TV
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 ...
fisun.guner
The difficulty with fashioning real-life events as drama lies in the temptation to turn the central players into characters that an audience will naturally warm to. But real life isn’t like that. Bad things can happen to people you wouldn’t necessarily feel much warmth towards, or sympathy for. But a drama, especially a prime-time television thriller, requires us to root for the protagonist. It’s not enough to simply know that a just outcome has been achieved. We have to be on emotional tenterhooks, even if we know the outcome in advance. And that’s the trouble with U Be Dead, a thriller Read more ...
howard.male
“Do you realise what you’re letting yourself in for?” is surely the worst thing to say to someone in order to put them at their ease, especially when they are about to step into the subconscious unknown. But down-to-earth fireman Neil Clarke took these words from hypnotist Trevor Roberts in his stride. His main concern - if it turned out he had lived a previous life - was that he was “a nice bloke and not some sort of murderer”. But no, this wasn’t a Mitchell and Webb sketch.It was the opening scene of a serious documentary on past-life regression. However, as this half-hour journey into the Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
It's not that I feel like a middle-aged fuddy duddy exactly - although I was even almost too old for The Word and I'm clearly not the target audience for BBC Three. But if I were still in the 16-34 age group - even at its most juvenile end - frankly I’d be insulted by a show like The King is Dead. Is it a valid criticism of a BBC Three show to call it puerile? Perhaps not, but unfunny is unfunny.Created, written and produced by Simon Bird, which must be some sort of reward for starring in the Bafta-winning (and genuinely funny) E4 sitcom The Inbetweeners, The King is Dead comes in that by now Read more ...
Veronica Lee
New viewers begin here: even if you know nothing of the previous five series of Waterloo Road, you could start to enjoy the drama set in a failing comprehensive in Greater Manchester with the opener to series six, as the writers have rather winningly taken the precaution of barely mentioning anything that went on in previous years - not even the teen suicide pact that ended series five. And, as with many a failing school, some of last term’s teachers have departed (also unmentioned), including those played by Denise Welch and Angela Griffin, but back comes former Waterloo Road pupil Janeece ( Read more ...
fisun.guner
Tony Blair’s style of leadership was often mocked for being “presidential”, but last night it was Andrew Marr, in sober suit/ shocking orange tie combo, who gave off something of that self-assured “presidential” air. Standing outside No 10, Marr addressed the people in his smoothly measured, gently emphatic way. He is, of course, an interviewer we feel we can trust (not to be flim-flammed or bamboozled), but, really, we already knew that this was hardly going to be the political TV interview of the decade – just, more or less, a reaffirmation of everything Tony Blair always knew and believed Read more ...
theartsdesk
JasperRees Not long now till Tony Blair faces interrogation by A Marr. GraemeAThomson and I tweeting a live reviewGraemeAThomson Nice to see they’ve scheduled it straight after Restoration Roadshow. Someone at the Beeb with a GSOH?GraemeAThomson Marr's gone with the orange tie. ProvocativeJasperRees Are you prepared to speculate about the timing of the Hague twin-bed allegations? Who wins? Who loses?GraemeAThomson I admired the directness of Hague’s statement earlier on. May make everything Blair says seem a bit evasive by comparisonJasperRees Can’t quite tell if he's really slagging off Read more ...
theartsdesk
Tony Blair has a book to flog. Andrew Marr has an interview to conduct. And theartsdesk has another TV programme to review live on Twitter.We tweeted our first review when Jonathan Ross said goodbye to the BBC. The Tony Blair Interview is on BBC Two on Wednesday at 7pm. Graeme Thomson and Jasper Rees will be watching and tweeting. Their conversation will then be posted on the site to be read in its entirety. Sign up follow to Graeme here and Jasper here in order to read their 140-character responses live.
You can also follow theartsdesk here.
Jasper Rees
Television seeks out the stories thrown up by real life. On the one hand there is the obsessive interest in the private lives of the great and good (and not so good) from Margot Fonteyn to Tony Blair. Other dramatists eagerly accept the responsibility to hold a mirror up to society in all its ills from the Ipswich murders to the travails of 19th-century lesbians. But the task that all writers have to face, whoever’s story is being told, is to make the narrative dramatic. A tale of contemporary slavery ought not to struggle there.It’s taken seven years for the awful story of Mende Nazer to be Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“The empire writes back” was Salman Rushdie’s pithy summation of the process that changed British literature during the late Seventies and early Eighties, a shift epitomised by his novel Midnight’s Children winning the 1981 Booker prize. It wasn’t just the empire. Everyone else who had been, in one sense or another, colonised (women; the working classes; those once termed "adolescents") by literary fiction began articulating their experiences in a manner that often ran counter to past orthodoxies.Subtitled Nothing Sacred, this was the last programme in an excellent three-part series tracking Read more ...