TV
Hanna Weibye
There’s been reasonable diversity in the ballet shown on the BBC in recent years – from full-length broadcasts of Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty and The Red Shoes to the compelling 2011 fly-on-the-wall The Agony and the Ecstasy. That’s why it was something of a disappointment to find this week’s five-hour ballet season, which finished last night, pushing a rather blandly uniform story about Tchaikovsky, Darcey Bussell and Margot Fonteyn.Last Saturday, the season opener, Darcey’s Ballerina Heroines (BBC 2), set the tone by getting the predictable Fonteyn panegyric in early, and by giving Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Back in the days before you could bash together an album on a phone, recording used to involve a group of musicians playing together in the same room. Finding the perfect studio ambience and acoustic was 90 per cent of the battle, and many a veteran musician will tell you that the studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama were the greatest of them all.Many of these old troupers had been rounded up by film-maker Greg Camalier for this fine and evocative documentary, which avoided the Brian Pern-style cliches of the bog standard rock-doc by being packed with great stories, brilliant music and loads of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hitherto, it has been routine for the average citizen to observe that while they could understand the causes of World War Two, getting a grip on why the world went to war in 1914 has been like trying to learn Mandarin while blindfolded and riding a bicycle. 37 Days, an account of the fateful few weeks leading up to the outbreak of war, has ambitions to change all that.In the first of three parts over three nights, we began (of course) with the assassination by Serbian agents of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, then were whisked away to the palaces and chancelleries of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's going to be a long slog through the mud and blood of the Great War commemorations, but we're going to learn a lot along the way. Coming up next month on BBC One is The Crimson Field, a new drama about nurses on the Western Front in 1915. Specifically, the action takes place in the fictional Hospital 25A near Étaples, where battlefield casualties find themselves being tended by a mixture of stalwart career nurses and the inexperienced young woman of the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD).Boasting a 24-carat cast which includes Suranne Jones, Hermione Norris, Oona Chaplin (pictured below), Read more ...
Matthew Wright
A series about the bizarre shenanigans of a family of ludicrous aristocrats would seem an unlikely hit for 21st-century Sunday night telly. It worked for ITV’s Downton Abbey, though, and while that’s off air, BBC One is glueing over five million to the settee with Blandings, its adaptation of PG Wodehouse’s tales of the dotty Lord Emsworth, and his prize sow, the Empress. We're already well into the second series, with quite a roster of comic acting talent visiting Blandings Castle and threatening each week to destroy Lord Emsworth’s patch of bumbling, piggy Eden. In places, it’s a lot of fun Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Do four programmes constitute a season? Let's not quibble too much; though brief, the ballet season airing on BBC2 and BBC4 this week has some appealing offerings. Judging from the strong focus on famous names (Fonteyn, Bussell) and the best known Tchaikovsky ballets, the Beeb is aiming at a broad general audience, but balletomanes will be happy to see several eminent dancers crop up as talking heads, as well as lots of lovely footage of both contemporary and historic performances.Reflecting perhaps a new confidence in the marketability of ballet, the season gets a primetime kickoff Read more ...
Andy Plaice
In its infancy back in 1997, Jonathan Creek felt fresh and inventive, with clever little swipes at the entertainment industry and a new take on crime drama: not who or why, but more of a howdunnit. Its star Alan Davies, he of the duffel coat and the tumbling hair, was rather good at narrowing his eyes and staring into space while we let our hot chocolate go cold waiting to discover not only who carried out one of those incredibly theatrical murders, but to see its baffling mechanism unpicked.And now he’s back for series five, doing rather nicely in marketing and with his days as a deviser of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hassan Ismail Konyi is not the first young man to see football as a meal ticket. The twist is that he has rather more dependents riding on his dream that most. Hassan has 26 sisters and 35 brothers. He comes from South Sudan, the youngest country on earth and one of the more benighted. But a young man can dream, and his dreams are given fuel by his national coach.“After two years in my control,” says Zoran Djordjević, “he will be in Liverpool Barcelona Manchester United”. Zoran, who doesn’t do modesty or commas, is the short fat bald Serb who has spent the past 30 years on football’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In between the second series of Silk and this new one, Peter Moffat took time out to write his rural-misery-and-cannon-fodder dirge, The Village. Having off-roaded so far from his usual track, perhaps it's no wonder that his return to the world of wigs, hypocrisy and legal sophistry felt a fraction off the pace.Last time we were loitering with intent around the nooks and corridors of Shoe Lane Chambers, we were sucked into a dystopian vortex of corruption and venality where just about everybody seemed to be compromised or on the take. Not least the legal system itself, with the noble Read more ...
fisun.guner
Is Brutalism brutal? Pugnacious? Uncouth? The name was coined by English academic and architecture writer Reynor Banham – more on him in a moment – as a play on the French béton brut (literally raw concrete) and the English “brute”, and hence was probably doomed from the start. Who, after all, can love an architectural style that sounds like it’s got all the grace of a troglodyte doing a plié before punching you in the face? The civic courtship of Brutalism in its heyday in the Sixties and Seventies (or the “long Sixties”, as Jonathan Meades prefers it) hit the skids long ago, and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Britain’s last castle, Drogo, may be only just over a century old, but repair work is going on in a big way – it’s currently the National Trust’s largest-scale restoration project. That provided the excuse for the Time Team special The Edwardian Grand Designer about Drogo's architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, though attention would surely have come round to him anyway this year, as the designer of World War One cemeteries and monuments, from London’s Cenotaph to the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval (pictured, below right). Not to mention the creator of the visual tribute to the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You could boil down the content of this new HBO import to an info-bite that reads "two detectives hunt serial killer in Louisiana", but that wouldn't give you the faintest inkling of the pace, mood or texture of what's shaping up as a remarkable chunk of television. You may find it a little slow, and the Deep South accents sometimes cry out for explanatory surtitles, but you're liable to find it seeping into your consciousness like a troubling dream you can't shake off.Unusually for an American show, this eight-part series has been authored solely by its creator, Nic Pizzolatto, and is helmed Read more ...