TV
fisun.guner
Has there ever been a successful portrait of the Queen? Not a photograph - there are been plenty of those (with its delicious air of ambivalence, Thomas Struth’s portrait of the Queen with Prince Philip stiffly occupying two ends of a sofa at Windsor Castle, is among the best) but a painted portrait. Or rather, since we have Warhol’s screen prints which cannot be bettered in the age of incessant reproduction – not to speak of the air of decadent Hollywood glamour she acquired in the process – an official painted portrait?Let’s cast our minds back. There’s Pietro Annigoni’s full-length Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year at the National Theatre, Jonny Lee Miller appeared in Frankenstein with Benedict Cumberbatch ("two excellent performances", according to theartsdesk's Sam Marlowe). Maybe something rubbed off, because now here's Miller following in Cumberbatch's footsteps as another 21st-century Sherlock Holmes, in this new series from CBS in the States.There were murmurings of disquiet from the team behind the BBC Sherlock when news of the American Holmes became known, but stylistically the two products are poles apart. Apart from anything else, Elementary has to abide by the stringent conventions Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It has never been easier to get sucked into a warm, simplistic sensibility which portrays every rich capitalist businessman as corrupt and amoral, but you spend 90 minutes watching Donald Trump in action and you start to wonder. If Trump didn't exist you suspect Martin Amis would invent him. He would probably call his caricature of a dastardly US business tycoon Donald Shit.Anthony Baxter’s powerful, unashamedly partisan film pitches a number of principled Davids against this gammon-faced, lizard-eyed, overcombed Goliath. The story begins in 2006, when Trump first set his sights on the Menie Read more ...
Jasper Rees
From 10pm last night to around 11.40, the BBC did what no other broadcaster in the world would have the stomach for. It turned its guns with maximum lethalness on itself. The result was extraordinary television. “Crisis at the BBC,” chimed News at Ten, “as one flagship of its journalism investigates another.” (The opportunity to visualise the scenario with Play School graphics was for once passed up.) By the time Newsnight kicked in at the bottom of the hour, Jeremy Paxman was deploying a poker face to flag a story about his immediate boss. “The Newsnight editor incidentally had nothing to do Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
While it’s not unusual for an imported television show to have been downloaded, discussed and dissected at length long in advance of of its UK transmission date, HBO’s Girls is even harder than most to approach with an open mind. Depending on which publications you read, you may already be aware that the show is many things: racist, classist, realistic, unrealistic, hilarious, overrated, written by one of the best and brightest young female writers, written by an overprivileged egomaniac. The show won an Emmy this year for outstanding casting for a comedy series (and was nominated for several Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Getting On exists somewhere on the spectrum between Carry On and Samuel Beckett. Set in a hospital ward where mostly geriatric patients are tended by middle-aged staff all with problems of their own, it looks unflinchingly at the great maladjusted edifice that is the Health Service and all who ail in her. And in Vicki Pepperdine’s tightly coiled consultant Dr Pippa Moore it has perhaps the most delightful sitcom grotesque since Malcolm Tucker first started turning the air blue.For this third series it’s all change. The action has moved from a grotty small-town hospital to ward K2 of St Jude’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This film, promised Imagine's host Alan Yentob, would be "the nearest we'll get to the real Freddie Mercury, a shy man in search of love and a driven artist living behind the protection of his stage persona". Probably true, but the shyness and the protective persona, coupled with vigorous policing by the Queen organisation, meant that film-maker Rhys Thomas couldn't add a great deal to what's already known about Mercury.This looked very much like an addendum to last year's Queen - Days of our Lives, a two-part history of the band which was inevitably dominated by Mercury, yet which also Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you asked a bunch of foreigners to describe the British, I bet one of the phrases most frequently used would be “a nation of dog lovers”, so it was no surprise to discover that film-maker's Vanessa Engle's latest bulletin about the British and the way they live (shown as part of the excellent Wonderland strand) was about this nation's love affair with canines.Engle and her assistant studied those walking their dogs on Hampstead Heath (London's largest open space) over the course of a year, after making contact with some owners first online and others by the simple method of accosting Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You suspected she was a goner the moment the doctors started to front up like King Kong and Godzilla. Having given birth to a girl, the rebellious bluestocking Lady Sybil got her marching orders last night on Downton Abbey and Jessica Brown Findlay’s husky larynx will be heard no more pouring oil on troubled waters. The rest of the cast can rely on a berth in Julian Fellowes’ gilded prison for all eternity. Ms Brown Findlay is available for work.Seasoned Downtonians should have known something of this order was on the cards. The second series was absolutely rife with death and doom and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was tough luck for Good Cop that the real-life killing of two female police officers in Manchester prompted the BBC to postpone its fourth and final episode, judging that its plotline of rookie cop Amanda Morgan acting as bait for a couple of knife-wielding thugs who preyed on women was too near the knuckle. This intrusion of headline events into the progress of the drama was also somewhat paradoxical, since while Good Cop presented some of the common symptoms of the mainstream policier, these were blended with an unusual mixture of morality play and psychological speculation.This lent the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's always either a very good or a very bad sign when my notebook remains untainted by my scrawl when I'm reviewing; either I am too busy enjoying myself to make notes or I'm so unengaged that I can barely be bothered to lift my pen.It was the latter with last night's opener (part one of six) of Me and Mrs Jones, despite the presence of Sarah Alexander, a talented comedy actress, and Robert Sheehan, a very fine dramatic actor whom the camera loves. And also despite the writing talents of Oriane Messina and Fay Rusling, who worked on the wonderful Smack the Pony with Alexander, and then wrote Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Charm, politeness and glittering repartee are clearly not considered important qualities for the Yorkshire-based policepersons who work alongside DCI Banks. TV coppers are rarely a barrel of laughs but for this bunch, spitting, snarling and glaring are their default modes of communication. Banks himself, played by Stephen Tompkinson as though he's lugging an invisible York Minster around on his shoulders, has assembled his characterisation of the doleful detective from a mixture of gloom, depression and disgruntlement.Still, all this fits quite well with panoramic shots of windswept moorlands Read more ...