TV
Jasper Rees
DNA: there’s a lot of it about. Random Googling reveals that, just in the past few days, a new study claims arachnophobia may be programmed into our DNA, that the British share 30 percent of their DNA with the Germans, while in the USA they’re using DNA to track down dog owners who don’t scoop poop. This last may not be what Leicester University geneticist Professor Alec Jeffreys had a mind when he developed techniques in DNA fingerprinting.Code of a Killer dramatises the case in which DNA was first used by police to pin a murder suspect to a crime scene (the concluding episode is broadcast Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dennis Marks, who has passed away at the young age of 66, was in every way larger than life. A talented and prolific music and arts documentary filmmaker, an inspired head of music for BBC Television, and artistic director of the ENO, he latterly reinvented himself as a consummately erudite and warm-voiced broadcaster who took his listeners on fascinating journeys down the Danube and along the Appian Way.Dennis was a true European, with a clarity of intellect honed in some of the best British educational institutions (Haberdashers and Cambridge), but with ears and eyes that avidly took Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
All the politicians lined up to chorus "Je suis Charlie" after the nauseating massacre of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris in January, but three months later, how is that emotional declaration of solidarity against murderous extremism holding up? For this documentary, British Muslim Shaista Aziz went to Paris to find out.Her inquiries suggested that France is split in two over the issue of Western values versus Islamic fundamentalism. So is much of the rest of Europe, but France's rigorous insistence on maintaining the state's secular status, and therefore banning such faith-based Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a distinct lack of giraffe or spiny ant-eater or even ant in The Ark. The animals went in none by none in the BBC’s visit to the Old Testament. When the deluge finally came on, it was only the human race which was saved from the watery wrath of God. Our furry and feathered friends never got the call. They say don’t work with animals, but this was taking liberties with holy writ.Meanwhile theologians will be poring over the text for arcane signs which might reveal why this was on in Easter week, an area of the calendar when they generally tend to favour the last few chapters of the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Louis Theroux just wants to make good television. This may seem an obvious thing to say of a programme-maker, but many programme-makers concerned with the kind of human interest story that Theroux has made his own, often want to do more than this. They want to understand subject and motive, to get under the skin of a thing, or perhaps somehow resolve an issue. They believe, and sometimes perhaps they may even be right, that this in itself will produce good television, or at least go most of the way there. Theroux’s ambitions are clearly much simpler. He wants to tease out stories – Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Switched from last Thursday to accommodate the live standup gigs by Cast Iron Dave and "Tough Enough" Clint Miliband, this 90-minute drama took us back five years to the birth of the Conservative-Lib Dem pact. It purported to be based on "extensive research" and interviews with "people who were there", though there wasn't much that the average politico-freak wouldn't have known or surmised already. Some of the performances were fun though.Particularly relishable was Mark Gatiss's portrayal of Peter Mandelson, silky and slithery like Kaa the snake in The Jungle Book. While all around him were Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Warning! Spoilers ahead, etc… Bearing in mind the high-octane thrills of recent Marvel forays into cinema, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is a surprisingly unshowy show. Some have taken this to be a good thing, though I suspect these people simply don’t like comic book adaptations or superheroes much. Me? I love comic-book characters – preferably covered in spandex and the sweat of battle. I want to see them have a massive scrap and fight personal demons along with extraterrestrial threats and improbably accented supervillains.Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. isn’t known for that, but the last episode Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If the mark of a good documentary is that it teaches you something new, then the awkwardly titled Hillary Clinton: The Power of Women was a very good documentary indeed. For instance, before watching it I had no idea that the famous “women’s rights are human rights” speech given by the possible 2016 presidential candidate was “the beginning of the cry for women’s rights across the globe”; and it was certainly a surprise to discover that the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan was not merely in service of a “war against terror” but rather “a war against the barbaric treatment of women”.The format Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“The righteous traitor” must be as provocative a subtitle as any when the subject is espionage. Director George Carey nevertheless used it in this highly revealing film about George Blake, the “spy who got away”, which proved as much about the anatomy of treachery – its correlation with the uneasy relationship of the outsider to a dominant establishment – as it was an investigation of the intelligence world in which Blake played so notable a role.The final rankings of ignominy – who really was the Soviets’ “masterspy”? – may never be decided when it comes to rating which of the British Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Australian musician and musicologist Martin Jarvis, connected with Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory, has been obsessed for the past 25 years with proving that Anna Magdalena Wilcke, Johann Sebastian Bach’s second wife, was not only muse, inspiration, and copyist but a composer of pieces that now bear her husband’s name. He claimed that she created the cello suites which are among the masterpieces of 18th-century music, among other contributions, including, perhaps, the tune that is the basis for Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Jarvis enlisted the professional help Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst has some stellar credits on his CV (Shameless, Exile and The Street among others), though I don't know if Ordinary Lies is going to rate among his finest achievements. Over six episodes, the series will tell the stories of six employees of a car showroom, JS Motor Group Ltd (seemingly somewhere in the north-west), and how being frugal with the actualité blights their lives.This opener starred Jason Manford as Marty, a salesman who prided himself on his glib motormouthing skills. However, it looked like his career was heading for the ditch. No longer brimming Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
For somebody who never seems to be short of things to say, journalist and author Caitlin Moran doesn’t half like to repeat herself. Raised by Wolves is, for those of you keeping score at home, her third attempt to tell the story of growing up chubby, eccentric and poor in Wolverhampton. Like last year’s novel How to Build a Girl this one is nominally fictional, but the addition of younger sister Caroline (Caz) as co-writer introduces something new.That something, as Raised by Wolves returned for a full series after 2013’s pilot, was red-haired Aretha (Alexa Davies), cynical, precocious and Read more ...