TV
Veronica Lee
“It was the best part of my life,” said one silver-haired lady in ringing tones, while another described it as “poetry” and a third as “the aeroplane and you were one”. What these doughty octogenarians were describing in this gem of a film was flying Spitfires during the Second World War.
The three women – and a few more more tracked down by director Harvey Lilley – are among the last-remaining women who served in the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), a 1,000-strong male-only preserve when the war started, but which had 168 female members by its end. The ATA delivered aircraft from factories to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I used to have a childhood fascination with the music of Herb Alpert, because I liked the tunes and always felt there was a hint of melancholy behind Herb’s breezy, nonchalant exterior. Everybody else found Alpert laughably cheesy, but happily, this excellent documentary proved that I was right all along by building a watertight case for regarding him as something of a neglected legend.Not neglected by the record-buying public, of course, because Alpert’s string of Tijuana Brass albums in the 1960s made him the top-earning act in the USA for a three-year period. In 1966, four of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A drama about Britain’s (and by the time Coronation Street reaches its 50th birthday in December, the world’s) longest-running soap starts with a huge advantage - its producers could just quote lumps of the brilliant original scripts, written by Corrie’s creator, Tony Warren, and be done with it. But Daran Little, himself a former writer on the show, resisted that urge (well, mostly) when penning The Road to Coronation Street, an affectionate and witty prequel that told us how the soap came about, or rather, how it almost didn’t.Although Corrie is now a staple of British TV (and many have Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jerry Bruckheimer’s production stable has already given us a lifetime’s supply of law-enforcement stories. The hydra-headed CSI franchise has become more ubiquitous than I Love Lucy in its heyday, while Cold Case and the FBI missing-persons yarns of Without a Trace are probably showing on a set near you whether you’re in Saigon or Santiago. Now here’s Jerry’s latest brainchild, Dark Blue, the saga of a crew of undercover Los Angeles cops led by Lieutenant Carter Shaw (Dylan McDermott).Since this is a Bruckheimer product, you might assume you weren’t about to be plunged too deeply into the Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
How do you rescue a drama about Spitfire pilots from over half a century of cliché and pastiche, from Kenneth More in Reach for the Sky to Armstrong and Miller’s street-talking RAF officers? After all, put an actor in a flying jacket and a cravat, get him to smoke a pipe and read the paper as he awaits the call to scramble, and you’ve got a 24-carat stereotype. The answer, as the wholly admirable First Light illustrates, is to go back to basics – to find the authentic details amidst the stock scenarios, and the emotional truth behind the stiff upper lips.It helps if you have first-rate source Read more ...
David Nice
"The church shouldn't be interfering in the personal and private lives of people - we don't own them." The comment comes from a Catholic priest working with abused children in the Philippines, Father Shay Cullen. It would be good to hear from other men or women of God rather more liberal than Pope Benedict XVI, for whose visit to Britain later this week this programme sounds no trumpets. Apparently few priests or bishops would speak to human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, so his is the talking head we see rather too much of here. But that's the personality-driven world of TV for you, and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Part 2 @bbcproms. The madness begins. Ms Derham has not switched gowns in the interval. No sign of Titchmarsh, for which we must give thanks.The "traditional" necklace of laurels for Sir Henry Wood's bust. Wonder if he'd welcome his head being polished by a pink rag.How do they pick these pieces? Apols but the Marche joyeuse did not fill this tweeter with joy. On the other hand, here's Renée plus a mike.Not many sopranos can address an audience like Renée F. America's sweetheart sings Czech stuff now: back to her rootsWhile Renée continues blowing a hole in the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Either it’s a bizarre accident. Or there’s something in the water. Port Talbot, the unlovely steel town in Wales where smoke stacks belch fumes into the cloudy coastal sky, has been sending its sons to work in Hollywood for decades now. Richard Burton was the first to put his glowering blue eyes and golden larynx at the service of Tinseltown. Anthony Hopkins, for all his American passport, has never shed the native tinge from his accent. And in recent years there has been Michael Sheen (b. 1969).Right from the start it was clear that Sheen was more suited to playing oddballs and misfits than Read more ...
Ismene Brown
That sobbing musical theme resumes, so does that hospital-white dreamlike cartoon of a male figure tumbling in a Hitchcockian fall from grace past huge ads of poster girls. Actually it’s almost as much Milton as it is Hitchcock. I say that to be deliberately pretentious, because the secret of Mad Men’s addictive draw is the human profundity you try to read into this fascinatingly surfaced drama about an empty man who doesn’t know who he is. This is the ultimate advert for TV, a series so slick and so moreish you don’t even know it’s an advert.If you are already hooked on Mad Men, you don’t Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
For hundreds of thousands of people watching Shane Meadows’s TV debut last night, an updating (by three years) of the director’s skinhead movie, This is England (2006), the opening episode may well have been their first experience of a "Shane Meadows film". What will they have made of it? Because I’m not sure whether it was exactly a Shane Meadows film, or whether it was a Shane Meadows pastiche or a Shane Meadows homage - "in the style of". For last night’s episode was co-written with Skins regular Jack Thorne and directed by someone else completely, Tom Harper (The Scouting Book for Boys). Read more ...
fisun.guner
Apart from a few nips and tucks, age has not withered Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Anyone who can remember the original steamy adaptation of Andrea Newman’s fine novel will recognise the changes. Prue, no longer the manipulative cow who graced our screens back in 1976, has been made-over as an unworldly innocent, while husband Gavin – still a deeply unpleasant wife-beater - is now a chippy, working-class Yorkshireman rather than a chippy American. And Peter, the daughter-obsessed patriarch, appears to be an altogether more anguished soul - though one suspects this has more to do with Trevor Eve’s Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes you get the impression the Beeb wishes religion would quietly go away. You see it in the gradual transformation of the Sunday morning slot from the lightweight Heaven and Earth Show to Nicky Campbell’s lighter-weight Big Questions and now the heroically worldly Sunday Morning Live. General Synod noticed it earlier this year when complaints were made about the lack of religious programming. And the secular society noticed it when they rushed to the Beeb’s defence commending its secular and rationalist output. From last night it seems that the secular agenda is even at work in the Read more ...