TV
hilary.whitney
David Leland (b 1947) has worked extensively both sides of the Atlantic but he is best known, both as a writer and a director, for his shrewd observations of ordinary people struggling against the constraints and hypocrisy of the accepted social mores of English life in films such as Mona Lisa (1986), Personal Services (1987) and Wish You Were Here (1987). However, it was Made in Britain (1982), a television play written by Leland for Channel 4 and directed by Alan Clarke, that first brought Leland widespread acclaim and the story of Trevor, a sociopathic skinhead, indisputedly destined for a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s hardly as if he needed critical resuscitation, but the work of Simon Gray is enjoying a moment in the limelight. Butley, starring Dominic West, is currently on in the West End, while in August BFI Southbank is to show a season of films written by Gray for the small screen and large.Among his films written for the BBC are his Play for Today double bill Plaintiffs and Defendants and Two Sundays, shown in 1975 and both starring Alan Bates. From his scripts for Screen Two there are After Pilkington starring Bob Peck and Miranda Richardson as childhood sweethearts who meet again in later Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Yesterday was a day when male physicality and the science of movement preoccupied - when you watch Rafa Nadal or Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, you can’t help thinking about the contrasts of grace that achieve the same athletic needs; Nadal the pouncing cheetah, the rich, weighty speed of Tsonga. Thing is, when you watch programmes about the greatness of tennis, they don’t try to persuade you that it’s just as good to watch if you yourself learn to play and get it filmed for the public's delight.This false premise has recently taken over the entire contemporary dance world; we must become awful Read more ...
David Nice
Your Macbeth opens in the round, tailored to a small studio theatre. In entrusting it to television, do you engage someone experienced in the medium to render faithfully the spaces and the talking heads, as Trevor Nunn did for the deservedly legendary McKellen-Dench double act? Or do you cry your own havoc and let slip the dogs of all your favourite film directors, as happens in Rupert Goold’s ambitious TV transfer?Either could work. But the only proof is in the end result. And while the 1970s film still chills my blood, I can’t help feeling that here so much tension and imagination flails Read more ...
josh.spero
You might say that the grand hotels brought this on themselves. Time Shift: Hotel DeLuxe on BBC Four last night saw beneath the shine of their marble atria and heard the uncomfortable murmurs under the joyful gossip of their chic bars. What started out as an apparent paean to the luxury hotel - the Savoy, the Ritz, the Dorchester - with an emphasis on the glamour, energy, buzz and innovation they created soon turned into a documentary with a social conscience.The fruity, naughty narration of Fenella Fielding, the jazzy soundtrack ("Puttin' on the Ritz"), hyperbolic statements Read more ...
josh.spero
Fake or Fortune? on BBC One, with Fiona Bruce and art dealer and sleuth Philip Mould, ought to have been called CSI: Cork Street for its blend of fine art and forensic science. They were trying to resolve whether a Monet was in fact a Monet, using a 240 million-pixel camera, Monet's own accountbook (which Fiona Bruce ran her ungloved fingers across) and plenty of ominous music. Next up: who killed Marat in David's picture?The mystery of fakes, forgeries and misattributions becomes ever more fascinating as pictures fetch greater prices at auction; Monet's record stands at £41 million. The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A few years ago I chanced upon something truly surreal. I was driving along a track in New Zealand. The way you do. There was a field on the left. In it there was a man sitting on a portable chair, a sketchpad in his lap, a pencil in his hand. Gathered in front of him, like a cluster of attentive disciples, was a tight semi-circle of cows. The man was wearing a black suit in a style popular at the end of the 19th century. The surreal bit is that, despite the grizzly beard, this was Columbo. None other than.I looked over his shoulder at a very pretty picture, and tried to engage the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
James M. Cain's novel Mildred Pierce is best remembered for Michael Curtiz's entertainingly lurid 1945 movie version, starring Joan Crawford. Featuring William Faulkner among its screenwriters, it played fast and loose with Cain's book, but bashed it into crowd-pleasing shape successfully enough to win Crawford an Oscar.Cue Todd Haynes's five-part miniseries for HBO (brought to us, or to some of us, by Sky Atlantic) and the equation is reversed. Haynes has adhered to the original book with exaggerated reverence, so much so that the dialogue sometimes feels more like sequential monologues Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Last March’s Japanese earthquakes and tsunami, as we know, brought devastation to hundreds of thousands of Japanese. But it also caused a crisis in the 3D film industry, just as it is attempting to be born. The most important 3D tape stock finishing factory in the world was swept away by the waters.In the burgeoning 3D film world this caused consternation, and for no one more than the producers of the 3D version of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake that was just about to be shot at Sadler’s Wells by Leopard Films. It caused a terrifying lurch in price for the making of what has to be seen as a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Americans have form when it comes to creating superior remakes of British TV shows. Life on Mars with Michael Imperioli? You gotta love it. The Office without Ricky Gervais? We are eternally in their debt.
Now they've taken Paul Abbott's Shameless in for a full engine re-bore and respray, with Abbott himself on board as writer and executive producer. The formaggio grandissimo of the Stateside version, though, is John Wells, of ER and The West Wing fame, and it's the rather imperial-looking John Wells Productions logo that you see at the conclusion of each programme.
It's bound to take a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Continuing BBC Four's trend of creating surprisingly watchable programmes out of dowdy and unpromising ideas, this survey of the plants gardeners love to hate was a mine of information and offered plenty of food for thought. And for that matter, plenty of food, since it appears that wheat has only survived to become one of our top crops because, several thousand years ago, it was genetically beefed up by getting spliced to a weed.What is a weed, anyway? Presenter Chris Collins, a seasoned horticulturist despite his protection-racketish demeanour, came up with several plausible definitions. He Read more ...
josh.spero
The dramatic music, blue-tinged reconstructions and menacing voiceover all suggested that we should be sceptical of World War Two heroine Vera Atkins. The title of the programme indeed, Secret War: The Spymistress and the French Fiasco, told us how we should feel. We know that she was a brave member of the Special Operations Executive, the British department responsible for secret agents in occupied lands, but thankfully this programme came along to debunk her. Or did it?It certainly intended to. The story of how Atkins, a senior operator in charge of the F Section, which ran missions in Read more ...