TV
Graham Fuller
British film noir followed two courses in the 1980s. Whereas the American neo-noir revival of the 1970s prompted such contemporary crime thrillers as The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa, and Stormy Monday, three superior BBC drama serials, though also neo-noirs, drew more rigorously on Hollywood’s classic noir era.Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness (1985) and Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986) were acknowledged as masterpieces. Howard Brenton’s Dead Head (1986) was admired but not lauded to the same extent. The red tops’ predictable reaction to a sex scene that showed the woman Read more ...
terry.friel
Covering both sides of a conflict is never easy. Apart from the physical dangers, warring parties are wary of journalists who've reported on and established ties with the enemy. Afghanistan showed this as clearly as anywhere, when the US forces were suspicious of any journalists with Taliban contacts.British film-maker Olly Lambert’s Syria: Across the Lines strode confidently over that hurdle, giving a unique insight into the people on both sides of Syria's civil war as it continues to veer in and out of the headlines after two years of fighting and more than 70,000, mainly civilian, deaths. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Where will it end? Inspector Morse keeled over all the way back in the year 2000. Then the faintly unimaginable happened. Morse’s plodding sidekick Lewis got a promotion and started solving Oxford’s apparently inexhaustible supply of murders himself. When Lewis retired this January, the logical choice would have been to hand the baton on his lanky junior. Hathaway sounds like a series, doesn't it? But no, ITV have long been hatching other plans for the brand that keeps on printing money.A year ago we were spirited back in time to look in on the junior Morse as he made his first Read more ...
joe.muggs
In six and a half years of existence, SBTV has redefined what youth culture broadcasting can be. It began as nothing more than a YouTube channel where Jamal Edwards would put up videos he had filmed of his favourite grime MCs – but his natural ambition and charm ensured it kept expanding from that base.Covering sounds that were just starting to form the basis of a new British pop music, Edwards not only built an admirable contact book, but demonstrated an understanding of branding which turned SBTV into the viewing destination for “urban” music fans – more so than any terrestrial or cable Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Oxford. A glum afternoon in early spring, 2000. Tourists clogging the city’s arteries. On a terrace overlooking the river Cherwell, a tour guide finishes her spiel and shepherds a flock of pensioners on to the next destination. A lone squat figure with silver hair, leaning contemplatively against the railings, doesn’t budge. The tour guide is convinced he’s one of hers. A quick cup of tea, she says kindly, and it’s back on the coach to Stratford. He turns the sad hound’s face on her, with its blowtorch eyes, and advises her brusquely of her mistake.Up on Magdalen Bridge, a group of Italian Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Does Caroline Aherne hate women? Surely not, but given that there have been plenty of painfully humourless so-called comedies over the years with this heavy a reliance on recurring jokes about older women’s breasts you could be forgiven for hoping that one of the country’s most high-profile comediennes might use her position to produce something a little less puerile than The Security Men.Aherne and Pope's foursome at least seem to be having funThe flimsy hour-long programme was co-written with Jeff Pope, who worked with Aherne on 2009‘s The Fattest Man in Britain. The Security Men reused a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The cup of tea is a national institution that brings comfort and good cheer to millions. So is Victoria Wood. Blend them in a pot and you’ve got a pleasing brew called Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea. It might not have been so. When Wood last ventured out into the former Empire it was to visit all the places in the world named after Queen Victoria. The concept felt slightly stewed. Not here.Broken down into two distinct chapters, Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea spent the first hour explaining precisely where the humble cuppa came from. Put very reductively, its precious leaves were originally Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I don't know how accurate Scott & Bailey is as a portrayal of the daily experiences of policewomen, but screenwriter Sally Wainwright is enjoying herself hugely with the chaotic private lives of her protagonists. Quite a bit of this echoes back to the death of barrister Nick Savage (the ineffably sleazy Rupert Graves) in series two. He was DC Rachel Bailey's lover, though he'd failed to mention that he was already married with two children. To heap insult on injury, she then discovered he'd had an affair with a juror during a court case.Anyhow, in this mostly-retrospective episode, we saw Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Mrs Thatcher famously presided over a huge rise in unemployment, but down the years she kept a large sorority of impersonators (and one male one) off the dole. She was lucky with her mimics, who included some of the great actresses of the age, and never luckier than when Meryl Streep (pictured below) inhabited the role of Britain's first female Prime Minister. To her three election victories, Thatcher was able to add - if by proxy - an Academy Award for Best Actress.The first person to grab the handbag was Janet Brown on The Mike Yarwood Show, even before the Conservatives' return to office Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Swedish cop drama Arne Dahl snugly fits BBC Four’s Saturday-evening slot for continental European TV imports, but it also suggests that the well might be running dry. Based on the opening episode there’s not much intrinsically wrong with it, but it’s not distinctive and – beyond Irene Lindh’s forceful portrayal of lead detective Jenny Hultin – lacks any characteristically Scandinavian markers. Things may change as the series finds its feet but, for now, Arne Dahl could have sprung from anywhere in Europe. The stock types making up Hultin’s team further that impression.Sweden’s top businessman Read more ...
fisun.guner
There was a time when the art of the Low Countries was considered to be very lowly and base indeed. It was the high art of Italy that counted if you were a person of culture and breeding. Not for you the carousing common folk of Jan Steen, or those watery flatlands of Van Goyen, touched with too much bleak realism. It was the arcadian Campagna of Claude – like Poussin a Frenchman but with the Rubicon flowing through his veins – that you looked to.But that was all long, long ago, in the days when the Grand Tour didn’t allow for a quick stop-over and art-pillage in Leiden or Amsterdam, and when Read more ...
fisun.guner
Ten years ago Peter Nicholson made a BBC drama about Pompeii and its destruction. This fictionalised reconstruction, depicting made-up characters in togas saying made-up things, sounded cheesier than a pound of Brie, but was actually completely gripping: you knew what was coming, but you rooted for the characters all the same. And while it had all the ingredients of a tense thriller, nothing got in the way of telling the story clearly and intelligently.One decapitated marble head of a goddess had hair that was painted Titian-red and eyes of limpid greenWith the British Museum’s Life and Death Read more ...