TV
Adam Sweeting
The Dracula story has seen almost infinite permutations, though none of them ever manages to improve on Bram Stoker's still-haunting original. This new Anglo-American production keeps Stoker's late 19th-century setting, but has transformed the befanged Count into a kind of supernatural corporate raider stalking the sneering, avaricious fatcats of the City of London. Played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Dracula (***) still retains his familiar Transylvanian roots. Professor Van Helsing, on the other hand, has made a dramatic switch to the dark side and is now the Count's ally and Read more ...
mark.kidel
Making a film about an artist with the phenomenal range and creative effervescence of someone like Elvis Costello was never going to be easy. There have been over 30 albums since he started out in 1977, hundreds of songs, many of which are as brilliant as anything written in the last 50 years, and a series of collaborations with artists including Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach, Bill Frisell, Chet Baker, the Brodsky Quartet, Emmylou Harris, T-Bone Burnett and many others.Portraits of great artists and musicians inevitably throw up a similar creative conundrum: I encountered it with Ravi Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Energy is this season’s dirty word. The big six fix prices from their ivory towers beyond the national borders, and wouldn’t dream of turning up in person to take a fearful wigging from a Commons Select Committee. In the old days, it was all a bit different. Energy came overwhelming from coal, mined domestically by a huge workforce. So central to British life was coal that, when the industry was nationalised in 1947, the National Coal Board took what now seems a remarkable decision to set up a film unit and show the results in up to 800 cinemas.The Mining Review consisted of dramas, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
These celebrations of our yesterdays can easily end up all camembert and wind. But while film people and television people will generally cock such things up, we do still have the odd cultural institution which can be relied upon to throw the right sort of party. For the National Theatre's golden jubilee, therefore, the stops were jolly well pulled out and the invitations damn well accepted from the actors who, striplings at the Old Vic in the Sixties, are now our own Oliviers and Ashcrofts and Scofields. And it was almost all impeccable.Of course the greatest frissons were reserved for those Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Compulsives may be wondering whether it was coincidence that Bedlam, Channel 4’s new four-part documentary following the work of the Bethlem Royal Hospital, reached our screens in the same week that the same channel’s Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners returned for a second series. The channel’s own internal debate as to whether it’s out to entertain or enlighten us has clearly not gone away. Then there was ITV’s hour on OCD Ward on Monday as well, dealing with many of the same issues as Bedlam, no less seriously, this time at Springfield University Hospital. Springfield can’t be far away from the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Most of us like a good legal drama, which is why there have been so many of them. By the same logic, finding a fresh spin or a new way of writing and shooting them inevitably grows ever-tougher.The Escape Artist, a new three-parter written by Spooks veteran David Wolstencroft, has given itself a head start by casting David "Mr Box Office" Tennant in the lead role of the irritatingly clever and successful barrister Will Burton. He has all the usual perquisites that accompany this familiar TV archetype - sparky and adoring wife, photogenic offspring, penthouse apartment with spectacular views Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Proof that the BBC’s love of gritty realism is not solely the province of Luther and similar modern-day urban crime dramas comes just minutes into the second series of Ripper Street, before the credits even roll. In the East End of London a police officer is thrown from a window, only missing a little boy playing recorder for the amusement of the street below when his leg is gruesomely impaled on a railing.The writers allowed their leading man a bit of social commentarySo far so Ripper Street of course, given the criticism that the first series of the Victorian crime thriller collected for Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the early 1980s the television producer Richard Denton was given considerable access and freedom of movement to make Public School. His documentary about Radley College remains the only really frank account of what goes on inside such an institution. It was a fine piece of patient fly-on-the-wall filmmaking of the kind that simply doesn’t exist anymore, so a documentary which sought to find out what happened to Public School’s subjects was also an elegy to a bygone age of television.A Very English Education was superficially a kind of 35 Up. It tracked down the young chaps who had taken Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Grand claims and superlatives were not lacking in this examination of The Who's fabled rock opera. "This is a quintessentially important creation," said Des McAnuff, the man who staged Tommy on Broadway and in London's West End. "This might just be the first pop masterpiece," wrote pop critic (and Pete Townshend's pinball-playing buddy) Nik Cohn in his review in 1969.But Townshend himself was not blind to the dangers of Tommy's mystical pretensions. When Cohn, who'd loved The Who's early and frantically wired-up singles, complained that the Tommy concept was too po-faced and quasi-religious, Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
How irksome in some ways for the National Theatre that both the glamour and the accessibility of cinema have bookended its first 50 years, when the company and, latterly, its Southbank home, are essentially driven by and dedicated to live performance. But it was Laurence Olivier’s film career, making him a household name, which helped secure for him the job as first director of the National Theatre in 1963. And it is cinema relays that have taken NT productions to places and people who might never step into Denys Lasdun’s building, despite the company’s national ambitions.The Olivier years Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The funny business of being British, and the even funnier business of being foreign, are at the heart of the latest vehicle for the talents of David Mitchell and Robert Webb. They’ve conquered the sketch format and the grimy sitcom but in Ambassadors they branch out into trickier terrain of comedy drama. The show's task is to snigger at the absurdities of international diplomacy while also showing signs of some sort of beating heart.Mitchell plays Keith Davies, our new man in Tazbekistan, a tinpot Asiatic amalgam of a couple of post-Soviet republics where the methods of communism have made Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Vivacious blonde presenter Cherry Healey’s latest three-part series aims to show how a dangerously large proportion of the nation’s youth are abusing themselves with booze, drugs and food “until their young bodies and minds are ready for retirement". Part one – about alcohol - opens, predictably, on the streets of Newcastle where the usual array of working class Geordie pissheads they snag for these programmes are staggering about Bigg Market and slurring that they just don’t care. “Why dwell on something you may not get?” runs the typical response from a young woman who Healey’s breathalyser Read more ...