TV
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If the UK’s entire power supply were to fail, how long do you reckon it would take for society to regress to the point that people would begin eating cold chips they had rescued from a bin? According to Blackout, a feature-length docu-drama directed by Bafta-award winning Ben Chanan, the answer is a mere two days.This is a serious piece of work which, by its closing moments, turns from exploration of an intriguing what-if scenario to fully realised psychological horror. And yet it’s the elements of humour among the panic and the drudgery that make Blackout so engrossing. The film follows a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Scientists may have found a cure for insomnia. It’s thinking up names for television detectives. Have you noticed how elephant-tranquilisingly dull they are? Alec Hardy and Ellie Miller. Len Harper. Denise Woods. Tony Gates, Steve Arnott and Kate Fleming. Sergeant Geoff Plank. DS Fiona Photofit. Oh go on then, couple of ringers in there, but the rest have lately been busting crime on a mainstream channel near you (see sidebar to ID them all).Apparently they end up with these vapid non-names because the plausible ones are all taken by real coppers already. The TV companies are not allowed to Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
Parents who separate make their children old before their time. The five young people in Olly Lambert’s spare and frank BBC2 documentary, Mum and Dad Are Splitting Up, certainly know more about dysfunctional adults than you would wish upon a child. Joining the pet rabbit and the little brothers and sisters at home have been alcohol, jealousy, non-communication, disillusionment and deception. The parents, now apart, were interviewed, for the most part, together, their wise child sitting in; they told the camera what you wish they had told Relate, or better still, each other, before the point Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I can’t have been alone in my struggle to keep the two of them straight in my head: there’s the one set in the east end of London, in which a former BBC Spook tries to track down Jack the Ripper; and then there’s the one set in the east end of London, in which a former BBC Spook tries to track down a modern-day killer inspired by Jack the Ripper. When Rupert Penry-Jones, dressed in suave black tie like the James Bond he never was, arrived at the book launch that kicked off this fourth series of Whitechapel, it took a few minutes - and a bit of stylised violence in an alley involving a kid in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Bruce Goodison has been responsible for some of the more impressive television of the last decade, sometimes drama, sometimes straight documentary, and sometimes drama-documentary, like his Flight 93: The Flight That Fought Back. He was back in the latter genre in Channel 4’s powerful Siege in the Sahara, bringing the heightened tension of fictional reconstruction to the story of the assault on the Algerian gas plant at In Amenas by terrorists in January this year. The ensuing hostage drama lasted three days, during which the Algerian side refused to negotiate, and left 40 of the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When The Newsroom’s first season started in 2012 the unthinkable seemed to have happened: Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing and Oscar-winning writer of The Social Network, had lost his mojo. Not even his previous, erratic show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, cancelled after its first season, had moments as excruciating as this. Set within a fictional cable news channel and centred on a ratings-hungry anchor man, Will McAvoy, who has rediscovered his fire for campaigning journalism, The Newsroom sought to combine the idealism and calling-to-account of Sorkin’s best work. But whereas Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I see a lot of things up there, I get chills, see shadows. I don’t know if you call them ghosts or whatever, but you feel stuff. They’re trying to tell you something.” This is bolt boss Mohawk Joe “Flo” McComber, one of the many Mohawk iron workers rebuilding the World Trade Center. A tough guy, he’s not alone in sensing the spirits of the dead. “The site is being take care of in a different way. You feel it,” says Mike O’Reilly, another ironworker.Belfast-born artist and film-maker Marcus Robinson has been on site since 2006, recording the rise of 1 WTC from bedrock upwards with time-lapse Read more ...
Jasper Rees
David Frost, who has died at the age of 74, was a character. The obituaries will tour the entirety of his career as swinging young presenter of TW3, as the first transatlantic celebrity of the gogglebox who gave his name to a sugary brand of Kelloggs cereal, and as a lifelong thorn in the side of Peter Cook. Then there was Through the Keyhole and the TV-am cataclysm later followed by his Sunday morning resurrection on the BBC. Above all, though, it falls to vanishingly few interviewers to see themselves fictionalised as a character onstage. And it was in this capacity that I once had the Read more ...
mark.hudson
You either get Youssou N’Dour, or you don’t. For millions on his home turf, the Senegalese singer is a major cultural figure: the street urchin-turned-superstar who almost became president. For large numbers of Western fellow travellers he’s the sexiest, most charismatic figure to emerge from the whole world music phenomenon. For everyone else, specifically the 99 percent of the Western public who aren’t into world music and didn’t buy 7 Seconds (and even some of those who did), he’s, well, a bit boring: an average-looking, dull interviewee, whose music floats by in a simultaneous blur of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It was only today I learned that, for copyright reasons, it is impossible to use Martin Luther King’s iconic “I Have A Dream” speech in its entirety without paying a hefty licensing fee to his estate. That knowledge made it easier to understand why a new documentary to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington seemed to gloss over its figurehead’s famous words.That those lines ring with familiarity half a century later is testament not only to King’s skills as an orator, but to the activists and civil rights leaders who pulled together what remains one of the largest, and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Tony Hancock stopped producing the work on which his reputation rests the best part of half a century ago. He still casts a long old shadow. Many years before BBC Four embarked on its series of biodramas, a life of Hancock starring Alfred Molina captured some of that hulking self-disgust. More recently Paul Merton has become a one-man module in Hancock studies, even going so far as to re-enact some of the old Half Hours. The absence of the real thing only served to remind the audience of Hancock’s ineffable charisma.There is always the danger, when contemporary comics make reverential films Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
Brush up your geography and dust down your history – Dr Michael Scott is investigating the sources of Greek drama and their influence on all theatre to the present day. But he isn’t going to make it easy. The opening instalment of Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth, a three-parter, was a giddying ride out of Athens to the farthest-flung regions of Google. So it’s off to the amphitheatre of Thorikos for a trot through the birth of drama in the sixth century BC, on through the siege of Mytilene, and over the water to Melos, for an atrocity that would prompt Euripides’ Trojan Women Read more ...