TV
Adam Sweeting
One can only speculate about why More4 would want to broadcast a documentary about bare-faced electoral fraud in the week before the climax of our own unimpeachably democratic process. However, this rather long film about 2009's Afghan presidential election gradually marshalled its arguments into a pointed critique of how the “democracy” which the West has unloaded over Afghanistan like a badly aimed air strike is anything but. Of course, this may not strike many people as front page news.Interestingly, even such complete novices at the free elections game as the Afghans had beaten the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“Marc Wootton is playing characters in real situations with real people” read the message that followed the opening credits of La La Land, as though Wootton were a comedic Archimedes unveiling his Eureka moment, rather than simply the latest “provocative” British wit to go panning for comedy gold in the murky waters of American embarrassment. La La Land premiered in January on US channel Showtime to fair-to-middling reviews and a thumbs-up from Larry David, and has now been given an Anglicised voiceover by Mighty Boosh star Julian Barratt and sent out to battle on BBC Three.The six-parter Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Five Daughters is “based on the personal testimony of those most closely involved”: family, friends, the last people to see the women alive. What we are watching - the story of the murder of five sex workers in Ipswich - has the stamp of truth. When one girl missed her appointment at the methadone clinic, her mother tried to collect her prescription for her. The mother, played by Sarah Lancashire with the washed-out complexion of the terminally worried parent, would in effect have been a script consultant. The same went for the episode’s climactic scene, in which Anneli Alderton (Jaime Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Several contributors alluded to this quality – he loved stories, was caught up in the drama of pirates and swashbuckling heroes (as Adam Ant used to his advantage when he hired Malcolm “for a thousand guineas” as an advisor. Malcolm then went off with his backing band and renamed them Bow Wow Wow). His partner Young Kim spoke touchingly of how he would often talk in his sleep, regressing to being a child, and she would talk to him while he was asleep, as though he was a five-year-old. The programme managed to show his mischievousness, a certain naivety, but also his “creating anti- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You always know where you are with Griff. You may be up a mountain or on a river or visiting any of the various topographical options the various TV companies deem it essential to send him. You may be doing up his house with him in Wales, where he freely admits he doesn’t really come from, or nosing round London, Paris or New York, as he did in the last series of Greatest Cities of the World. You may, as with the new series, be in Rome. But in the end, you never leave the Land of Griff.In the Land of Griff, all is bafflement, muddlement and of course chortlement. The lingua franca understood Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's difficult to reach a rational verdict in the midst of the blog-barrage, Twitter-frenzy and crass party point-scoring that surround our new national pastime, but as the party leaders neared the 90-minute time limit, it was at least obvious that this second debate had brought feistier and more committed performances from all three of them. David Cameron and Gordon Brown wasted no time in demonstrating how well they'd learned Nick Clegg's trick of looking straight into the camera and addressing us viewers, though frankly you'd have thought that should always have been pretty bleeding Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The opening episode of a new series is always an awkward blighter. You have to introduce the characters and establish the required tone, while squeezing in enough plot to keep the thing moving. Even mega-budget epics like FlashForward have struggled to make it work.And then along comes episode one of White Collar, a wry drama about a FBI agent and a master thief, and suddenly everything looks sublimely easy. Casting is all, and White Collar’s twin leads have an easy rapport that makes you believe that agent Peter Burke (Tim DeKay) really has spent three years pursuing the mercurial Neal Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"The ultimate battle! Jesus versus Magneto!" raved one sci-fi blogger (ironically), on seeing that this Anglo-American remake of The Prisoner stars Jim The Passion of the Christ Caviezel and Sir Ian X-Men McKellen. If only. Unfortunately the new Prisoner's dominant characteristics are its sluggish tempo, limited vision and inability to drag itself out of the shadow of the Patrick McGoohan original.Critics were queueing up to dole out kickings to the new Prisoner even before the first episode, which seemed a trifle cruel. Even Private Eye's "Remote Controller" weighed in with a merciless pre- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The way the pundits were jumping up and down hailing a historic night in British politics, you'd think nobody had ever seen Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Gordon Brown on TV before. This, we were told, could be a historic 90 minutes that would transform our nation's political discourse. "The leaders' debate will be a direct confrontation with the voters that could change the election", according to a man wearing glasses in The Times.I had an inkling the Telegraph's Benedict Brogan could be nearer the mark when he wondered: "What if it's too boring for words?" Sure enough, the first-ever " Read more ...
graeme.thomson
When it first aired in 2007, Outnumbered finally allowed viewers to see children on television really being children (hitting each other, lying, being naturally witty, shouting “Dad attacked that lady” in public), while ruthlessly exploiting the child’s unerring ability to say aloud what we’re really thinking, whether it's about terrorism (“What other religions have blown up planes, Mummy?”) or other cultural hot potatoes.Written and directed by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, with the children improvising around the scripted adult actors, the show's main aim was to create a version of domestic Read more ...
howard.male
You might think that an hour-long documentary mainly shot around a slaughter yard and rubbish dump might not make for particularly agreeable television, but trust me, this opener of a three-part series is by turns amusing, life-enhancing and gripping. Producer Will Anderson and director Gavin Searle have done an excellent job of getting under the surface of one of the worlds great megacities. A place that in the space of 50 years has grown from a population of about 300,000 to 16 million today.At first, parts of Lagos society appear to be on the brink of meltdown, but as the documentary Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
At around the same time that Oliver Postgate, that singular genius of children’s television, was knocking up new worlds in his garden shed in Kent, so, in a garden shed in Wiltshire another remarkable maverick, Professor James Lovelock, was assembling a new world of his own. Postgate’s was a moon inhabited by Clangers, while Lovelock’s was a re-imagining of Earth as “Gaia” - and what is perhaps unexpected is that it is children’s entertainer Postgate who comes across as the more melancholy of the two men. Lovelock, by contrast, seems remarkably chipper for a doomsayer who predicts the Read more ...