TV
Jasper Rees
It’s not usually a good sign when the second series takes two years to materialise. Vexed , a comedy drama with corpses, took its first bow a couple of years ago. It offered Toby Stephens as DI Jack Armstrong, a detective from the old school who’s rather more mouth than trousers. There can’t have been much confidence in it back then: August is the cruellest month for fresh television content when the target audience is generally off on its hols.The drama department may have eventually given it this second run around the paddock, but the schedulers continue to lack confidence in the finished Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having begun as a piece of fan fiction derived from the Twilight movie series, EL James's Fifty Shades of Grey has blown up into the publishing phenomenon du jour. It's supposedly the UK's fastest-selling book of all time, and has sold nearly 50 million copies worldwide. In the process, with its copious descriptions of BDSM (or bondage, discipline and sado-masochism), it has gathered a vast mostly-female fanbase and fostered the creation of the term "mummy porn".It has also become a giant canvas for pundits, fans, critics and "experts" of every hue to spray graffiti on, a fact which this Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If he isn't careful, Daniel Barenboim is going to find himself on a plinth in Trafalgar Square. He was feted at the Olympic opening ceremony as a great humanitarian, and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is being held up as a model for how music can bridge political and ethnic divides, with particular reference to the Middle East. The orchestra's performances of the nine Beethoven symphonies at the Proms have been an event, even if Barenboim's conducting priorities have provoked some critical pursed lips and the hiss of vitriol hitting keyboard.In this hefty documentary, Michael Waldman Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Oh to have been a fly on the wall at the Palace. “Your Majesty, we’ve had a request from a Mr Boyle. It concerns the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games.” “I’m already opening the blessed thing, aren’t I? What else do they want?” “Ma’am, they just want you to be yourself.”Enter Daniel Craig, greeted by corgis and flunkies, ushered along lushly carpeted corridors into an inner sanctum. The entire planet will have had the same thought at the same moment. They haven’t gone and got the Queen to play ball? “Good evening, Mr Bond,” suggested Her Majesty, before apparently following 007 into a Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
So, how are we all feeling about David Starkey? The historian’s reputation has taken a battering lately, since he was seen last year taunting overweight schoolchildren on Jamie’s Dream School and more recently causing Twitter to combust after criticising black culture on Newsnight. But if Channel 4 is to be believed, such displays of bullying and bigotry haven’t dented his authority as a historian.While the viewing figures will likely be the judge of that, what is immediately clear in his first proper outing since the Newsnight furore is that, to Starkey, such controversies are but minor Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nearly there. In one more day the phoney Games will be over and the real drama can begin. For the past weeks the television schedules have jostled with documentaries about past Olympians and current ones, while Chariots of Fire has been going for gold in both the theatre and the multiplex. There was just time last night for one final Olympic story to be smuggled under the wire. The remit of Bert and Dickie seemed clear: to remind us that we’ve done all this before, in much more trying circumstances, and the whole thing united the nation in a warm glow. So there.The on dit is that Team GB does Read more ...
fisun.guner
It’s a patchy history, the history of art told through the colour gold, though I suppose it would be. After all, despite the title of this new three-part series, we’re not actually talking about gold as colour, that seductively warm, buttery yellow of Italianate landscapes and Turner sunsets, but of gold itself. Actual gold. The Impressionists never used it, but those ancient Egyptian tomb builders did, and so did medieval icon painters. As for the kings, queens and emperors of Europe, their palaces are replete with decorative artefacts finished off with solid gold nymphs and nudes and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
So that’s all over then. Which isn’t good. The gnawing anxiety for followers of Twenty Twelve, the programme whose theme song is “There may be trouble ahead...", has been whether real-life events would become so like it - or even worse, more like it than it could be - that the programme would become redundant. The extempore absurdities of Jeremy Hunt, the lost Olympics taxi drivers and G4S have given its scenarios a tense run for their money, and I'd guess a lot of BBC nails are down to the quick by this week.This was an exceptionally bold TV idea, to keep apace with current events and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At the end of episode four, we left ferret-faced copper Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) seemingly having his fingers hacked off with a bolt-cutter by a gang of hooded thugs and their poisonous little child-sidekick, Ryan. Boringly, the glum and dislikeable Arnott was rescued in this finale when the supposedly corrupt DCI Gates organised a police rescue, and got away with all his fingers mostly intact.It seemed to symbolise Line of Duty's annoying habit of setting up ever-murkier scenarios, then wriggling its way out of delivering a real punchline. It really, really wanted us to believe that it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jane Treays's previous film about diver Tom Daley was 2010's The Diver and His Dad, which followed the amphibious teenager as he sat his GCSEs and defended various titles. Ominously, it also charted the progress of his father Rob's struggle against a brain tumour.This sequel picked up the story in 2011, as the London Olympics loomed over the horizon and became the focus of Daley's ambitions. In July last year, he made the inaugural dive into the brand new Aquatics Centre pool in Stratford, a few days after he'd qualified for the 2012 Olympics at the World Championships in Shanghai. Daley only Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
We had Kevin MacDonald’s Bob Marley epic documentary earlier this year, and this is a similar film about another artist who became a symbol as much as a singer. I only saw Miriam Makeba in her sixties, by which time she had become a revered institution they called Mama Africa, as though she was the mother of an entire continent. This Storyville documentary took us back the amazing vibrancy and courage of her early years, with some terrific archive footage.By the 1990s, although her long exile from South Africa was over, Makeba had been bashed around by events, notably the death of her Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The first anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s death seems like both a temptation and an opportunity for a sensationalist, hyperbolic tribute. Refreshingly, this Arena film, which told the story of the night that a superstar in the making performed to an 85-capacity church in the Irish fishing village of Dingle, for the most part avoided the clichés: the word “tragedy” wasn’t even mentioned until 38 minutes in.“You don’t just go to Dingle by accident,” Philip King, director of Irish music series Other Voices, explained by way of introduction. Every winter the show manages to attract some of the Read more ...