TV
Jasper Rees
Where next for Gareth Malone, who would ardently like to teach the entire planet to sing in perfect harmony? He began all those series ago with the ruffians and rapscallions who make up the average sixth form, most recently took his outreach work to tone-deaf soldiers’ spouses and for his next stop he’s boarding a plane to export The Choir Stateside. Other constituencies who could use a healing stint singing under Malone's pastoral wing would include politicians, football supporters and anyone to do with The X Factor. But for the moment, it’s back to the office for Gareth.In ep one of The Read more ...
fisun.guner
There’s nothing like having a fatwa hanging over you to find out who your friends are, for those who might be taken for natural allies may surprise you. And so it was when Salman Rushdie received his death warrant 23 years ago on St Valentine’s Day: there were those who proved their mettle, or at least found common cause with the imperilled writer. And then there were those whose instincts did not lie in the advocacy of free speech but in maintaining, as they saw it, a diplomatic pragmatism. Their principles, it seems, were flexible enough to allow them to spill ink for the British press Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Mid-September: the nights are drawing in and, to quote that well-known costume dramatist John Milton, the period detail is as “thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa”. Downton – praise be! – is back. However, before the third series even gets into its penguin-suited stride it seems that paradise is about to be lost all over again. Lord Grantham has blown most of his wife’s fortune: the Canadian Trunk Line Company has hit the buffers and gone bust. While the crusty aristo refuses to be a failure his dependents have far more important things on their tiny minds. Lady Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Now here's a thing. Why would you invite one of his generation's most acclaimed classical actors, who is also a huge star of popular culture, to make his debut as a light entertainer in that most clichéd role, a quiz-show host? Well, when that individual is David Tennant, a brilliant Hamlet and a former Doctor Who, you are guaranteed to attract some new viewers and it gives a neat reboot to what is a very tired format: a bunch of comics answering soft questions (in this case about the history of comedy) but in actuality being given a chance to trot out jokes and anecdotes.So is he up to the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Don’t say this hasn’t been on the way for a while. For years now we’ve had the public working on television for free. They sing for free. They juggle and ventriloquise and suck up to Simon Cowell for free. They even live in glass houses for free. Meanwhile, back at home, the audience makes the key decisions about who stays and who goes. One blue-sky thinking-outside-the-box lightbulby brainstorming roundtable session later and you have the bizarre metatexual freak that is The Audience.In The Audience, the audience is no longer monitoring events from the sofa. Well, it is, but it’s also up Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Despite Lilyhammer’s sub-zero, snow white Norwegian setting, it is initially difficult to divorce Frank Tagliano from The Sopranos’ Silvio Dante. They’re both played by Steven Van Zandt and both are Mafia men. The suit they wear is the same. Yet Lilyhammer is not The Sopranos in Norway and, by plonking this stereotype into the most unlikely of locations, Van Zandt reveals a flair for nuance formerly obscured by the shadows of others.In The Sopranos, as in the E Street Band, he cemented his image as a side man. Being Bruce Springsteen’s long-term guitarist is probably enough to secure Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
The small screen has always been as much a mirror as a window into other worlds. Even when the picture-box is switched off it reflects the viewer. If light is both particle and wave, glass is both solid and liquid. It shows things and hides things. Now you see it, now you don’t.Daphne du Maurier was obsessed with ways of seeing. Her short story, “Don’t Look Now” – made into a truly great film by Nic Roeg – explores the grief of a bereaved couple and the possibility that their drowned little girl has come back to life. Her shiny red mac is continually glimpsed among the calles and canals of Read more ...
graeme.thomson
What tremendous sacrifice did Armando Iannucci lay before the comedy Gods in order to be offered the gift of the coalition? Labour post-Blair singularly failed to provide rich pickings for political satire; Gordon Brown and his hangdog posse were too obviously doomed for anyone to bother really sinking their teeth into. In the three years since the last series, however, democracy has served up the omnishambles to end all omnishambles. The question is what will The Thick of It choose to do with it?On the evidence of the opening episode the answer is far from conclusive. Though it has always Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
Praise be, they’ve kept the title sequence. Dallas, the mama of all American soap operas, is famous for a lot of things – Stetsons, satin sheets, surreal shower scenes, the slow disintegration of Priscilla Presley’s nose – but perhaps the most memorable component in its Eighties incarnation was the opening credits in which mirrored skyscrapers were juxtaposed with the bucolic idyll of Southfork, and split-screens showed JR, Bobby, Sue-Ellen et al pulling panto poses to a histrionic orchestral soundtrack. Such things are sacred.The new show is billed not as a remake but a sequel, the exhuming Read more ...
Ismene Brown
So the chairman of Big Brother TV becomes chairman of the Arts Council. Is it good or bad that Sir Peter Bazalgette will now hold the purse-strings for our publicly supported arts, the most debated, the most fragile, the most ephemeral elements of our national cultural consciousness, the most opposite of the time-wasting that is reality TV?Bazalgette is descended from the Victorian Bazalgette who built London's sewers, and he has attracted verbal ordure for years for his development at Endemol TV of the reality shows about the petty minutiae of life (cooking, gardening, eating - heavens - Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Sometimes when we reconnect with the television of our childhood it seems very different from what we recall, usually lesser in some way. This is certainly not the case with the physical violence of The Sweeney. ITV's hour-long special, to coincide with the release of a new feature film, showcased a mass of beatings, snarling assaults, and men taking limb-breaking leaps into quarries rather than face the actors who went on to play Inspector Morse and Minder.It was the roles of Detective Inspector Jack Regan and Detective Sergeant George Carter of the Metropolitan Police Flying Squad that Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
We have been here before: The Killing wasn’t the first crime drama to open with a damsel in distress. This time it’s a schoolgirl who is being chased across the sand dunes at night. She has been stabbed. She falls – conveniently backwards – to the ground. The pursuer is reflected in the dying pupil’s dilated pupil. “I’m sorry,” whispers the girl. Why?The first part of A Mother's Son throws up many more intriguing questions. The second one is why the script editor allowed Chris Lang to repeatedly commit the cardinal sin of letting his characters tell each other what they already know. “My Read more ...