TV
Jasper Rees
Well, it’s one way to cure shellshock. The centenary of World War One has produced quite a bombardment of dramas, none quite as curious as Our Zoo. The war is long since over in this new BBC One confection, and men have either come back from the trenches or not. Some have returned but without the full complement of limbs or, in the case of shopkeeper George Mottershead, marbles.You know he’s not quite the full shilling when he takes his daughter to the circus but has to run as soon as cowboys firing popguns. They didn’t go in for the talking cure in those days, not in the tight-lipped north, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Bennet family had an issue. Time to get the Austenesque quips out of the way. For the Bennets in Gems TV the truth universally acknowledged was, roughly: “That a £100 million family-run jewellery television channel risking running out of its best-selling African gem, not to mention suffering from a shortage of screen presenters who can flog the stuff, must be in want of a friendly television documentary format to get them out of their fix.” (For the record, no one seemed sure if it was a single “t” or a double one in Bennet: ITV gave them one – closet Janeites there, eh? – the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Poet and campaigner John Betjeman, who died 30 years ago this year, still has a public profile most writers would die for tomorrow. He shares with Philip Larkin the distinction of having written some memorably, demotically quotable lines of verse, their respective denunciations of Slough and parents being possibly the two best-known pieces of 20th-century verse.Yet while Larkin has suffered from a perception of racism and misogyny, Betjeman’s reputation as a far-sighted architectural campaigner has, with his statue at St Pancras, one of the buildings he helped save, helped consolidate Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You didn’t have to wait for the words in the closing credits, “written and presented by”, to know that The Writers Who Shaped a Nation was a project that Andrew Marr was involved with fully. Its sheer broadcasting quality showed it from the beginning. It’s the first project that has taken Marr out of the studio since his stroke, and it confirmed that his agility of mind (and legs, given the amount of mountain walking involved) was as powerful as ever.Simply put, viewers can really feel the difference when a presenter is clearly the master of the script from beginning to end. It’s far from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It looked like Dresden after the bombing.” Blondie’s Chris Stein may be a member of one of pop’s most-loved bands, but he also has a way with words. Describing 1970's New York City in this way is offensive to the memory of the 25,000 who died in the World War II air raids on Dresden. More pertinently for New York-dweller Stein, his comment also chimes badly with the destruction of the twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Centre in 2001.Blondie’s New York and the Making of Parallel Lines unquestioningly celebrated the band’s massive-selling, breakthrough third album but some care could have Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
What a difference four days can make. Stammer School: Musharaf Finds His Voice took us on an emotional journey from deep frustration and pain towards something like triumph and hope. "Triumph" may seem a big word, but it was hard to think of a better one after the film’s final scene where the stammerers whose progress we had been following came out and spoke with confidence in public.The one we knew best was Musharaf Asghar from last year’s Channel 4 Educating Yorkshire, with its closing episode that showed the severe stammerer reading a poem out aloud to the school. He’d been coached and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Mid-week at 9pm has always struck me as the perfect televisual sweet spot. It’s not so close to the weekend that you’re likely to want to go out, but enough of the week is done that it seems right to put your feet up and relax with a glass of wine and some exciting new drama or challenging documentary. Or, if you’re Channel 4, an hour on the 'professional pets' that the internet has helped launch to viral fame.Of course, advertisers recognised the purchase power of 'cute' long before Grumpy Cat and her ilk were but a twinkle in YouTube’s eye; with the Andrex Puppy and Dulux mascot being only Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Since Big Brother, Channel 4 has become expert at selecting naively self-promoting members of the public, and rubbing their unsuspecting apple cheeks into choice and unsavoury anatomical and psychological corners, for general public amusement. The title of this series suggests only a cosmetic variation on that theme, the question merely being whether it’s Islamists, Russian separatists or the weather that gets them first.In fact, the surprise of this series so far (though there’s still time for disaster...) is how lovely everything is. The scenery is unspeakably beautiful, they’re doing some Read more ...
Andy Plaice
Fifty-seven minutes into this hour-long programme entitled "Al Murray’s Great British War Films", our host put panellist Dan Snow on the spot and asked him to name his favourite war film. “Does it have to be British?” Snow wondered. For a second it looked like Murray and his other two guests might stick him in solitary confinement for a week, yet Snow’s dizzy reaction was not only (unintentionally) funny but also gave away just how much he’d switched off by now. And he wouldn’t have been alone.For all that it promised – a comedian with a love of history and three panellists sit in lovely Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In the current political climate, it would have been grotesquely inappropriate to conclude even the most fictionalised account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with any kind of neat resolution. But even if Hugo Blick’s absorbing thriller had ever dealt in such things, the carefully orchestrated dual-location bloodbath at the climax of its penultimate episode was all the hint one needed that a happy ending was never on the cards.Moral ambiguity makes for more interesting drama, of course, but by its ending The Honourable Woman had turned traditional notions of “good” and “bad” on their head Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Imagine that you were a TV executive producer, and that you had managed to cast one of the country’s finest actors in the lead role. To what use would you put his considerable talent and gravitas? If your answer was not “engage him in a five-minute shouty monologue about how much he hates his eyebrows”, well, congratulations: you are not Doctor Who show runner Steven Moffat. But commiserations too, because you missed out on the funniest and best-played regeneration scenes since the show’s renaissance in 2005.It may have been billed as a feature-length episode, simulcast in cinemas across the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Kate Bush’s return to live performance next week, after 35 years’ absence, has been one of the defining features of this musical year. Her announcement, in March, of the Hammersmith gigs left even David Bowie’s gifted coup in the shade, creating a simmering summer of speculation. It’s surprising, then, that it’s taken the media so long to create the inevitable previews and retrospectives. This BBC Four feature did a bit of both, though it ended with a sense that Bush’s reputation survived the hour despite, rather than because of, the programme’s organisation. Though Bush was dismissed Read more ...