TV
Adam Sweeting
This wasn't only the series finale, but the last ever episode of Camelot, since the American Starz network has decided to scrap plans for further seasons. It's not hard to see why. After a fairly promising start, Camelot spent several instalments staggering around aimlessly, as if writers and directors had been beheaded by King Arthur's Excalibur. Annoyingly, this tenth and final episode offered belated flashes of what the show might have been.At last, Arthur himself, played by the aggravatingly petulant Jamie Campbell Bower, began to - if you will - grow a pair. His ridiculous but heroic Read more ...
Jasper Rees
I Resign. It’s not a phrase you hear that often these days. Unlike, obviously, You’re Fired. There was a time, largely synonymous with the era when Tory toffs and grandees had sufficient private income to walk away from employment, that a chap could afford to resign, as the phrase has it, with honour. And it usually was a chap, usually after he’d been found to be hopping on and off strippers or tarts or his secretary or handing over the Falklands to some jumped-up tinpot little Johnny Foreigner. Nowadays politicians prefer to wriggle on a spit and keep the chauffeur. Honour be damned, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Is there a place for the travelling fun fair any more? Static attractions like Alton Towers and Thorpe Park have rides that are bigger, grander, more varied and scarier than anything a traditional, transient fair could ever transport. All the Fun of the Fair’s answer was that the fair has survived by winding the clock back, rekindling the past with original Victorian and Edwardian rides. There’s still room for something less bombastic.All the Fun of the Fair traced the history of the travelling fair in its familiar form. What we now recognise as the fair, with rides, sideshows and snacks Read more ...
josh.spero
If you're reading this review, you'll probably be expecting a sarky analysis. It invites that - wow, posh girls with unpronounceable names have to work in a Newcastle chippy! - but the programme, which sent four Home Counties fillies up North to compare lives with four Newcastle lasses, hit on something so important that we should force MPs to watch it.Aside from the usual solipsism that all teenage girls have in common - both sides discover that the other has a heart and means well - what GFSG showed is that the divide between the haves and the have-nots in Britain is now so wide that it Read more ...
fisun.guner
The only voice recording Sigmund Freud ever made was for the BBC. It was made in December 1938, at Freud’s West Hampstead home just a few months before the father of psychoanalysis succumbed to throat cancer. He was 82 and wouldn’t see out another year, yet here he was on fighting form: “People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavoury,” he declaims, his voice clipped, precise and resoundingly emphatic. “Resistance was strong and unrelenting. The struggle is not yet over."Freud was a revolutionary, and like all revolutionaries he was, clearly, a dogmatist. Twenty years Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Meet the new Dragon, slightly different from the old Dragons. Or is she? For series nine, the squad of rich, grumpy bastards is joined by “formidable businesswoman and self-made multimillionaire Hilary Devey”, as presenter Evan Davis introduced her.Power-dressed like a Barbara Taylor Bradford heroine, or possibly the new landlady of the Rover's Return, Miss Devey (that’s De-Vay) began by beguiling us with a display of down-to-earth motherliness, as she calmed the panic attack being suffered by Georgette Hewitt, would-be internet entrepreneuse. Trying to get the Dragons fired up about her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a recent article, David Hare complained about “a national festival of reaction” in the arts, exemplified by such supposedly Establishment-leaning works as The King’s Speech and Downton Abbey. His real target was Terence Rattigan, currently being hailed in many quarters as a national theatrical treasure enjoying a renaissance in this centenary year of his birth.Far from being neglected, argued Hare, Rattigan has rarely been out of the limelight, but his work now chimes with the “wheedling tone of self-righteous privilege” which he detects as a hallmark of the David Cameron era. I don’t know Read more ...
fisun.guner
Can Marcus du Sautoy do for maths what Brian Cox did for physics? Can he convince us of the beauty of numbers and help us fall in love with pi? It’s a tall order, but not only does Professor du Sautoy have an unstoppable passion for ratios, he’s also a natural communicator, which clearly helps if you’re the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding for Science, which he is. And so du Sautoy guided us through some basic mathematical principles which underpin the workings of the universe. He introduced us to The Code.Everything is governed by The Code, he explained, and he made it sound Read more ...
howard.male
For 35 years, contemporary art in Iraq was a no-no unless it was grimly, dully figurative or a gaudy mural glorifying Saddam Hussein. But this year, six Iraqi artists were invited to the most prestigious annual contemporary art event in the world; the Venice Biennale. It may be of little significance that Alan Yentob’s parents came from Iraq, but last night’s Imagine was probably the best of the series so far. Its focus may have been these artists and their art, but its reach was somehow much greater.It’s said that the best literature springs from oppressed or ravaged cultures, making Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Dan, a tall ginger streak of entitlement, had an issue with the hygiene. Channel 4 were about to lift him out of a five-star hotel in the Gambia and send him off to see how the other half lives. “They’re not going to be as clean as us,” he predicted nervously. Dan worried that he might have to survive sans moisturiser and hair gel. He hadn’t been warned about the lack of cutlery. And of loo roll. Nor that you approached each problem with the same manual solution.Who volunteers to make themselves look like utter tits for these films? Luxury-loving Londoners is who, said Tamsin Greig, slumming Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I was once shown around Anglia TV’s studios by the bloke who used to say, "And now, from Norwich - the quiz of the week!” by way of introduction to the immortal Sale of the Century. A tremendous thrill, as you can imagine. It all came back to me while watching Regional TV: Life Through a Local Lens which, despite a title which seemed to be code for “please don’t watch me”, proved to be a sprightly little mover packed with absurd stories and amazing factoids about the days when regional TV, BBC and independent alike, was far more than just a bit of token local news stuck on the end of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Although it's a period drama set in the dim and shadowy London of 1956, The Hour can’t help reminding us that the more things change, the more inclined they feel to do a brisk U-turn and fly back to hit us in the teeth. I even wondered whether the BBC had felt like pulling this first episode from the schedules, on account of the scene where chippy young BBC news journalist Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) slipped a bribe to a police officer to gain access to the corpse of a murder victim. In this particular week, it was uncannily close to the bone.Lyon himself would surely have relished being Read more ...