TV
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s 2016, and The X-Files is the most popular TV show in the world. The very idea that over 20 million people in the US would tune in to a new episode of the pioneering sci-fi drama 14 years after the last one might seem as preposterous as the conspiracy theories the show put forward in its later years, but it was probably more likely than fans in the UK hanging on for the fortnight it took for the new episodes to show up on Channel 5.The problem, though, is how to re-introduce a show that managed to combine being a genuine pop culture phenomenon with the sort of convoluted mythology that, Read more ...
David Nice
At the end of Episode Five, Brian Cox's savvy old Field-Marshal Kutuzov gave the order to retreat and abandon Moscow, with hardly a hint of Tolstoy's council of war. That left the final hour and 20 minutes to wrap up the burning of Russia's sacred capital, Pierre's capture by the French and his best shot at the meaning of life through the peasant Platon Karatayev, Natasha's reconciliation with the wounded Andrei, the French retreat dogged by partisan attacks and then all the other loose ends. A mere 350 pages of novel, in short, not counting Tolstoy's final disquisition on the nature of war Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This slightly ludicrous programme is really a chance to see a charming range of dogs and cats, based on an assumption that by comparing cats and dogs we humans can decide which species is best. But best for what? As pets, domestic companions, survivors in the human jungle?Both species have survived indeed by attaching themselves in one way and another to various human societies, and even managing in certain societies to be worshipped as divine beings, Egypt being a prime example, while now some Asian countries see dogs as a food source. Well, they eat guinea pigs in South America; one country Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In 2005, Lynn Alleway made a film about Kids' Company founder Camila Batmanghelidjh called Tough Kids – Tough Love. In June last year, Alleway was invited to film her again. It wasn't spelled out in this new documentary, but you'd have to assume Batmanghelidjh was hoping to enlist some sympathetic media coverage, since the management and funding of Kids Company was coming under a gathering crescendo of scrutiny.Certainly, Alleway got plenty of access to Ms B, whom we saw speaking at length in the backs of cars, in corridors, on pavements, on phones and in her office. Alleway, behind the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This debate about the future of the BBC might be missing the point. In the black corner scowls the Dark Lord of Swingeing Arts Cuts John Whittingdale, while in the fluffy corner is everyone who doesn’t want anything to change. By their “I heart Lyse Doucet” shall you know the latter. We’re all of us, on both sides of the fence, of a certain vintage. The kids, who like it or not seem an absolute dead-cert shoo-in to inherit the future, haven’t got a dog in this fight. Why? Because they don’t watch TV. Any more than they buy newspapers. They watch YouTube. If they like the BBC it’s as a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Seventh series (★★★★) of the superior legal drama (still perversely tucked away on the obscurantist More4), and Alicia Florrick is having to get back to legal basics. Having been blown up by a political landmine in series six, as she made an ill-fated attempt to become State's Attorney, she's now trying to start her own law firm from home and scuffling for work.Thus she found herself on the cab-rank of hard-bitten bar attorneys down at the bond court, waiting to be lobbed a sheaf of the day's drink-and-drugs cases by the abrasive Judge Schakowsky (Christopher McDonald). Some comic value was Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
One novel and two movies, but the BBC cheekily claims that this three-part series was inspired by Deborah Moggach’s 2004 novel These Foolish Things, and the pair of films The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – but not related. How did the programme-makers come up with this, and keep a straight face?We have here a contrived documentary, taking eight sexagenerians and septuagenerians, from the delightful and diminutive character ballet dancer Wayne Sleep and the horizontally challenged, formidably intelligent actress Miriam Margolyes, to the singer Patti Boulaye and newscaster Jan Leeming to Jaipur, Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
We have been here before – literally. Morse and his colleagues discreetly observe a gangster’s funeral in Kensal Green cemetery – just as they did in Promised Land, one of the best episodes of Inspector Morse, first broadcast in March 1991. A quarter of a century has passed (along with John Thaw) yet ITV are still trying to breath new life into the ratings warhorse.Coda, the last episode in this third series, is Russell Lewis’s eighth screenplay for Endeavour. Alas, a better title would be Codswallop. He has also written one episode of Inspector Morse and four episodes of Lewis. He has made a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sky are making a big deal about the fact that this new fantasy-drama is based on an idea by Marvel Comics superhero Stan Lee, but the "lucky man" is surely the 93-year-old Lee himself. "They [Sky's production team] went back to England to do the work," said the LA-based Stan. "I stayed here to take the credit."Stan's concept was to base a show around a character blessed with phenomenal, outrageous luck. It turns out this chosen one is London detective Harry Clayton (James Nesbitt), though for the opening minutes of this debut episode his luck was very much out. We homed in on Harry as he Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
China’s tumultuous recent past attempted to selectively obliterate the history of one of the world’s great and ancient civilisations, with the neatly complementary result in the past several decades of a huge upsurge in Chinese studies, East and West, from publications to exhibitions to enormous advances in archaeology. At the same time, a sense of preserving the material past has been threatened by urban development, a habit copied perhaps from the West.And here comes a six-part television history, sprawling and ambitious, of the past 4,000 years masterminded and narrated by Michael Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A year ago, Channel 4 aired Jamie Roberts's documentary Angry, White and Proud, the result of a year Roberts spent getting to know members of far-right splinter groups. Now here's the follow-up, this time the result of two years' research into Islamic extremism in Britain.Amid the mountain of hair-raising material he came away with was the revelation he kept until last (except it had already been trailed fairly heavily, but never mind). This was that the man he'd come to know as Abu Rumaysah, who lived in Walthamstow and used to make a living by renting out bouncy castles for children's Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Created and written by the abundantly talented Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who also stars, Crashing is set among a group of twenty- and thirtysomethings living in a disused hospital in London, which the characters are “protecting” – sort of legalised squatting, where the sanctioned occupants pay a small rent and protect the building from being taken over by, well, squatters. It was filmed in an actual disused hospital, with lots of rooms and shared spaces such as bathrooms, which lends bags of atmosphere and allows the story to have several strands.In the first episode we saw Waller-Bridge's Lulu Read more ...