BBC Four
Adam Sweeting
As one of the opening captions put it, "you couldn't make it up", and this sprightly drama about the House of Commons expenses scandal duly tacked its way skilfully up the channel between satire and slapstick. Concluding correctly that wallowing in moral outrage was not the way to handle a subject whose full ramifications have yet to land on us (and them) with their full crushing force, writer Tony Saint instead deftly depicted the Commons as a kind of Swiftian monstrosity, ludicrous yet malevolent.Speaker Michael Martin, Labour MP for Glasgow Springburn, was presented as an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though children’s TV series Skippy The Bush Kangaroo was only in production from 1966 to 1968, it continues to resonate deafeningly with Australians, who are still apt to break into the theme tune or start doing kangaroo-hops round their living rooms. In fact it isn’t just Australians, since its 91 episodes were shown in 128 countries and dubbed into numerous exotic languages. Swedish was not among them, since Swedish child psychologists were violently opposed to children being encouraged to believe that animals could talk. But for many viewers, Skippy put Australia on the map in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
On Daniel Ellsberg's first day in his new job at the Pentagon in 1964, working under Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred. This engagement between American destroyers and North Vietnamese torpedo boats was used as the pretext for President Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam war, and marked the start of one of the most traumatic eras in recent American history. For Ellsberg, it was a period in which he was transformed from a strategic analyst enthusiastically committed to America's global struggle against Communism into an anti-war activist Read more ...
william.ward
The latest subject in the BBC Four series of composer portraits by Christopher Nupen is Ottorino Respighi. One of the most unfairly neglected major composers of the first half of the 20th century, his reputation has suffered less from not being considered at all, but for having been confined to his trilogy of tone poems that evoke respectively the Fountains, the Pines and the Traditional Festivals of Rome. Nupen's film, made in 1982, puts a welcome case for his more challenging but less well-known work.Composed over the course of 12 tumultuous years – from Italy’s disastrous participation in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The second season of BBC Four’s artiest import began uncertainly, but season three took off at the gallop. The opening scene of the first episode prised open Don Draper’s closely guarded past with a flashback to his Depression-era infancy, depicting his adoption after the death of his mother (a prostitute). Then we jumped back to the present, where his wife Betty’s pregnancy picked up the childbirth theme. His employer, ad agency Sterling Cooper, is reeling from job cuts in the aftermath of a takeover by a British company, a problematic union which could spell rebirth or stillbirth.Some argue Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Early on in Michael Samuels’ unremittingly sombre film about Winnie Mandela, the star-crossed heroine made the observation that being married to Nelson meant you were also married to “the struggle”, and would inevitably end up in Nelson’s shadow. So it proved. Even as she went to meet Nelson (David Harewood) as he was finally released after 27 years in jail, Winnie (Sophie Okonedo) was advised to learn from the example of Prince Philip and the way he walks dutifully one step behind the Queen.With her husband sweating it out either in hiding or subsequently in Robben Island prison, Winnie was Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Only Fools and Horses, whose last new episode was broadcast to the traditionally bloated Christmas audience in 2003, has enjoyed several kinds of afterlife. It lives on lexically, in the form of the Peckhamspeak inherited by its viewers – “cushty” and “luvly jubbly”, “plonker” and “dipstick”. It is also frequently exhumed in clips packages and on repeat channels. Then came the spin-off sitcom The Green Green Grass, a fifth series of which is said to be in the pipeline. And now this: a prequel to Only Fools and Horses, a whole hour-and-a-half’s worth of back story explaining the birth of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I’ve never been quite sure whether Brian Eno is a musician, or somebody for whom music happens to be the end product of a chain of cognitive processes. Certainly it was music that powered him to prominence, either as the inventor of ambient music, a performer with Roxy Music, or as a collaborator with artists ranging from rock gods U2 and David Bowie to composers Harold Budd and Philip Glass.But as this Arena film illustrated, these days Eno is as likely to be involved in art installations, software development, the study of mathematical systems or debates on the value of global governance as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It started ten years ago with The Second World War in Colour, continued with The First World War in Colour and Britain at War in Colour. You didn’t half get the picture. In series after absorbing series, the foreign country that is the monochrome past came closer. Colour footage flushed some pink into its cheeks. Grey flowered into khaki. Now here comes another war effort. Shooting the War tells the story of 1939-1945 from the bottom up. In part one, entitled “Men”, Tommy and Jerry laid down their weapons to wield cine cameras at the elbow of history.While it’s never a good idea to buy Read more ...
josh.spero
If Andrew Graham-Dixon's arts career ever goes belly-up, there is surely a microphone with his name on it at Radio 4, so warm and confident and trustworthy is his voice. Judging, however, by his new three-part programme on BBC Four, The Art of Russia, there is no chance of this happening soon.The first episode is entitled "Out of the Forest", describing how the Russian people under Ivan the Terrible emerged from their wooded subjugation by the Mongols, but the story Graham-Dixon starts with - how they got there in the first place and how they survived - is at least as interesting.It was - as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A bit like the British constitution, it’s never been written down. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist: the edict, issued from a leather-bound desk somewhere within the innermost enclave of the citadel that is Television Centre, that an audience’s intelligence must never in any circumstances ever be taken as a given. No horses were frightened in the making of this programme.Thus, for years, those comedians presenting documentaries on often immensely serious subjects of which they overwhelmingly tend to know something fairly adjacent to bugger all. Thus the - in private - no doubt perfectly Read more ...
Ismene Brown
If Margot Fonteyn and Rudy Nureyev were the most massively important people who ever existed in ballet, then the most massively important question that ever existed in ballet was, did they sleep together? Last night Margot got this over pleasingly quickly. There was the quivery BBC anno at the start that there would be scenes “of a sexual nature”, and hop-skip-jump the couple were at it like rabbits straight after their first performance together.After that things got considerably more complicated, and far more enjoyable. Following the disaster that was Gracie! last week, I fully expected Read more ...