BBC Four
Ismene Brown
And so Mad Men 4 rode into the sunset, Don perched on yet another horse (sorry, love interest), a fifth series in production, and it’s all become a soap opera rather than a drama series. It should be called Madly Men. Fast diminishing returns, one of them me, diminishing possibly to zero next time. I’d held hopes that series 4 would see Don come to the picturesque fall promised in the credit sequence, probably off a cliff far away in the wilderness where his body would lie unnoticed like an empty Lucky Strike packet. His hidden identity would tear through his careful carapace and his Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Getting On, a wonderfully lo-fi and dark sitcom, debuted last year, it had a run of just three episodes, which possibly reflected the BBC’s lack of faith in audiences being able to appreciate a programme rich in subtlety in its writing, acting and direction. But thankfully the Corporation has seen the light and the medical comedy now returns with a six-part run, and is as brilliantly observed and laugh-out-loud funny as ever.We are in general medical ward B4, in the kind of hospital that you hope doesn’t exist in real life but, given that Jo Brand, one of Getting On’s co-writers with Read more ...
howard.male
The recurrent image in this somewhat staid documentary is a monochrome photograph of Poe’s moon of a face with its panda-like eye sockets. Occasionally the camera moves in for a close-up on those eyes - perhaps hoping they’ll reveal something that mere biographical detail doesn’t - but appropriately enough the grim Gothic writer’s eyes are more black holes than windows on the soul, and they give nothing away. The horrors, scandals and tragedies of Poe’s life had to be exhumed from his words, and the words of those who came into his orbit.With Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” throbbing away in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Obviously the world has decided it needs Mark Gatiss, and it keeps finding things for him to do. An influential figure in the latterday revival of Doctor Who, as well as co-creator of the BBC's recent Sherlock, Gatiss's forte is turning out to be whimsical old-fashioned adventure stories, perhaps overlaid with a patina of science fiction.In that case, what could be more appropriate than an update of H G Wells's novel The First Men in the Moon, originally published in 1901? The protagonist, the charmingly eccentric scientist and inventor Professor Arthur Cavor, could have been the Doctor Who Read more ...
howard.male
If you have fond childhood memories of either the Born Free book or movie, you might want to stay away. From the opening moments of this documentary, the knowledge that lion-loving conservationist George Adamson was fatally shot in the back on a dirt road in Kenya will immediately stop John Barry’s epic and optimistic theme song from swelling to life in your head. But that’s only the beginning of a systematic dismantling of the Born Free myth from a documentary which, ironically, was made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Joy Adamson’s unexpected bestseller.With the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“It was the best part of my life,” said one silver-haired lady in ringing tones, while another described it as “poetry” and a third as “the aeroplane and you were one”. What these doughty octogenarians were describing in this gem of a film was flying Spitfires during the Second World War.
The three women – and a few more more tracked down by director Harvey Lilley – are among the last-remaining women who served in the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), a 1,000-strong male-only preserve when the war started, but which had 168 female members by its end. The ATA delivered aircraft from factories to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I used to have a childhood fascination with the music of Herb Alpert, because I liked the tunes and always felt there was a hint of melancholy behind Herb’s breezy, nonchalant exterior. Everybody else found Alpert laughably cheesy, but happily, this excellent documentary proved that I was right all along by building a watertight case for regarding him as something of a neglected legend.Not neglected by the record-buying public, of course, because Alpert’s string of Tijuana Brass albums in the 1960s made him the top-earning act in the USA for a three-year period. In 1966, four of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A drama about Britain’s (and by the time Coronation Street reaches its 50th birthday in December, the world’s) longest-running soap starts with a huge advantage - its producers could just quote lumps of the brilliant original scripts, written by Corrie’s creator, Tony Warren, and be done with it. But Daran Little, himself a former writer on the show, resisted that urge (well, mostly) when penning The Road to Coronation Street, an affectionate and witty prequel that told us how the soap came about, or rather, how it almost didn’t.Although Corrie is now a staple of British TV (and many have Read more ...
Ismene Brown
That sobbing musical theme resumes, so does that hospital-white dreamlike cartoon of a male figure tumbling in a Hitchcockian fall from grace past huge ads of poster girls. Actually it’s almost as much Milton as it is Hitchcock. I say that to be deliberately pretentious, because the secret of Mad Men’s addictive draw is the human profundity you try to read into this fascinatingly surfaced drama about an empty man who doesn’t know who he is. This is the ultimate advert for TV, a series so slick and so moreish you don’t even know it’s an advert.If you are already hooked on Mad Men, you don’t Read more ...
howard.male
Every great novel is a world, and every great novelist responds to and recreates their own time in their own image. Therefore how could a three-part documentary series possibly cover that fertile period in British literature that took in both world wars and their aftermath? Of course it’s an impossible task but it’s one that is neatly circumvented here because these programs are really just an excuse for the BBC to dust off some old tapes of some of our greatest writers speaking about their work.This first in the series begins with the only known audio recording of Virginia Woolf. Across Read more ...
josh.spero
What was originally a coincidence of reviewing – two dispatches from the Dark Ages, Treasures of the Anglo-Saxons on BBC Four and Domesday on BBC Two – in fact turned into a remarkably instructive diptych of how and how not to make history programmes for the television.In reverse historical order, Domesday is the exemplum of what not to do, which is turn an average idea for In Our Time on Radio 4 into an hour-long documentary for the television. This is the greatest sin: when given time on the television, fill it with interesting pictures. There is nothing – almost nothing at all – in this Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Now that Last of the Summer Wine has been strapped aboard the great Stairmaster to the Sky, there’s a gap in the market for a comedy in which the landscape has a starring role. Written by Kevin Cecil, whose credits include Black Books, and Andy Riley, The Great Outdoors is a bucolic al fresco sitcom following the members of a rambling club in the Chilterns as they trudge through their drab, rather lonely lives and negotiate their petty rivalries. Like the countryside it depicts, it's diverting and nicely put together without ever quite taking the breath away. Last week’s opening episode was a Read more ...