrun by an infestation of teeming humanity - is enough to make me feel smugly sane to have decided, as usual, to just remain cosily at home watching whatever the BBC had decreed were the best bits.But that doesn’t mean that a potted (and pot Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems like an aeon ago that we had people who dared to make television series with names like Civilisation or The Ascent of Man. The notion of TV as a forum for vigorous intellectual debate and for taking the philosophical measure of human progress has come to seem almost as quaint as the Reithian newsreader being compelled to wear a dinner suit. I don’t think QI really counts, does it?But in My Father, the Bomb and Me, Lisa Jardine – eldest daughter of emigré Polish polymath Jacob Bronowski, who created and presented 1973’s aforesaid Ascent of Man – hacked some chips off the old block Read more ...