TV
Tom Birchenough
The story of Orion, aka Jimmy Ellis, really was a case of truth being weirder than fiction. “He couldn’t have failed, if Elvis had never lived,” we heard from Shelby Singleton, boss of Nashville’s Sun Records, which launched his career – meaning that Ellis was born with a voice so close to the King’s that he couldn’t escape becoming something of a stand-in. There was no other direction for his talent, despite efforts to clear matters up by recording a song, “I’m Not Trying To Be Like Elvis”.The mask he donned over his eyes to give an extra element of mystery was a stipulation in his contract Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Had he not become one of the pivotal members of Pink Floyd, it's not difficult to imagine that David Gilmour might have become an academic like his father Douglas (who was a lecturer in zoology and genetics at Cambridge), or maybe a high-flying lawyer with leftish inclinations. Despite having been at the vanguard of rock music in its greatest and most extravagant years, Gilmour was never a likely candidate for a dissolute life of rock'n'roll hedonism.During this expansive TV profile, he pondered over this himself. Inspired back in the Fifties by Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" and Elvis' Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“He has been in poor health for some time, but was cracking jokes to the last,” read the statement from Warren Mitchell’s family following news of his death today, at the age of 89. That will come as no surprise for those who remember the actor primarily as Alf Garnett, first in Till Death Do Us Part (on the BBC, 1965-75), and later In Sickness and In Health (1985-1992).But, as I discovered when interviewing Mitchell in 2002 on the eve of his playing the lead in Arthur Miller’s The Price, there was much more to him than the Cockney dock-worker. He was Miller’s favourite British actor, and won Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Josh Widdicombe is the tousle-haired guy at the end of the sofa on Channel 4's The Last Leg – where, as in his stand-up, he's permanently baffled by life and quickly reaches screaming pitch about the most minor of controversies. And so, in his new sitcom – written with Tom Craine, a fellow stand-up and his former flatmate – he plays to type as a tousle-haired guy who's permanently baffled by life and quickly, etc, etc.Widdicombe plays Josh, a twentysomething who shares a flat with two former university chums - Kate (Beattie Edmondson) and Owen (Elis James). Their landlord Geoff ( Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This "mockumentary" concerning the play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was incredibly well-intentioned and unintentionally baffling. It operated on so many levels at once that the viewer could all too easily keep falling through the cracks. Was it about the wonderfully successful play and its productions, the novel that inspired it, or, in the real world, children and adults on the autistic spectrum, and their interaction with society?The conceit is that the programme was itself a documentary made by Christopher Boone, the 15-year-old hero, about the play in which he was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Penned by Tom Rob Smith, the author of Soviet-era thriller Child 44, London Spy imparts unexpected spin to the espionage genre. Among other things, apart from the title it was by no means clear that it had anything to do with spies for virtually all of the first episode, although the camera did linger suspiciously over the MI6 building on the South Bank at one point. And once, the protagonists spotted a dubious-looking car in their rear-view mirror.However, just before the final credits rolled, we suddenly knew we'd been plunged neck-deep into something exceedingly sinister. Danny (Ben Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They said there'd never be an audience for a period drama about an aristocratic Edwardian family. Six series later, we're bidding adieu to a national (and indeed global) institution, as Julian Fellowes's motley band of ridiculous, ahistorical and frequently exasperating characters potter off into the fading TV sunset. There's still the Christmas special, but – though we might not admit it – we'll miss them.It was the casting wot dunnit. Some will undoubtedly argue that you can find more plausible characterisations in CBeebies or the new-look Thunderbirds, but despite the non-sequiturs and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Maggie Smith rarely gives interviews. In the week that Downton Abbey's last-ever series episode is broadcast, and she reprises on screen her role in Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van (pictured below with Alex Jennings), theartsdesk revisits an encounter that took place in Highclere Castle in 2010. It was the only interview Dame Maggie gave that summer apart from one – which took place just before – to Julian Fellowes. Back then global conquest was only a glint in his Lordship's eye and, talking in a chintzy side sitting-room just around the corner from the cameras and the milling Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Critic and popular historian Dominic Sandbook understands the power of the soundbite, so he supplied one of his own to sum up his new series: "We do still make one thing better than anybody else – we make stories."This is a companion piece to Sandbrook's new book, The Great British Dream Factory, in which he upset a few readers by daring to criticise John Lennon. The thesis remains the same, however – Britain has been in decline since 1945, with the Empire gone along with our manufacturing base, but has compensated by applying the energy and ingenuity that made the Victorians great to Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Metal figures on the foreshore of Crosby Beach, Liverpool, set against a sunset, signify the preoccupations of Antony Gormley. The sculptor has been concerned consistently with the human figure, manifested in metal – lead or iron – casts of his own body.We were shown his career from work to work, interspersed with questions and answers between Gormley and Alan Yentob (pictured below, with Gormley), the presenter here diffident and attentive. Tim Marlowe, once connected with Gormley’s gallery White Cube (not referred to – the business of art did not get a look in, although we were told that Read more ...
Matthew Wright
TV chefs are like the characters in a favourite band, each one with their newsworthy quirk. There’s the matey one, the posh one, the sweary one, the mumsy one, and the light-fingered one. Then there’s Nigella, the kittenish one, best known for licking her fingers with a lingering thoroughness rarely seen on family television. (She was once the Oxford graduate best known as deputy literary editor of The Sunday Times. Gotta love the patriarchal, objectifying media circus...) This series features the sort of quick but wholesome recipes that can be rustled together after a tiring day Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The prospect of Ian McKellen and Anthony Hopkins acting together for the first time in their storied careers in Richard Eyre's BBC adaptation of The Dresser was one of those mouth-watering propositions to sit alongside DeNiro and Pacino on screen in Heat and the stage reunion of Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench in The Breath of Life.And if the rather lopsided result of this latest version of a Ronald Harwood play, already made into an Oscar-nominated film in 1983, saw to it that McKellen came up trumps, that may be in the nature of the piece itself: McKellen's Norman (pictured Read more ...