TV
Joe Muggs
Tulisa, Dappy and Fazer of North London pop phenomenon N-Dubz – or, if you prefer, Tula Constavlos, her cousin Dino Constavlos and their schoolfriend Richard Rawson – are easy to mock, and Channel 4 know it. The first episode of this showbiz slice-of-life documentary about the ebullient trio is so slathered with the kind of hideously knowing upper-middle-class arched-eybrow voiceover that characterises the whole of the channel's T4 youth programming strand that you have to wonder if they actually credit the viewer with the ability to form an opinion at all.It's true there are occasions when N Read more ...
graeme.thomson
You could tell Glastonbury at 40 was in trouble as early as the opening three minutes, when it cut from a well-heeled, ageing hippie survivor mumbling about “earth magic” to footage of Robbie Williams in 1998 bashing his way through the entirety of "Angels". The programme stumbled into the vast gulf between those two concepts as uncertainly as a reveller stumbles into the wrong tent at four in the morning, and never once looked like finding its way back home.Despite the fact that for nearly two decades the BBC has been sending its staff to Pilton in battalions stretching well into the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Almost like an inverted echo of Stevie Wonder over in Detroit, Little Stevie Winwood was a Brummie teen prodigy who scored an early dose of stardom with the Spencer Davis Group at age 15. Raved over for his amazing soulful vocals and effortless instrumental skills, he went on to form Traffic before joining “supergroup” Blind Faith with Eric Clapton.Quite a lot of people already know all this, and many of them will have been to see Winwood and Clapton on their recent tour, but somehow Winwood has always contrived to avoid the kind of status and visibility that ought to go with his rich and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Remarkably, the most provocative moments in Sir David Frost's survey of TV satire were supplied by his own early-Sixties show, That Was The Week That Was, when he was still an oily young upstart on the make. The BBC's Director General himself had declared that the aim of the show was to "prick the pomposity of public figures", but he must have felt the shockwaves rattling the door of his office. We revisited Millicent Martin's scathing lullaby for single mothers to sing to their children ("the world is full of bastards just like you"), a member of the studio audience jumped onstage and tried Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We love Gareth Malone, don’t we? We are big fans of the Pied Piper of primetime. And so we should be. The youth of today seem impressively eager to down tools, put away childish things like knives and drugs and safe-cracking equipment, and follow this slightly weedy and totally uncool choirmaster out onto the concert platform. Our glorious new coalition should be using him to tackle crime. No sooner does he move into a tough working-class ‘hood wielding nothing more than a Michael Jackson songbook than the figures for shootings, muggings and moochings about on street corners drop through the Read more ...
fisun.guner
We know the format: take a bunch of posh, privileged types - held up as examples of cluelessness when it comes to how “ordinary” people live by privileged, overpaid TV executives - and plonk them down in the middle of some dodgy council estate. Remove their credit cards and give them £6.50 to last a week. Watch as they baulk at the amount of cash their new, jobless neighbour manages to spend on fags, kebabs and the occasional drug habit. Watch as they wonder how to react to the plight of a harassed single mother in a mouldy one-bed flat who’s railing against immigrant families being given“ Read more ...
howard.male
With the last ever series of Big Brother dominating Channel Four’s schedules for the rest of the summer, the first TV screening of this Sundance Film Festival award-winner couldn’t have been better timed. Because the chillingly disconcerting “art project” that dot-com pioneer Josh Harris devised back in 1999 (just before Big Brother came on air for the first time) made the world’s most controversial reality TV show look like Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation, by comparison. American film director Ondi Timoner’s documentary is an unsettling look at Harris’s struggle to find himself which could be Read more ...
graeme.thomson
American television's desire to upgrade the BBC’s Who do You Think You Are? into a prime piece of emotional real estate was never likely to meet any serious resistance. Even stripped of the stridently Hollywood voiceover that teed up the US version of the show when it first aired on NBC back in March - “To know who you are, you have to know where you came from”, it boomed over a slo-mo montage of Olympian hugging - last night’s tweaked version, with a new, subdued British narration, told us more about US TV and America’s relationship with its own history than it ever did about its subject, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I always used to wonder why casting directors ever sent for Dougray Scott when they might just as well have used an old chest of drawers or a pile of deckchairs instead, but at last this gloomy Scottish actor seems to be coming into his own. Maybe his stint in Desperate Housewives kicked something loose, but he wasn't bad at all in BBC One's Day of the Triffids at New Year, and he's better still in this four-part gangster drama set in Manchester's terrifying criminal underworld.Scott plays Michael O'Connor, a former Manc crime lord of epic notoriety, now trying to live a new life and start a Read more ...
howard.male
My excuse is that I was comfortably settled on the sofa next to my wife when the first episode of Glee aired, and I just got drawn in. I know, it’s not much of an excuse - and it hardly explains the fact that I then went on to watch the next 20 episodes - but there we are. And as a heterosexual middle-aged ex-punk rocker, I’m certainly not the obvious target demographic for this latest American television phenomenon, so perhaps I should explain further.Glee is probably the most aptly named TV show ever devised, in that the dictionary defines “glee” as “open delight or pleasure; exultant joy; Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Doctor Who crew are fond of their encounters with historical characters. In his time, and let's face it he has infinite supplies of it, the Doc has rubbed shoulders with Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie, and recently weathered the Blitz with Winston Churchill. For this one, "Vincent and the Doctor", le Docteur voyaged back to 19th-century Provence to straighten out a puzzling temporal kink.While visiting the Van Gogh exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where art historian Dr Black (Bill Nighy) was holding forth about the marvels of the tormented Dutch genius, the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Melvyn Bragg last night won this year’s Bafta TV fellowship for his long championing of ITV’s arts with the now mothballed flagship The South Bank Show, which itself has been nominated for more than 30 Baftas and won nine. Ironically Simon Cowell was another winner at the London Palladium, with a special award for an outstanding contribution to entertainment and for furthering new talent in reality talent shows such as The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent. The political satire The Thick of It won three awards, Julie Walters's win for Best Actress as Mo Mowlam beat herself in the euthanasia Read more ...