TV
gerard.gilbert
That title has been troubling me. The Great Offices of State is so stolid and dull, like an illustrated Ladybird children’s book from the 1950s - The Flags of the Commonwealth, or some such. And then you start trying to think of alternatives, a play on Yes, Minister perhaps, and you soon see that this flippancy wouldn't do justice to what is in fact a masterful achievement - the sort of television series that will (or should) be shown in schools and universities for years to come. Perhaps they should have simply called it Another Political Documentary Series by the Great Michael Cockerell, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though children’s TV series Skippy The Bush Kangaroo was only in production from 1966 to 1968, it continues to resonate deafeningly with Australians, who are still apt to break into the theme tune or start doing kangaroo-hops round their living rooms. In fact it isn’t just Australians, since its 91 episodes were shown in 128 countries and dubbed into numerous exotic languages. Swedish was not among them, since Swedish child psychologists were violently opposed to children being encouraged to believe that animals could talk. But for many viewers, Skippy put Australia on the map in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
On Daniel Ellsberg's first day in his new job at the Pentagon in 1964, working under Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred. This engagement between American destroyers and North Vietnamese torpedo boats was used as the pretext for President Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam war, and marked the start of one of the most traumatic eras in recent American history. For Ellsberg, it was a period in which he was transformed from a strategic analyst enthusiastically committed to America's global struggle against Communism into an anti-war activist Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Fife, like Scotland itself, is a mass of contradictions compressed into a relatively small space: beautiful beaches lie in the shadow of lowering tower blocks; the pink, plump prosperity of St Andrews rubs against the scar tissue of former mining towns like Methil; tourism nestles uncomfortably close to despair. Fife provided Jonathan Meades with the location of his third and final instalment of the immensely enjoyable Off Kilter series on BBC Two, but the state of the entire nation was his theme.With Meades, you expect shameless partiality, skewed perspectives and a tendency towards hammy Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For a number of years I used to live opposite Abu Hamza. You didn’t see him much. I remember a Mercedes spilling devoutly robed football fans who had come to watch the game round his place when Iran played the USA in the 1998 World Cup. After 9/11, the street would occasionally fill with swooping fleets of police vehicles. Once they decanted a squad of space-suited forensics looking, presumably, for incendiary devices. His family is still there, living next door to John Hutton, until the other day the Minister of Defence. Try putting that into a script.Britain has a bit of history in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Dan Snow’s four-part history of the Royal Navy has been in many ways a marvellous thing, and a timely reminder of one of the central planks of our island story. At a moment when various brass hats are openly discussing the possibility of one of the UK’s armed services being dispensed with (and it won’t be the Army), Snow’s efforts may yet take on a greater significance than he imagined.All that being said, the final instalment was something of a puzzlement. More specifically, it looked as if some bean counter had axed part five at short notice, forcing Snow to end with a lecture to camera Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What do our elected representatives in Westminster know? Apart from, clearly, how to fill in an expenses claim form. You can file all the usual complaints about Tower Block of Commons, a series in which MPs take up residence in sink estates. It uses the tired old Wife Swap format of sadistically throwing its subjects in at the deep end to watch them sink or swim. The editing is visibly manipulative. After every commercial break it recaps the entire story for its goldfish audience. And that title is, as per, naff. But strip away modern documentary grammar and after the first instalment you Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was a bit like the Ghost of Labour Past at Channel 4’s screening of this biopic of Mo Mowlam at BAFTA a couple of weeks ago. A cohort of party veterans turned out, including Charles Clarke, Neil Kinnock and Adam Ingram (a close ally of Mowlam’s and played by Gary Lewis in the film). There was even a brief introductory talk by "Batty" Hattie Harman, recalling how she first met Mowlam at Westminster. What a thrill that must have been for Mo.The star of the piece, Julie Walters, admits that she has become so disillusioned with politicians that she doesn’t know if she can bear to vote for any Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
If I wanted to be solipsistic about this, I could say that the opening episode of The Virtual Revolution, the new BBC Two series about the changes wrought by the internet, is also the story of theartsdesk.com. It certainly felt personal at times. But then we print journalists, now launched together into cyberspace, are but one (very important, naturally) sub-atomic particle of what is variously described here as "the fastest change since the Industrial Revolution" and "the most exciting development since Gutenberg".That Gutenberg remark was made by disenchanted Twitterer Stephen Fry – just Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The second season of BBC Four’s artiest import began uncertainly, but season three took off at the gallop. The opening scene of the first episode prised open Don Draper’s closely guarded past with a flashback to his Depression-era infancy, depicting his adoption after the death of his mother (a prostitute). Then we jumped back to the present, where his wife Betty’s pregnancy picked up the childbirth theme. His employer, ad agency Sterling Cooper, is reeling from job cuts in the aftermath of a takeover by a British company, a problematic union which could spell rebirth or stillbirth.Some argue Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In his forbidding dark suit and heavy-framed sunglasses, declaiming his artfully wrought texts to camera with the ominous certainty of a hanging judge, Jonathan Meades is one of TV’s most unmistakable presences. While it may be lamentable that we don’t see him more often, it’s miraculous, in the current climate, that we see him at all.His films are densely layered brain-twisters where history, architecture and folklore collide, ripe with allusion, metaphor and facts carefully selected for their provocative value. His best-known series include Abroad In Britain, Further Abroad with Jonathan Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Early on in Michael Samuels’ unremittingly sombre film about Winnie Mandela, the star-crossed heroine made the observation that being married to Nelson meant you were also married to “the struggle”, and would inevitably end up in Nelson’s shadow. So it proved. Even as she went to meet Nelson (David Harewood) as he was finally released after 27 years in jail, Winnie (Sophie Okonedo) was advised to learn from the example of Prince Philip and the way he walks dutifully one step behind the Queen.With her husband sweating it out either in hiding or subsequently in Robben Island prison, Winnie was Read more ...