TV
joe.muggs
Oh BBC Four, we do love you, but this was an uncomfortable proposition from the start. We watch your pop music documentaries, because – let's face it – nobody else is making any, but so often they are pretty thin gruel. There are gems, of course, generally the ones focusing on an individual artist or label, or super-specific genre or time period. But the broad-sweep ones are more often than not a hodge-podge, seemingly governed in their narrative by what library footage was available, but also by a cripplingly old, white, rock establishment view of history.Even when soul and reggae are the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The cliffhanger ending of series two – will serial killer Paul Spector survive his gunshot wounds? – has been quietly defused, since Spector (Jamie Dornan) now has series three stretching out ahead of him. What was less expected was that this opener would look like a homage to Sky One's appallingly graphic surgical drama, Critical.After a quick recap of the shooting incident which left our eminence noire teetering on the brink of oblivion and experiencing near-death visions of tunnels and car crashes, most of the action focused on the trauma team dealing with his injuries.There was a nifty Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Damned (★★★) is the third comedy drama in what could be termed Jo Brand's social/healthcare triptych (after Getting On, set in a geriatric hospital ward, and Going Forward, in which she appeared as a care-home worker). Damned, in which she also stars, is set in a child protection social services unit.Co-created with Morwenna Banks (who appears as co-worker Ingrid), Damned follows in the tracks of Getting On and Going Forward by being low-key, dark-humoured and full of throwaway lines, but - on the evidence of last-night's opening episode (of six), has yet to reach the former's superb heights Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The indefatigable Victorian spinster Marianne North (1830-1890) is the most interesting artist you've never heard of. The upper-middle-class Ms North thought marriage a terrible experiment, and with her single state allowing her control of her fortune, she took to cultural and physical independence. Her rich landowner father, Frederick, MP for Hastings, knew everyone who was everyone, including Sir William Hooker, director of Kew. It was a visit to the gardens that turned his daughter’s eyes to the world of plants. She was 25 and had found her vocation. Marianne deserted the drawing room Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They keep on coming, these crime dramas, from every direction. The Viking invasion continues, the co-productions with France, the ongoing American global takeover. Meanwhile back in Blighty, Red Productions have been a reliable source of quality drama since the 1990s. Their most recent forays into crime have both involved Sally Wainwright: Happy Valley was theirs, and so was Scott & Bailey. Their latest, modishly, is an international collaboration: Paranoid, a new eight-parter set somewhere quiet and northern, was made in conjunction with Studio Canal and is destined for Netflix.In one Read more ...
Barney Harsent
This look back at the events earlier this year when the country elected to buy a car, sight unseen – and from proven liars – to drive us into an imagined and politically unstable future, was a little confusing to me at first. Now, I do remember a fat, milky manchild holding a pasty aloft like some kind of magic totem – that definitely happened. I remember Toad of Toad Hall standing in front of a deeply racist poster hoping to elicit passion from patriots on the very same day that a Labour politician was brutally murdered by an angry racist. I also remember a man with the complexion of vacuum- Read more ...
Florence Hallett
If you’ve had half an eye on BBC Four’s conceptual art week, you’ll have noticed that the old stuff is where it’s at, with Duchamp’s urinal making not one but two appearances, equalled only by Martin Creed, that other well-known, conceptual stalwart (who actually isn’t as old as he looks). The BBC would say that this is because 2016 marks the centenary of Dada, the anarchic, absurdist art movement (if a movement is what it was) that saw artists begin routinely to challenge and ridicule accepted ideas about art – what it is, why it is and what it’s for.The other reason, as demonstrated in Tate Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Arresting elderly entertainers for historic sexual abuse now appears to be the primary function of the police, and here they are doing it again in Jack Thorne's new drama about veteran comic Paul Finchley. Finchley is part of a much-loved double act with his partner Karl Jenkins (it seems strange that they named the latter after a popular contemporary Welsh composer, but he's played with carefully calculated ambivalence by Tim McInnerny), and Finchley's autumnal years suddenly turn to ashes when a pair of cops turn up at his door to inform him he's been accused of committing rape back in 1993 Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The wilder shores of contemporary visual art are now ephemeral or time-based: performance, installation, general carry-on and hubbub. But once upon a time – say, the 1960s – it was the nature of objects, pared down to essentials, and often made from real materials sourced from the streets, builders’ yards and shops, that startled: the idea made manifest without old-fashioned notions of the hand-made, craft or manual skill.The making could even be outsourced, and one critic called minimalism “ABC art”, reduced almost literally to building-block art: form or colour representing nothing but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
On the face of it a murder mystery, The Night Of develops steadily into a panoramic survey of the American justice and prison system and attitudes to race and class. Produced by BBC Drama and HBO, it's based on the BBC's 2008 series Criminal Justice (which starred Ben Whishaw). The good news is you can watch all eight episodes right away on Now TV.The story so far is that Naz Khan (Riz Ahmed), a shy and unworldly Pakistani-American college student from Queens, New York, has been acccused of murdering 22-year-old Andrea Cornish after he unwisely borrowed his father's taxi for a night out in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In film and photography, zoos and on safari (we should be so lucky) we admire the great cats, kings of jungle and forest, top of the food chain, predators, and gorgeous to boot. But in spite of this admiration, some human populations hardly bear affection for the cheetah or lion because of their perceived threat to cattle, while human encroachment on their habitat is leaving many a feline population vulnerable and endangered.Following the Rio Olympics and huge political scandals in Brazil, this quiet and surprisingly emotional documentary on jaguars is curiously topical. For jaguars, powerful Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sixty years of sitcoms in 60 minutes? That's a big ask, but the makers of this whizz-through of British sitcoms tried, with a mega session of clips and comedy experts opining about them in a one-off documentary charting the importance of sitcom in British broadcasting history.The set-up was to talk about firsts and breakthroughs: it started with Hancock's Half Hour, now regarded as the UK's first sitcom, and worked consecutively through many more, with a short clip and one or two people talking about each programme mentioned. It ended, for no apparent reason, with Gavin & Stacey, which Read more ...