TV
Alan Bennett and The Habit of Art, More4Saturday, 27 November 2010
Few theatrical collaborations have been as successful as that achieved over five plays, two films, several decades, and numerous awards by the playwright Alan Bennett and the director Nicholas Hytner, who had jointly made a habit of art well before... Read more... |
Peep Show, Series 7, Channel 4Friday, 26 November 2010
What a pair of teases Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain are. The co-writers (and co-creators, with Andrew O’Connor) of Peep Show write only one short series of this sitcom each year but such is its pull that fans don't forget and move on to other... Read more... |
Fry and Laurie Reunited, GoldWednesday, 24 November 2010
There’s a surreal sitcom waiting to be written about the often-told story of when Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse were Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s plasterers for a while in the early 1980s. Here’s the pitch: F and L would play caricatures of... Read more... |
Storyville: Mandelson - The Real PM?, BBC FourWednesday, 24 November 2010
The title could have used a bit more work, I'd have thought. No, Peter Mandelson was never "the real PM", and won't be now. As for the real Peter Mandelson, there is no evidence that any such mythical beast exists. And why hadn't Lord Mandelson... Read more... |
Any Human Heart, Channel 4Monday, 22 November 2010
Any period drama that crops up on Sunday nights is now automatically billed as a potential replacement for Downton Abbey. Any Human Heart has duly been described thus, but isn't. Converted into a four-part series from William Boyd's 2002 novel, with... Read more... |
Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire, BBC FourFriday, 19 November 2010
The renaissance enjoyed by Leonard Cohen over the past few years is not only thoroughly welcome and entirely justified, but also partly a testament to the strange and powerful alchemy that sometimes occurs when the defiantly high-brow is swallowed... Read more... |
Lip Service: Series Finale, BBC ThreeTuesday, 16 November 2010
When The L Word, an American drama series following the interconnected lives of a group of lesbians in Los Angeles, first aired in 2004, much of the acres of coverage it attracted made disbelieving mention of the cast members’ attractiveness, which... Read more... |
Imagine: Ai Weiwei - Without Fear or Favour, BBC OneTuesday, 16 November 2010
If you found yourself thinking that you were watching Mission: Impossible rather than Imagine, you could have been forgiven. Alan Yentob had clearly been banned from meeting Ai Weiwei in China, and so one of their interviews was conducted over a... Read more... |
Accused, BBC OneMonday, 15 November 2010
With a title like Accused it would be easy to imagine that Jimmy McGovern’s new series was going to be just another generic courtroom drama, but McGovern would never be that predictable. The man who made Brookside grittily unmissable back in the... Read more... |
Garrow's Law: Series 2, BBC OneMonday, 15 November 2010
With a Royal Television Society award in the bag for its first series, Garrow’s Law has shifted up a gear with a batch of new stories about such momentous issues as homosexuality in the 18th century, the callous treatment of injured servicemen and... Read more... |
Elgar: The Man Behind the Mask, BBC FourFriday, 12 November 2010
Where is the real Elgar to be found – in his boisterous self-portrait at the end of the Enigma Variations, the warm, feminine sentiment of the Violin Concerto and the First Symphony’s Adagio, or the nightmares of the Second Symphony? No doubt in... Read more... |
The Only Way is Essex, ITV2Thursday, 11 November 2010
To vajazzle or not to vajazzle; it’s the question on everyone’s, er, lips. Thanks to ITV’s unlikeliest of hits, The Only Way is Essex, tans will be brighter, teeth whiter and bodies more diamante-encrusted across the nation this winter. It’s the... Read more... |
