World War Two
Adam Sweeting
Once upon a time, they all laughed at Inspector Morse because it was felt to be too "highbrow". In 2007, ITV axed Foyle's War, despite regular ratings of about 7 million, allegedly to go in pursuit of a "younger" audience. But people power swung into action, and a surge of protest caused ITV to think again. Hence, DCS Christopher Foyle returned for a sixth series, and now here he is again in a seventh.Although that means only three episodes, a two-hour Foyle can normally be relied on to pack in a nutritious mix of whodunnit, plausible characterisation and (the trump card) a well-researched Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
From Monday 12 April, retro channel History is airing a 10-part series called WWII Lost Films. It will present the story of the Second World War from the viewpoints of 12 Americans involved in the war effort, using a newly restored stash of rare and unseen colour footage.Providing a real-life counterpoint to the fictional saga The Pacific (showing on Sky Movies Premiere), the series draws on more than 3,000 hours of film culled from private collections and archives around the globe. The footage has been restored to HD quality and refurbished with Dolby-enhanced audio, with voice-overs Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For The Pacific, the 10-part saga of a group of US Marines involved in the campaign to drive back the rampant Japanese army in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Spielberg has resumed the executive producer role he adopted to make Band of Brothers nearly a decade ago, once again in partnership with Tom Hanks. Filmed on location in Australia at a cost of $230m, it's reckoned to be the most expensive TV series ever made, and the screen is duly crammed with wall-to-wall action – naval fleets and landing craft, dogged Marines digging in against charging hordes of Japanese soldiers, squadrons of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This week the world-renowned Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch arrives in London - for the first time, without its towering creator. Last summer the German choreographer died at the age of 68. The company intends to continue, despite the dodgy track record for troupes formed around one singular giant vision to survive long without that magnet at the core. Bausch (1940-2009) was shy in person and had no need to publicise her work, but at Christmas 2001 I met her in her base in Wuppertal, and she looked back in detail over the surprising sources in her life for her innovative style of dance- 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 ...
Adam Sweeting
Thanks to the shenanigans of Brit-art superstars like Messrs Emin and Hirst, Art has become a lucrative appendage of pop culture, so it’s only logical that it should be given its own version of X Factor, with a bit of Apprentice-style authoritarianism bolted on for good measure. In School of Saatchi, a panel of judges sifts through a long list of hopefuls who are whittled down to 12, then six, then finally to the chosen one who will be installed in a London studio for three years under Charles Saatchi’s patronage.Saatchi (“one of the most influential and enigmatic figures in the world of Read more ...
james.woodall
Bertolt Brecht was probably made for them: Deborah Warner directing Fiona Shaw in Mother Courage and her Children is as desirable a coupling, surely, as the Warner-Shaw Richard II or Happy Days, both immensely satisfying showcases for the director's imaginative reach and the actress's fabled versatility. Brecht's saga of the Thirty Years' War demands a challenging cross between Shakespeare's rich historical dramaturgy and Beckett's relentless density; so the must-see urgency of the German-speaking world's best-known play at the Olivier by two such - well, is it rude to call them veterans? - Read more ...
james.woodall
Nine years ago, historian Jan T Gross published a book called Neighbours. It chronicled, and tried to analyse the reasons for, the massacre of 1,600 Jews in a north-eastern Polish village, Jedwabne, in July 1941. That was a month after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, into which, in 1939, this bit of Poland had been absorbed by Stalin. The unexamined historical assumption had been that, like so many similar east European communities, Jedwabne simply fell victim to the by then efficiently exercised Nazi lust for Jewish annihilation.Gross suggested otherwise – that half of Jedwabne’s non- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Slickness is not always a virtue in a television presenter, and Katherine Jenkins (The Week We Went To War, BBC1) has some way to go before she risks being accused of it. Her chief weapons are her blonde hair, cleavage and searchlight smile -- she isn't so much the new Vera Lynn as one of those pneumatic dream-babes that American aircrews used to paint on the noses of their B17s -- but even so she struggles to conquer a script that wallows like a torpedoed freighter.Her dialogue with assistant-host Michael Aspel, as he reminisces about being a wartime evacuee or eating austerity-style prunes Read more ...