TV
Adam Sweeting
Three years after Jonathan Creek's last one-off special, tellies across the land resounded once again to the strains of Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre, a theme tune cunningly chosen to reflect the show's mix of menace, wit and whimsy. Nor had writer David Renwick stinted on the bizarre quirks and fiendish sleights of hand, in a tale featuring a vanishing corpse and an unsolved supernatural mystery from the past, amid a herd of gambolling old thesps having a whale of a time.Chief among these were Nigel Planer and Joanna Lumley as polymath and TV producer Franklin Tartikoff and his Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
We hear ghastly, otherworldly shrieks and human screams over a black screen, which then fades to white and the sight of a man running for this life through a snowy wilderness. As he approaches a seated figure, he cries out, “friend”, only to find the poor chap holding his own head in his lap.The creators of HBO’s rightly acclaimed fantasy drama Game of Thrones like to open and close a season with the White Walkers, the undead long ago defeated in the frozen wastes north of The Wall, but whose return puts the battle for the kingdom of Westeros into perspective; whoever gets his, or her hands Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Peter Moffat's latest project is a long-form drama reminiscent of Heimat (the Edgar Reitz project that told a German family's story through the 20th century) in which he charts 100 years of life in a Derbyshire village up to the present day. The first series started last night and its six episodes cover 1914-1920; the following series haven't yet been commissioned, but on the evidence of the opening chapter Moffat must be hopeful.The story is told through the eyes of Bert Middleton (David Ryall), now the “second oldest man in Britain”, remembering his childhood. It starts with the summer of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Ever since Steven Moffat made the transition from fan favourite writer to showrunner, certain storytelling tricks in Doctor Who have become increasingly frequent. I can’t have been the only one who groaned at the short prequel to The Bells of St John, the first of eight new episodes to air before the summer, when it appeared online last week. In a two-and-a-half minute scene, the Doctor (Matt Smith) meets a little girl who is revealed to be new companion Clara Oswald (Jenna-Louise Coleman). It could only have been more of an homage to Smith’s first appearance proper, The Eleventh Hour, if the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It was one of those entirely unverifiable "facts" that music documentaries increasingly prefer over genuine insight: early on in this serviceable but routine overview of a truly stellar talent, we were told that Nile Rodgers’s guitar has “played on two billion dollars' worth of hits”. Who really knows? Who actually cares? You don’t measure the sheer joy of Chic’s “Good Times” or Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” by counting the cash or doing the math. You simply use your ears.As Johnny Marr pointed out, Rodgers is responsible for countless records “you’d have to be made out of stone not to be Read more ...
Veronica Lee
How do we know Jesus Christ was a Jew? He was still living with his mum at 33 and she thought he was God Almighty. Are you offended? I sincerely hope not and profuse apologies if you are, but that was the first religious joke I remember from my Catholic childhood, and which managed to take a swipe at two religions for the price of one.I also remember - and on my occasional forays into church still do - hearing priests crack jokes about God and the Pope from the pulpit. Maybe it's a Catholic thing, because I have never heard a left-footer make the complaint that Ann Widdecombe - former Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
As the second series of Zooey Deschanel-starring US sitcom New Girl gets underway on E4, it’s an interesting exercise to revisit first impressions. I note that when the pilot originally aired, theartsdesk was not as harsh as I was on a show which, over the course of its first year, quickly became one of my favourites. In her remarkably prescient conclusion, our Veronica Lee suggested that by toning down the central character’s kookiness and the stereotypes the show made of the rest of the characters, New Girl could turn out to be great.The strength of the show is in its ensemble castIn the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
One of the weapons deployed by Blighty in World War Two was humour. Stoical, deflating, relentlessly making light of the darkness, British wit refused to take the Third Reich as seriously as it took itself. The biggest cannon in our arsenal of laughter was PG Wodehouse, or it would have been if the creator of Jeeves and Wooster and, most pertinently, the pompous black shirt Roderick Spode hadn’t accidentally found himself on the other side, and apparently batting for them too.In 1940 Wodehouse and his wife Ethel were living as tax exiles in Normandy, and failed to make their excuses before Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Always a treat to see the shrewd, penetrating gaze of DCS Christopher Foyle back for one of its all-too-brief runs, though no doubt rationing Foyle's War to short series at long intervals is what has enabled writer/creator Anthony Horowitz to sustain it for so long. The three episodes in the new Series 8 find Foyle back in Britain, following a trip to the USA to "tie up some loose ends" from a previous case.It's 1946, and he's becoming embroiled in the Cold War as East faces off against West and rampant paranoia stalks the corridors of power. One of the strengths of Foyle has always been the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
How can you not love a show that opens with Robert Plant singing "Satan, your kingdom must come down" on the soundtrack? The song is aptly chosen, since Boss is the story of Chicago mayor Tom Kane, a bully, a tyrant and a master of the black arts of political fixing and gloves-off deal-making. But his days are numbered.The introductory scene of this first episode was a monologue by an unseen woman, addressed to Kane (played with thunderous assurance by Kelsey Grammer) seated in what looked like a derelict warehouse. This was an odd location for the kind of news that the voice was giving him. Read more ...
fisun.guner
You might phrase the question rhetorically: “just what do artists do all day?” Or you might ask it in the spirit of genuine enquiry: after all, to many, the artist is an exotic creature whose mystery is still to be fully penetrated. Either way, it’s pretty clear that though it may not be “a proper job”, artworks don’t make themselves. The title was enticing, but, in fact, What Do Artists Do All Day? turned out to be, well, just another low-key television profile of an artist: the relatively little-known Royal Academician Norman Ackroyd. But it’s good the title didn’t suggest any of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When the NASA space shuttle Challenger fell out of the Florida sky on the morning of 28 January 1986 after 73 seconds, killing all seven astronauts, the Nobel-winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was the only independent scientist appointed to the investigating panel. He duly made a nuisance of himself, asking awkward questions, ignoring protocols, disobeying instructions and generally making damn sure the appliance of science would dig up the truth protected by vested interests. Feynman has been portrayed onstage by Alan Alda, and on the radio by Alfred Molina, but when you want Read more ...