TV
Kieron Tyler
"Compared to the way I feel now", said Ray Davies 50 minutes in, “having a nervous breakdown was a jaunt.” His voice was even, matter of fact. He didn’t look distressed, merely appeared to be stating what he thinks is obvious. Julian Temple’s documentary about The Kinks’s leader and songwriter was packed with such moments – revealing and so open that it was impossible not to be affected by Davies’s low-key passion. This assured portrait was more than the story of a pop star. With Davies as a unique guide, Temple captured an alternative portrait of how the Sixties unfolded.The broadcast of Ray Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Jason’s toby jug of a face has been on the television screen over Christmas since the days when you had to get up and switch between three channels by hand. There was nothing ostensibly seasonal in his latest vehicle. A Yuletide entertainment for our times, Come Rain Come Shine had starring roles for three very contemporary ghosts of Christmas Present - belt-tightening, debt and social implosion. But scratch at the surface and what emerged was a neat inversion of the Scrooge tale, in which it was a big spender rather than a miser who had to learn the value of family.Jason played a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s been a journey, an emotional rollercoaster, since 14 soap stars and sports personalities abandoned reality three months ago, donned a series of spandex and chiffon outfits and embarked upon the most important experience of their lives. They all gave it 110 per cent, took disappointment on the chin and came back fighting, and last night the three finalists battled it out for the ultimate prize – the Strictly Come Dancing 2010 glitterball trophy. “Who’d have thought a bit of ballroom dancing could mentally change you?” asked a teary Kara Tointon, and as viewers across the country blotted Read more ...
howard.male
A startling one in 10 British adults apparently went to a music festival this year. Given that I’m a music journalist and I didn’t, maybe I’m some kind of astronomically unlikely anomaly. I’d like to think so. But those familiar aerial shots of Glastonbury – not just a few fields but a sizeable expanse of Britain’s patchwork-quilt landscape, completely overrun by an infestation of teeming humanity - is enough to make me feel smugly sane to have decided, as usual, to just remain cosily at home watching whatever the BBC had decreed were the best bits.But that doesn’t mean that a potted (and pot Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Once upon a time, just before Lord Reith began permanent rotation in his place of rest, there was a hideous botchjob of a television genre known as the docusoap. It wasn’t quite documentary and it wasn’t quite soap. It was scriptless drama with “characters” whose “narrative arcs” were tweaked and massaged into what you'd loosely call "stories" in post-production. The docusoap launched the idea that the public will gladly work on television for sweet Fanny Adams. If there’s one thing you can applaud reality TV for – if there’s just one thing - it’s that it pulled the trigger on the docusoap. Read more ...
theartsdesk
With the lightning speed of online delivery, there is still masses of time to select the best and most enjoyable presents for Christmas, thanks to the taste and wisdom of theartsdesk's pack of writers. With battered guitars, Belgian cartoons, Pacino's Shylock on Broadway, Australian festivals, Ballets Russes scarves, boomboxes, special edition CDs, advance booking on next year's hot shows, a subscription to The New Yorker and commissioning a portrait by a top artist among the cornucopia of suggested desirables, there really is something for everyone and for every purse. Kieron Tyler Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Via the Chichester Festival and acclaimed runs on Broadway and in the West End, director Rupert Goold's Macbeth has made a sizzling transition to television. Set in an anarchic, war-torn Scotland and suffused with imagery of murder, torture and Stalin-style purges, it placed Patrick Stewart's thunderous central performance in a spinning black hole of evil, into which he was remorselessly sucked as the action developed.We saw Macbeth steadily torn apart by a maelstrom of ambition, conscience and destiny, the latter revealed in regular bulletins from the flesh-crawlingly sinister Three Witches Read more ...
joe.muggs
Last week I suggested that The X Factor's rules may have been manipulated in order to lead to a more entertaining final week. I would like to apologise unreservedly for this suggestion, in the light of the absolute unremitting shower of dismalness that we had to sit through this weekend. Congratulations to the winner Matt Cardle and all - he seems like a nice chap, sings well sometimes, might even make a career of it – but sweet baby Jesus on a bendy bus, that was truly awful television. And, yes, millions of us sat absolutely glued to it for four hours of our weekends, hoping for some Read more ...
theartsdesk
And so we reached the climax of Series 7, long awaited by cognoscenti but greeted with mounting apathy by non-believers. Though some had held out hopes for boy - infant? - band One Direction, it was live poll favourite Matt Cardle who ultimately romped home to victory.It was hard to tell why - Cardle has the charisma of an apprentice photocopier salesman, and his performance on the night barely breached the frontiers of insipid. Hysterical supporters of Rebecca Ferguson, urged onwards by Coleen Rooney, thronged the streets of Liverpool to urge their girl on, but Rebecca's identikit soul-diva Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Now that The Walking Dead has been nominated for a Writers Guild of America award for Best New Series, executive producer Frank Darabont and his team must be ruing the fact that series one comprised only six episodes. A 13-part second season will probably air next October, by when its halo of success may have dimmed significantly.Having greeted the opening episode with scepticism, I heroically stuck with it, and I feel partially rewarded. The biggest surprise has been Andrew Lincoln’s performance as Deputy Rick Grimes, which has allowed him to emerge as an actor reborn, as if Love Actually Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems like an aeon ago that we had people who dared to make television series with names like Civilisation or The Ascent of Man. The notion of TV as a forum for vigorous intellectual debate and for taking the philosophical measure of human progress has come to seem almost as quaint as the Reithian newsreader being compelled to wear a dinner suit. I don’t think QI really counts, does it?But in My Father, the Bomb and Me, Lisa Jardine – eldest daughter of emigré Polish polymath Jacob Bronowski, who created and presented 1973’s aforesaid Ascent of Man – hacked some chips off the old block Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Even as a confirmed fan of the soap, I would be lying if I said I tuned in to Coronation Street for great acting. Fantastic comedy, yes; brilliant writing - certainly. But routinely fine exposition of the dramatic art? Nah, although there are honourable exceptions when the occasion demands. But by crikey, did most of the cast pull it off last night in an hour-long live episode to mark the show’s 50th anniversary, part of a week entitled “Four Funerals and a Wedding”, involving a gas explosion, a tram crash on the iconic viaduct and an attempted murder.There were only the tiniest, blink-and- Read more ...