TV
Jasper Rees
Television is a regular prison visitor. You can’t keep Louis Theroux out of the grimmest Stateside penitentiaries, the drama departments drop in now and then for a stretch inside – most recently in Prisoner’s Wives. And then there’s ITV. A couple of years ago it reported from Wormwood Scrubs to find out how the prison system was coping in Brown’s Britain. It wasn’t the prettiest sight. The channel turns its attention to Aylesbury, a young offender institution heaving with the sort of hoodies the Prime Minister may not after watching this first episode feel quite so inclined to hug.Aylesbury Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was the moment when we learned that Sergeant Nick Brody really had been converted into an Islamist agent that the spring went out of Homeland's step. Complicit doesn't make the same mistake. Skilfully spun out over its movie-length span, it's a probing examination of the ambiguities and uncertainties that bedevil intelligence work. It won't make you sleep any easier at night.Screenwriter Guy Hibbert has avoided shoot-outs and political grandstanding and instead approached his subject through the narrow perspective of a single MI5 operative, Edward Ekubo (David Oyelowo). For three years, he Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not a bad idea for a series, even if it is a tiny bit Boardwalk Empire Goes to Nevada. In short: whoosh back to the early Sixties and poke about in the wild and lawless underbelly of Las Vegas, a city awash with debauchery and corruption and under the thumb of the Mob. Better still, the show was created by Nicholas Pilleggi, screenwriter for Martin Scorsese's gangster flicks Goodfellas and Casino.Vegas is based on the true story of Sheriff Ralph Lamb, who aimed to tame the hookers, hustlers, hitmen and hucksters who helped make Sin City such a fun destination. Lamb is given some movie star Read more ...
theartsdesk
There is much anguish in some quarters at the news that the BBC has axed The Hour, the Abi Morgan-penned series for BBC Two about the workings of a 1950s current affairs TV programme based at the Corporation's old studios at Lime Grove. A BBC spokeswoman said: "We loved the show [yes, clearly] but have to make hard choices to bring new shows through." The news came as a blow to producers Kudos, who had anticipated making a third series, and the company's chief executive Jane Featherstone was "sad and disappointed".Despite The Hour's cliqueish allure and platinum-plated cast, which included Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
As Julian Lloyd Webber combatively suggests of certain strands of 20th-century music: “Let’s make a noise no one likes. If the audience likes it, you have failed as a composer.” In general, though, the first programme in this welcome three-part series is if anything too measured and respectful in guiding us through the labyrinths of 20th-century music – from Debussy to Richard Strauss (relatively easy on the ears) via the tougher, spikier Schoenberg and Webern.Partly encouraged by the fact that Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise has become a bestseller (who knew so many people could Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is Charlie Brooker a bit of a soppy old traditionalist at heart? In Black Mirror, our tuned-in, switched-on, networked-up society sits for its portrait. It’s never a pretty sight. Brooker’s vision of the near future, or the alternative present, is Swiftian in its modest savagery. There was a surprise in last night’s second-series opener - with Brooker, there always is – and on this occasion it was to do with the nature of the comedy. There wasn't any. Its place was taken by the dead hollow of real grief.In Be Right Back a young couple - Ash and Martha - were moving to the country home of his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I wonder if ITV ever imagined this Inspector Morse spin-off would last seven series? The opening pair of episodes in this valedictory season of Lewis still clocked over eight million viewers, though the numbers have subsided a bit since. Future one-off specials have not been ruled out.The final story, "Intelligent Design" (its traditional two-hour format split into two single hours) sustained a reliably Lewisian tenor, with its tale of a murdered academic, Professor Seager, who'd just been released from prison, where he'd been dispatched following a drunk-driving incident in which a young Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A lot has happened since uncompromising French cop drama Spiral was last on our TV screens in May 2011. More of continental Europe has arrived. Attention has shifted northwards to Denmark for The Killing and Borgen. Sweden’s Wallander and Sebastian Bergman were never far. The Bridge closed the gap between both countries. French contender Braquo threw down the gauntlet too, but it was never going to steal Spiral’s thunder as it was just too cartoony, too brutal to clench to your bosom. Can the return of Spiral, its flawed heroine Captain Laure Berthaud and her scruffbag chic raise the flag Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC has suddenly noticed that there used to be these really brilliant things called "albums", and now they're going out of style and out of date. Hence they're holding an Albums Season in all media (Danny Baker's Great Album Showdown, Steve Wright's Album Factoids, Johnny Walker's Long Players and many, many more). The rest of the planet has been living with the digital revolution in music for years, or even decades, so this late, lumbering response feels rather quaint. It's as if the Death of the Album can only occur when the Corporation says so, rather like pop music didn't Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Usually that “similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental” note at the end of a broadcast is a mere formality - but I can’t have been the only person to react with a start when a trio of shady record company execs referred to Juliette Barnes, Hayden Panettiere’s perky blonde future of country music, as “the number one crossover artist in the country”.Mind you, I did spend more time listening to Taylor Swift’s chart-topping album Red last year than is really healthy, or socially acceptable, for a grown-up woman. It’s pretty hard to reconcile the all-American sweetheart who Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After last week's spectacularly unconvincing foray into saving Africa (usually the last refuge of a doomed statesperson), Birgitte Nyborg returned to the centre of Denmark's political life for the concluding pair of episodes in series two. Back amid themes of political infighting, media skulduggery and personal relationships under pressure, Borgen had, amid sighs of relief, come home to where it belonged.Immediately, crisis loomed. Birgitte (Sidse Babett Knudsen) had to bite the bullet and accept that her anxiety-stricken daughter Laura (Freja Riemann) needed more than phone calls and a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the Sixties, self-appointed guardians of the nation’s morals were pretty steamed up about bingo. More so even than about Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Fyfe Robertson, the BBC’s bewhiskered roaming chronicler, said the game was “the most mindless ritual achieved in half a million years of evolution.” His own brainlessness mattered not a jot.The winner of £47,000 – and two shillings – declared: “I’m so excited I could do with a drink of whisky.” She wasn’t going to be swayed by finger-wagging and noses being looked down. This enthralling canter through the history, sociology and quirks of the Read more ...