TV
howard.male
We all enjoy the moment when the detective loses his rag and lunges across the desk to grab the suspect by the lapels, but such scenes are in short supply in this new female crime-fighters series. Instead, the interrogative approach of “the new Cagney & Lacey” as it’s been called, is more slowly, slowly catchy monkey, but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying. Scott & Bailey was co-created by former detective inspector Diane Taylor, which is presumably why it seems to provide a more grounded, realistic look at the world of the Manchester murder squad.But whereas realism in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Once upon a time, "easy listening" was a term of abuse and contempt, intended to evoke everything uncool, unhip and musically middle-aged. It meant pipe, cardigan, golf and Bing Crosby, and it was the last thing you'd hear before you were felled by your thickened arteries and under-exercised heart.Things have changed, as Bob Dylan sang, some years before he reached 70. As The Joy of Easy Listening pointed out, now that the passing decades have narrowed the great divide that used to exist between the cutting edge of rock'n'roll and the puréed strings of James Last or Bert Kaempfert, it may Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Paul Merton started his three-part series on the origins of the American film industry with a deliberately clichéd shot, greeting us while standing with the Hollywood sign in view. But he quickly whizzed over to New York City, the true location of the birth of movies - or American ones at least - for it was on the East Coast that Thomas Edison, after inventing the phonograph, developed the Kinetoscope, a basic viewing device for moving pictures. The Kinetoscope was a raw instrument indeed, as the pictures could be seen through a peephole by one viewer at a time. It was the French Lumière Read more ...
graeme.thomson
David Frost and Richard Nixon. Melvyn Bragg and Dennis Potter. Parky and Ali. The list of seminal TV interviews is a relatively short one, and it's not about to get any longer. Alan Titchmarsh’s hopelessly mismatched bout with Prince Philip saw the Queen’s "liege man of life and limb" endure not so much a meaty grilling as an obsequious basting in Titchmarsh’s uniquely bland brand of conversational oil.The royals are enjoying a distinct upswing at the moment, what with Wills and Kate's nuptials and last week’s trip to Ireland. On 10 June, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark (“Philippos – Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As The Observer once put it, an abiding theme of Adam Curtis's documentaries "has been to look at how different elites have tried to impose an ideology on their times, and the tragicomic consequences of those attempts". This neatly sums up the essence of Curtis's new three-part series - though it looks like being more tragic than comic - which began with a daring parabolic narrative which soared from the monomaniac philosophies of Ayn Rand across California's Silicon Valley to the Clinton White House and Alan Greenspan's basilisk-like reign on Wall Street.Whether these assorted items really Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Someone had moved in next door to the Palins. There was a camera shot of him, his face pixellated out. Apparently he was writing an exposé of the lady of the house. “I think it’s an invasion of our privacy and I don’t like it,” chirrupped Sarah Palin in that fingernails-on-a-blackboard voice of hers. “How would you feel if some dude who you knew was out to get you moved in 15 feet away from your kids?” I suspect I’d probably do something sane and rational like invite a camera crew into my home and make an access-all-areas reality TV series. That’d teach snoops to mind their own business.Sarah Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Crikey, no gongs whatsoever for ITV1's Downton Abbey, but you can't grumble about Sherlock lifting the Best Drama Series award at last night's Baftas. Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss's ingenious update of Conan Doyle for BBC One was one of 2010's telly highlights, and you might have thought it would have earned the Leading Actor award for Benedict Cumberbatch. But no, that one went not to Cumberbatch, nor to Matt Smith for Doctor Who (BBC One) nor Jim Broadbent for Any Human Heart (Channel 4), but to Daniel Rigby (pictured below) for his portrayal of Eric Morecambe in BBC Two's Eric and Ernie. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With more claret than a blood bank and more skin than a nudist colony, True Blood is HBO at its most gleefully provocative. Unencumbered by the cerebral depth of The Sopranos, the social conscience of The Wire, or the historical obligations of Deadwood, it’s a two-backed beast of a TV show. That’s not to say it’s not smart or satirical, but from its opening credits it announces its dishonourable intentions as a gravelly voiced stranger croons, “I wanna do bad things with you.”Based on the novels by Charlaine Harris, True Blood is the televisual brainchild of Six Feet Under’s Alan Ball. It Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Half of Wales is visible from the blustery summit. “Of all the hills which I saw in Wales,” recalled George Borrow, author of the prolix Victorian classic Wild Wales, “none made a greater impression upon me.” He was not alone. Arenig Fawr, a southern outcrop of Snowdonia, was also the entry point for British art into Post-Impressionism. This at any rate was the claim of a scenic documentary which joined Augustus John and his young protégé James Dickson Innes on their productive two-year sojourn at the foot of the mountain.It’s a mountain in the Welsh sense of the word mynydd, being at 854 m/2 Read more ...
josh.spero
Although in perhaps a less ostentatious manner than is familiar from Louis Theroux's documentaries, BBC Two's Wonderland last night nevertheless took the well-worn path of finding an odd-seeming community and examining its customs, morals and characters. In this case, it was the 20,000 Hasidic Jews of Stamford Hill, north-east London, who - we were led to believe - had some pretty funny ideas about love.The superficial oddities of the culture must have seemed so inviting to the film-maker, Paddy Wivell: pious observance of hundreds of biblical rules of behaviour, from circumcision to Read more ...
fisun.guner
There’s nothing like a reality TV programme to bring a community together. Or maybe not. The Street That Cut Everything took one suburban cul-de-sac in Preston and shook up its residents thus: if they wanted their bins emptied, their street cleaned, their benefits paid and their elderly and needy looked after, they had to do it themselves. The council were going to withdraw all services - bar the emergency services and schools - for six whole weeks. And if that doesn’t sound terribly long, it was certainly long enough to pit neighbour against neighbour when it came to voting over who Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
America has been very good to Hugh Laurie. His starring role as Dr Gregory House has shot him to the top of the earnings tree in US television, while comprehensively demolishing existing preconceptions of him as the blissfully idiotic Bertie Wooster, or the half-witted Prince Regent in Blackadder the Third. You might even say that with House, Laurie finally got the chance to play Blackadder.It's a mutual transatlantic love affair, and Laurie's triumph as the manipulative medic has given him a platform from which to record an album of his adored blues and New Orleans music, Let Them Talk. In Read more ...