TV
Mark Sanderson
The title says it all: Bertolucci’s landmark (if boring) French film has its last word changed from Paris to Halifax – where butter is only used for glazing parsnips. The very idea of Derek Jacobi taking Anne Reid up the scullery is enough to put anyone off their food but the two grandes dames of English theatre add class to the bittersweet romance of Sally Wainwright’s dog’s-dinner of a drama.Jacobi plays Alan Buttershaw who was stood up by Celia Dawson 60 years ago – except he wasn’t. Celia moved to Sheffield and sent him an explanatory note via a friend called Eileen who destroyed it and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
What is the point of this? Someone somewhere must have imagined Cheryl: Access All Areas was a passably entertaining idea yet it makes Come Dine With Me look like Kick Ass. It’s the antithesis of watchable and a complete waste of time - boringly constructed, badly filmed, jam-packed with nothing revealing, amusing or exciting from start to finish. In short, there’s more fun to be had scraping burnt cheese off your cooker.The premise is that it’s a documentary about Cheryl Cole’s A Million Lights debut solo tour last month but the actuality is it documents only in the very loosest sense. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The horror, the horror. Primetime television tends to give a wide berth to things that go bump in the night. However reliable a low-budget option for budding indie filmmakers, the chills are not multiplying on the small screen. There’s no need to call in a special spookologist to work out why. Horror has its own demographic, which won’t tend to curl up on the sofa of a Sunday night for a cosy hour of creaks and shrieks. So The Secret of Crickley Hall, which has slung on a white sheet and crept into the nation’s living room, is a bit of collector’s item.Adapted by Joe Ahearne (who also directs Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Zipping her trousers while coming out of a toilet cubicle, Sarah Lund continues the phone conversation that was on-going while she was in there. Making for a sink to wash her hands, she ignores the puppyish man trying to attract her attention. Nothing is going to distract Chief Inspector Lund, whether it’s the call of nature or the new police kid on the block.The third and final series of The Killing doesn’t begin exactly like the second, with Sofie Gråbøl’s Lund marking time checking what comes off ships arriving in Denmark. Instead, we find her in another sort of holding pattern. On her Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Each episode of Southland – the best American cop show since The Shield – begins frenetically and never lets up – except for a freeze-frame in the first minute which the rest of the show spools back to explain. In this first part of the fourth season, one of LA’s finest is out of his black-and-white and chasing a suspect within seconds as his partner careers down the back alleys of South Los Angeles.These signature car chases are one of the reasons that adrenalin junkies love it so. The suspect leaps a chain-link fence: the officer known as Hollywood (a rich kid with a pretty face and a big Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
The first rule of temptation is to yield to it slowly, says a sozzled roué surrounded by semi-clad lovelies, it’s much more fun that way… The Hour is back and, the silly conspiracy strand sewn up at the end of the first series, better than ever.The BBC’s Lime Grove studios were never going to be a match for Madison Avenue but television news with its endless deadlines is far more exciting than advertising. If Abi Morgan’s retro-soap can’t be Mad Men it doesn’t lack bad men: Hector Madden, the alcoholic news anchor (Dominic West oozing sleazy charm); Angus McCain, a shifty Whitehall mandarin ( Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There was a time when we’d have felt withdrawal symptoms over the absence of The West Wing or The Sopranos, or The Wire; invariably it was American television that had its hooks in us. Now it’s Danish. And it’s time for a fix. Cue The Killing, which returns to add its own particular chill to the winter.Saturday sees the start of the third, and final adventure for Sarah Lund, the detective whose instinctive brilliance is not matched by any sort of good fortune. In the ground-breaking season one, Lund was blamed for the death of her partner, and solved the murder of a young girl only for a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The BBC has other things on its to-do list at the minute. However, once all the newly installed acting heads have been replaced by actual heads, and the matter of the ex-DG’s severance pay sufficiently chewed over by the Corporation’s bosom pals in the Fourth Estate and the Conservative Party, perhaps someone at TV Centre could get around to other business. The search, for example, for a costume drama capable of giving Downton Abbey a bloody nose.It’s not been a good period for period on the BBC. Since the ladies of Cranford hung up their bonnets, Upstairs Downtairs trailing oodles of Read more ...
terry.friel
There was a memorable, very French moment in a television series hosted by the great British wine writer, presenter and Master of Wine Jancis Robinson. A French winemaker, asked to taste an Australian wine, swills in disdain and pointedly walks outside, on camera, to spit it out. It’s not good enough even to slosh the floor of his traditional wineshed.That was just a few years ago. Chateau Chunder showed how Australian wine went in two generations from a joke and "plonk" fit only for the poor, the alcoholic and the desperate to some of the best wine in the world. It opened with the famous Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
So, another programme about Hitler and the Nazis. They mock the Brits all over Europe for our obsession with this subject. During the summer, I worked on a project with Italian associates who found this intense interest roundly bemusing. They subscribed particularly to the old joke that to create the British market’s most successful ever book, it would need to include cats certainly but, most of all, Nazis. So is there anything left for historical writer and documentary maker Laurence Rees to say in his new three-part series?The answer is, “A little, yes”. Having created the gripping The Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The 12th series of the jungle fun is another gathering of micro-celebs, wannabes and has-beens, and a smattering of people you have never heard of - and indeed by the end of the series would still have difficulty identifying in a police line-up, so interchangeable and unremarkable are they.The 10 “celebrities” are the usual suspects: people you vaguely remember from a soap - Helen Flanagan (Coronation Street) and Charlie Brooks (EastEnders); a popster (ex-Pussycat Dolls' Ashley Roberts); and a couple of actors of a certain age - former Doctor Who Colin Baker and Linda Robson of Birds of a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The one thing you can rely on when a programme is billed as "The Real" something-or-other is that that is exactly what you won't get. This film, commemorating the centenary of the birth of the great Hungarian conductor, did a thorough job of tracing his career through the great orchestras, concert halls and opera houses of the world, pulling in various stellar musical names and bags of excellent archive footage en route. But anybody already familiar with Sir Georg's life and works would not have come away a great deal wiser.Fortunately it's a great story, however you tell it. A gifted pianist Read more ...