TV
Veronica Lee
It's a truism of modern television that a programme rarely gets made without a celebrity being attached, but in this case there was a very good reason for Felicity Kendal being on board. Her parents, Laura and Geoffrey Kendal, founded Shakespeareana, a travelling theatre troupe that performed Shakespeare in India in the postwar decades; many will know their story from Merchant Ivory's 1965 film about the company, Shakespeare Wallah.Like her parents, Kendal has a deep love of both Shakespeare and India, and this programme was shot through with that genuine affection. She still speaks some Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
How delightful to welcome the return of Peter Moffat's skilful legal series. Yes alright, sceptics may contend that the law firm drama has already been road-tested to destruction via the likes of Rumpole of the Bailey, Kavanagh QC and many more - indeed, Kavanagh veteran Nicholas Jones popped up in tonight's opener as Judge Goodbrand - but Silk boasts a superb cast and a thoughtfully-drawn set of characters, whose already fraught personal relationships are being given some cunning new twists.Series one focused on the rivalry between barristers Clive Reader (Rupert Penry-Jones) and Martha Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For most of us, life is what happens to you when you’re looking the other way. For the participants in 7 Up it’s what happens in seven-year segments between the visits of Michael Apted. First interviewed in 1964, they are all 56 now, and as usual the questions loom. Who is still turning up for these things? Who has thrown in the towel or, as will now become a more urgent issue, has anyone shuffled off their mortal coil?Television’s magnificent grand projet crops up every seven years to rebuke modern broadcasters with the accusation that they don't make documentaries the way they used to. The Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There have been some highly unlikely couplings in the long history of television comedy, but the one between Debbie from The Archers and Joey from Friends in the first series of Episodes ranked somewhere near the top of the list. If the viewers struggled to be convinced by that oddly implausible tryst, at least we weren’t alone. It turns out Tamsin Greig’s character Beverly Lincoln can’t quite believe it happened either.It is Bev’s bout of improbable (and – as it transpired – unjustified) revenge sex which is destined to hang like a smoggy sky over series two of Episodes, the Golden Globe- Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Street of dreams? The people who lived in the real-life inspiration and location for Coronation Street, Archie Street in Salford, hand-picked by the soap’s begetter Tony Warren, would be flummoxed and flabbergasted to hear it called that. I walked down Archie Street several times when the TV soap started. The two-up, two down, back-to-back terraced houses, separated by a three-foot alleyway, had no baths, no hot water, no inside lavatories and were dubbed “a disgrace to society”. But the people who lived in them when the TV version started on 9 December 1960 were genuine enough folk. One of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is, as you may have heard, the Israeli TV series which provided the inspiration for Homeland, smartly snapped up by Sky Arts to plug the gap left by the latter after last weekend's finale. And guess what - it may be even better than its Hollywood spin-off.Written and directed with auteur-ish panache by Gideon Raff (who also exec-produced on Homeland), Prisoners of War - or Hatufim in Hebrew - is less the labyrinthine thriller, more a skilful and probing analysis of loss and separation. Where Homeland's central theme was whether or not rescued US Marine Nick Brody had been turned by his Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a funny old game. Sport rewards the talented when they are young and their bodies responsive. A profession which requires the reflexes to work in instant harmony with the brain means that beyond a certain age, the gifted become instantly unemployable the moment they lose their magic powers. A case of they don’t think it’s all over: it is now. Michael Vaughan, the England cricket captain whose body decided to retire before he did, embarked here on a thoughtful trawl through the sporting world to ask a poignant question: how do you cope when the crowd has stopped applauding, the accolades Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's always a pleasure to watch comics first seen and enjoyed playing a tiny room at the Edinburgh Fringe make their television debut; it's an even greater pleasure to see two immensely talented comics make such an accomplished entrée as Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns did last night. But then they have a track record: in 2006 the duo (then performing as a threesome with Sophie Black as Fat Tongue) were nominated for best newcomer in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards.Their sketch comedy is mostly spoofs of instantly recognisable TV tropes that lend themselves to parody, but here given a neat Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
The course of the serialised drama finale never did run smooth, particularly in the case of a show like Homeland, which has structured its entire run around a slow-building sense of queasy, paranoid dread with, thus far, very little real payoff.The penultimate episode ended with both series leads fulfilling their long-awaited narrative destinies - rescued prisoner of war Brody (Damian Lewis) was indeed the brainwashed terrorist that CIA analyst Carrie (Claire Danes) had always suspected him to be, while Carrie herself had fallen into the manic state of psychosis she’d long been skirting the Read more ...