reality TV
Adam Sweeting
I stayed in a frightful hotel in Plymouth once. Decrepit rooms, filthy windows, potentially fatal cuisine, sinister staff… By contrast, that same city’s Astor Hotel looked quite pleasant, though not if you were viewing it through the gimlet eyes of Alex Polizzi. Nothing that met her gaze was adequate. The décor was too kitschy and flowery and old-fashioned. The carpets were disgusting, the walls stained and peeling, the lobby too gloomy to contemplate. The establishment’s habit of equipping wardrobes with tatty mismatched plastic hangers aroused her ire. The practice of leaving towels on the Read more ...
fisun.guner
No-nonsense Hayley Taylor is to the terminally unemployed what Jo Frost, aka Supernanny, is to the attention-seeking, tantrum-prone pre-schooler – but without the naughty step. In this reality three-parter she attempts to do what whole governments have so far failed to: to get members of the long-term, unskilled unemployed (what some might unkindly term the "Jeremy Kyle generation" – aka the underclass) back into the labour market. This she attempts to do, not by sprinkling magic Fairy Jobmother dust over the British economy, but by addressing the “negativity” of those she’s come to rescue Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
So was it nice to see him (to see him nice)? Actually nice is probably the wrong word for Bruce Forsyth on the evidence of the opening documentary in a new series of Cutting Edge – tetchy, obsessive in his habits and (as we shall see) sometimes downright unpleasant, may be nearer the mark, as director David Nath gains access to Forsyth’s two palatial homes (both on the edge of golf courses, it almost goes without saying) in Wentworth, Surrey, and Puerto Rico.Living with Brucie was done a disservice by being advertised as if authored by his wife Wilnelia Merced-Forsyth, a sort of love letter Read more ...
fisun.guner
We know the format: take a bunch of posh, privileged types - held up as examples of cluelessness when it comes to how “ordinary” people live by privileged, overpaid TV executives - and plonk them down in the middle of some dodgy council estate. Remove their credit cards and give them £6.50 to last a week. Watch as they baulk at the amount of cash their new, jobless neighbour manages to spend on fags, kebabs and the occasional drug habit. Watch as they wonder how to react to the plight of a harassed single mother in a mouldy one-bed flat who’s railing against immigrant families being given“ Read more ...
howard.male
With the last ever series of Big Brother dominating Channel Four’s schedules for the rest of the summer, the first TV screening of this Sundance Film Festival award-winner couldn’t have been better timed. Because the chillingly disconcerting “art project” that dot-com pioneer Josh Harris devised back in 1999 (just before Big Brother came on air for the first time) made the world’s most controversial reality TV show look like Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation, by comparison. American film director Ondi Timoner’s documentary is an unsettling look at Harris’s struggle to find himself which Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Melvyn Bragg last night won this year’s Bafta TV fellowship for his long championing of ITV’s arts with the now mothballed flagship The South Bank Show, which itself has been nominated for more than 30 Baftas and won nine. Ironically Simon Cowell was another winner at the London Palladium, with a special award for an outstanding contribution to entertainment and for furthering new talent in reality talent shows such as The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent. The political satire The Thick of It won three awards, Julie Walters's win for Best Actress as Mo Mowlam beat herself in the euthanasia Read more ...
sue.steward
In the week that Sarah Ferguson was caught on a secret camera receiving a stash of $40,000 from News of the World journalists, Tate Modern launched this ambitious and excitingly diverse photography exhibition. Had the meeting been earlier, the incriminating images would have been perfect for the show. Instead, the Royal Family is spied on in Alison Jackson’s unusually generous parody, The Queen Plays with her Corgis. Spread across 14 rooms, the collection holds over 250 still images and several short films, and includes work by legends from the early years and 20th-century icons (from Read more ...
william.ward
By general consent, The Real Thing expresses an almost perfect balance between the brilliance of its dialogue and the ideas examined on one hand, and the depth and range of human feelings on the other. Anna Mackmin’s brisk and dynamic take on the play, first performed nearly 30 years ago, to a large extent succeeds in recontextualising what is surely a classic, for a subsequent generation of viewers.Viewers rather than theatre-goers perhaps, because one of the principal differences between the cultural baggage of those who would have seen the first production at the Strand Theatre in Read more ...
howard.male
You might think that an hour-long documentary mainly shot around a slaughter yard and rubbish dump might not make for particularly agreeable television, but trust me, this opener of a three-part series is by turns amusing, life-enhancing and gripping. Producer Will Anderson and director Gavin Searle have done an excellent job of getting under the surface of one of the worlds great megacities. A place that in the space of 50 years has grown from a population of about 300,000 to 16 million today.At first, parts of Lagos society appear to be on the brink of meltdown, but as the documentary Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Having already unearthed a Joseph, a Maria, an Oliver and a Nancy for three of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s many West End productions, at the same time generating several dozen hours' worth of free primetime publicity, the BBC are now aiding the “merciful Lord” in his search for a Dorothy (and a Toto, although we’ll have to wait until future episodes before we get into the Alan Partridge-esque circus of dog auditions) to tread the boards in his forthcoming stage adaptation of The Wizard of Oz.Over the Rainbow is basically The X Factor for girls raised on Boden and Birkenstocks. One candidate's Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We know the grammar now by rote. Some local institution is on its uppers. A traditional way of life is threatened by changing times. Sic transit etcetera and so forth. What’s wanted is a shot in the arm, a kick in the seat, preferably administered by a famous well-known celebrity star, one if at all possible followed at all times by their own bespoke camera crew. And yea, lo, not to mention verily, they will sprinkle their fairy dust, twinkle their pixie bits, and an impossible task of a horridly hard nature will by some completely predictable miracle be achieved, all thanks to grit, graft Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Naturally it would be impossible to reach an objective verdict on what is the worst programme ever shown on television, but it is at least safe to say that Popstar To Operastar is determined not to get left behind in the race to the bottom. This could also be said of some of its contestants, whose unfamiliarity with the concept of "singing" seemed surprising in people who perform music for a living, albeit of the non-operatic kind.Not that the concept is necessarily a bad one. The notion of recruiting a bunch of pop singers and bussing them over to the operatic sphere could have been a device Read more ...