TV
Jasper Rees
One of the weapons deployed by Blighty in World War Two was humour. Stoical, deflating, relentlessly making light of the darkness, British wit refused to take the Third Reich as seriously as it took itself. The biggest cannon in our arsenal of laughter was PG Wodehouse, or it would have been if the creator of Jeeves and Wooster and, most pertinently, the pompous black shirt Roderick Spode hadn’t accidentally found himself on the other side, and apparently batting for them too.In 1940 Wodehouse and his wife Ethel were living as tax exiles in Normandy, and failed to make their excuses before Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Always a treat to see the shrewd, penetrating gaze of DCS Christopher Foyle back for one of its all-too-brief runs, though no doubt rationing Foyle's War to short series at long intervals is what has enabled writer/creator Anthony Horowitz to sustain it for so long. The three episodes in the new Series 8 find Foyle back in Britain, following a trip to the USA to "tie up some loose ends" from a previous case.It's 1946, and he's becoming embroiled in the Cold War as East faces off against West and rampant paranoia stalks the corridors of power. One of the strengths of Foyle has always been the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
How can you not love a show that opens with Robert Plant singing "Satan, your kingdom must come down" on the soundtrack? The song is aptly chosen, since Boss is the story of Chicago mayor Tom Kane, a bully, a tyrant and a master of the black arts of political fixing and gloves-off deal-making. But his days are numbered.The introductory scene of this first episode was a monologue by an unseen woman, addressed to Kane (played with thunderous assurance by Kelsey Grammer) seated in what looked like a derelict warehouse. This was an odd location for the kind of news that the voice was giving him. Read more ...
fisun.guner
You might phrase the question rhetorically: “just what do artists do all day?” Or you might ask it in the spirit of genuine enquiry: after all, to many, the artist is an exotic creature whose mystery is still to be fully penetrated. Either way, it’s pretty clear that though it may not be “a proper job”, artworks don’t make themselves. The title was enticing, but, in fact, What Do Artists Do All Day? turned out to be, well, just another low-key television profile of an artist: the relatively little-known Royal Academician Norman Ackroyd. But it’s good the title didn’t suggest any of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When the NASA space shuttle Challenger fell out of the Florida sky on the morning of 28 January 1986 after 73 seconds, killing all seven astronauts, the Nobel-winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was the only independent scientist appointed to the investigating panel. He duly made a nuisance of himself, asking awkward questions, ignoring protocols, disobeying instructions and generally making damn sure the appliance of science would dig up the truth protected by vested interests. Feynman has been portrayed onstage by Alan Alda, and on the radio by Alfred Molina, but when you want Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This story is mostly familiar from Alfred Hitchchock's 1938 movie, starring Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood. Among the things it's best remembered for are the comic double act of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, playing the cricket-obsessed Charters and Caldicott trying to get home to England from somewhere in pre-war Europe to watch a Test match, and Dame May Whitty as the titular missing person, Miss Froy.This new BBC version, dramatised by Fiona Seres, lacked fanatical cricket supporters, though it was more faithful to Ethel Lina White's original novel, The Wheel Spins, which didn't Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I must confess that I do not understand the zombie as pop culture phenomenon. Why otherwise sensible people would dress up as shuffling, mindless automatons interested only in the consumption of human brains for an annual “zombie walk”, or why somebody would rewrite Jane Austen to give the undead a co-billing is beyond me. As far as the former is concerned, certainly, it seems as if the zombie meme is a satire that has eaten itself.There are also very limited ways that the zombie narrative can play out - we’ll see how Brad Pitt handles it in the big screen adaptation of World War Z when it Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is Steptoe and Son the platonic ideal of the British sitcom? Two men trapped in eternal stasis, imprisoned by class and bound together by family ties as if by hoops of steel, never to escape: it’s what half-hour comedy should be. Posterity would seem to agree, because since the sitcom ended in 1974 the two rag and bone men have never been out of work, appearing in the cinema, on stage and radio. For 30 years they made and reran the show on Swedish television, underpinning the widely held theory that Steptoe is but a step from Strindberg.Half a century after its creation, last summer Steptoe Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a truism of the impersonator’s art that those who can do other voices have none of their own. On Parkinson, Peter Sellers couldn’t even come down the staircase as himself. When at the end of the show Mike Yarwood said, “And this is me!” a nation switched off. The idea behind The Mimic, starring the remarkable Terry Mynott, is that it accepts the truism as truth. This is a comedy about a man who can pose convincingly as Ronnie Corbett stuck in a postbox but has no life to call his own.Martin Hurdle – even his name sounds like a personality flaw - works in maintenance at a pharmaceutical Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apparently on a clear day in the Shetlands, you can see Norway and Iceland. And from about halfway through the first instalment of this Caledonian murder mystery, you could see all the way to the final reel and take a well-educated guess about who did it.I was reading an opinion somewhere the other day that ITV's Broadchurch was an inferior rip-off of such fashionable Scandinavian fare as The Killing or The Bridge. Can't see it myself. Shetland, on the other hand, was riddled with Nordicisms and fit the bill perfectly. Shetland (the place) was even a Norwegian province back in the Middle Ages Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Watching Mr Selfridge has been like one of those whirlwind tours with the refrain, “It’s Tuesday, so it must be Rome”. Episodes have been defined by the drop-in appearances of Blériot and his aeroplane, Conan Doyle and the séance, Mr FW Woolworth and the like. They've succeeded one another like the purring Monsieur Leclair’s window displays, leaving ongoing interest in character in the shade.Crowning, in every sense, this closing episode was the private visit paid to the store by Edward VII, received with customary unctuousness by Jeremy Piven’s Harry Selfridge. Either it was the King of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Five years,” said former Mott the Hoople fan club president Kris Needs of the band’s lifespan. “That’s how long the Kaiser Chiefs have been around, but who cares?” It seemed an unfair measure. Mott split 39 years ago and the Leeds quirksters are still going strong. But in terms of stitches in rock’s rich tapestry, Mott’s, like the Kaiser Chiefs’, probably wouldn’t darn a sock.That’s not to say Mott the Hoople didn’t merit this documentary, or that their best records weren’t among the greatest of the early Seventies. But it did take David Bowie to write their first hit and boot them into the Read more ...