TV
Veronica Lee
EM Forster fans will straight away get the reference in the quiz show's title to Howards End. Those of a less literary bent will make another mental link – Connect Four, a game for six-year-olds and up invented in 1974 and still going strong – which shares with its near-namesake the need for abstract reasoning. In fact when I first heard about Only Connect the latter was the connection I made, but it's typical of fans of the BBC show that they could make either. Arcane knowledge, both of intellectual pursuits and popular culture, goes a long way in this programme.Victoria Coren (or Victoria Read more ...
Matthew Wright
BBC channels One and Two currently present such different sides of Ian Hislop that his appearances should by now be required watching for trainee psychologists. As a founding team captain on Have I Got News For You, his knuckles have left a lasting impression on panellists including Jimmy Savile, Piers Morgan and Neil Hamilton; but switch over to one of his documentaries, which have graced all of the more thoughtful channels, and we find a wryly avuncular character. Sometimes he’s even cosy, and that’s something a satirist never should.During two and a half decades ensuring HIGNFY remains Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hang about with estate agents (for the only reason that anyone would) and you notice the men among them often stand with their hands clasped pliantly in front of them, with their shoulders bent slightly inwards. The pose semaphores trustworthiness, humility and the morals of a choirboy. Uriah Heep, ever so ‘umble, would have made a fine addition to the trade.Under Offer: Estate Agents on the Job is a docusoap about a profession that gets an even worse press than the press. The idea is to show its human face. So meet Lewis, who’s a big cheese in Exeter. “I’m the guy that’s sick in the urinal Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Gyles Brandreth pointed out, before the advent of breakfast television in 1983, Britain was a civilised country in which people ate breakfast while browsing through a newspaper. Then the BBC cheekily nipped in with its new Breakfast Time programme, a fortnight ahead of the much-hyped all-star TV-am project, and the nation has been going to hell in a handbasket ever since.This often hilarious account of the breakfast TV wars of the 1980s ladled on the military metaphors a little too eagerly, but it was propelled swiftly forwards by a droll voice-over from Peter Snow as it unravelled a lurid Read more ...
Andy Plaice
Television shorthand for something terrible about to happen includes the car journey where the happy mum is singing at the top of her voice with an even happier kid safely strapped in at the back. No, not that they’re about to do "Wheels on the Bus", I mean something even worse, like mummy getting her head caved in with a rock while daughter plays yards away by the water’s edge.In fact episode one of Undeniable, ITV’s two-part psychological thriller from screenwriter Chris Lang, felt strangely familiar from the start but maybe that was the point. Twenty-three years ago Jane was a girl who Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The BBC is going to reap a rich harvest from The Crimson Field. Sarah Phelps’s drama impresses for a whole number of reasons that will score with viewers: there's the closed community and class elements we know so well from the likes of Downton, as well as rather more room for fermentation of youthful hormones, male and female alike, among a shapely cast.Most of all though it has the sheer emotionally powerful drama of war, with its stories of life and death that will be resounding throughout this “commemorative” year. The timeline of this opening episode was June 1915, the casualties of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Trip is a hall of mirrors put together with the help of Heath Robinson. It’s a comedy vehicle in which pretty much the only thing that’s real is the actual vehicle. The stars are two impersonators who above all impersonate themselves. Their quest as they drive between high-end restaurants is to submit a series of reviews to The Observer, which will of course never be written. This is a trip also in the pharmaceutical sense.The first series took Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon around the north-west, where the former comes from. The second series resists the lure of the latter’s homeland, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a hectic writing career spanning theatre, radio, film and TV, Sarah Phelps can lay claim to such milestone moments of popular culture as both the return of Den Watts to EastEnders and his subsequent demise in 2005, and writing the screenplay for BBC One's adaptation of Dickens's Great Expectations at Christmas 2011, which starred Ray Winstone and Gillian Anderson. Her work for the stage includes Angela Carter at the Bridewell Theatre (an adaptation of a brace of Carter's stories) and Tube at Manchester Royal Exchange (which won her an Arts Council Award), while her armful of TV credits Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Biança Barker's film was broadcast to coincide with the run-up to the Grand National this weekend, although one got no sense of where its subjects fitted into the horse racing world in general. In fact, one got no sense of where they fitted into anything other than a tickbox used by TV producers when looking for the next big idea. Animals, troubled teenagers, non-nonsense adults trying to knock them into shape, school of hard knocks, last-chance saloon. It had all of these, but woefully lacked impact.It followed three teenagers on the intensive 10-week jockey-training programme at the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
History may be written by the winners, but its verdict is surely still out on Kim Philby. The presenter of Kim Philby: His Most Intimate Betrayal, Ben Macintyre, acknowledged that Philby is “the most famous double agent in history”, but though such acclaim will never guarantee any kind of moral endorsement, at least it keeps his seat of notoriety warm. The fascination remains, not least for television.Francis Whately’s two-part docu-drama is the second BBC film in a year (the first was last winter's The Spy Who Went Into the Cold by George Carey, focusing on the crucial Beirut period in 1963 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's been six years since Peter Flannery's lurid Civil War series The Devil's Whore, which ended shortly after the death of Oliver Cromwell. This sequel, co-written by Flannery and Martine Brant, speeds us forward to 1680, which means Charles II is on the throne and, in between attending bawdy Restoration plays, is hell-bent on tracking down the people who executed his father.To avoid getting stuck in any kind of rut, however, the writers have introduced a transatlantic dimension to the story. We catch up with Angelica Fanshawe, heroine of the first series (she was played by Andrea Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The title of Sebastian Junger’s documentary comes from a casual remark made as a group of journalists set off towards conflict in the outskirts of the Libyan town of Misrata: it may sound like a standard question from a battle-hardened war correspondent, but the film that follows shows that Tim Hetherington, whose off-camera voice it is, was anything but that. It was April 11 2011, and that journey would prove fatal for the British photographer and filmmaker. Only weeks earlier he had been in the very different setting of Los Angeles: Restrepo, the remarkable film in which Hetherington and Read more ...