TV
josh.spero
The most finely judged thing about Lowdown on BBC Four is how it takes the tradition of broad Australian humour and makes it broad enough to cover the Outback without causing a breach in laughter or taste. The taste in this comedy of hacks is, of course, bad, but that's what makes it so good. The bogan element in Australian culture - it's their equivalent of the hick - is turned into the comedy of the unspeakable, and is always very, very funny.Now, I'm not the first man to laugh about anal fissures - for yucks it's somewhere up there with lacemaking and Elizabethan constitutional history - Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We know any old nonsense goes on Valentine's Day, but as it dragged itself towards the end of its allotted hour, Jo Brand's search for the meaning of kissing was being drowned out by a cacophonous din of barrels being scraped. Considering Brand's implacable hostility towards seeing people kissing - "There's far too much kissing going on these days, especially in public" was her opening salvo - it's amazing she wanted to make the programme at all. In the end, though, it was her neurotic eagerness to avoid kissing or being kissed that gave the film what little fascination it managed to generate Read more ...
fisun.guner
Daniel McGowan is a convicted terrorist. As a former leading member of the Earth Liberation Front, listed as the FBI’s number one domestic terrorist organisation, the thirtysomething New Yorker with a gentle, rather guileless demeanour was convicted in 2007 on multiple counts of arson and conspiracy. No one was killed during these attacks and no one has ever been killed or physically injured in the course of any ELF action. But that’s not to say we were meant to feel entirely sympathetic to McGowan or, indeed, to the ELF .This excellent film, by Sam Cullman and Marshall Curry, was balanced, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Zach Braff (b 1975) is overwhelmingly known as the star of Scrubs, the hugely popular American hospital comedy which came with a side order of surrealism. But fans of low-budget indie cinema will also cherish fond memories of Garden State, which he wrote, directed and starred in alongside Natalie Portman. It told of a young actor/waiter on anti-depressants who after nine years in LA comes home to New Jersey for his mother’s funeral and finds a panacea in the form of a beautiful, equally troubled young woman.After that promising debut, Braff retreated into silence. Pinioned for nine seasons in Read more ...
ash.smyth
Mea culpa. I take it all back. Christoph Waltz can act, and like a dream. You know, that dream you have where Tarantino's favourite pantomime Nazi demonstrates his apparently incurable fixation on apple-based desserts, and then Kate Winslet yakks all over his shoes. In fact, in Roman Polanski's oddly flat Carnage, I'd go so far as to say that Waltz is the only one really pulling his weight. It may be, of course, that this is just a side-effect of Yasmina Reza's French play being shipped across the Atlantic; but when Reza's Parisian characters did spite, you got all spitey with them. Read more ...
ash.smyth
Watching Bullets, Boots and Bandages last night, I found myself recalling a tutor from my Master’s year whose favourite hobby was lampooning the “sloppy thinking” of other noted academics. His personal bête noire, he more than once informed us, had many years ago written a book averring that leadership was the most important thing in war; then, later, another saying that actually technology was the key; after which came a volume on the paramount importance of strategy; and then one concluding that wars were in fact won and lost over logistics.Saul David agrees with the last bit, at least. “ Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's a brave sitcom writer who dares to write a bleakly comic drama, without canned laughter, in which nothing very much happens and where a long-married couple natter away about the mundane details of their lives in the half-hour after they come home from work. But twin sisters Emma and Beth Kilcoyne have done just that, and the result, Roger and Val Have Just Got In, is a thing of quiet beauty.It debuted on BBC Two in 2010 and, given little fanfare by the corporation, still gained a solid and devoted following, instantly hooked on this delicately woven story about Roger and Val (Alfred Read more ...
howard.male
We humans think we’re the bee’s knees don’t we? We’ve got language, music, art, cars, fridges, bank accounts. Essentially we’ve left all of the other planet’s creatures faltering on the starting line. Well, if that’s what you believe then it may have come as a surprise to see a chimp on last night’s Super Smart Animals solving a number-centred memory challenge that we oh-so-superior primates couldn’t even begin to do, and doing it so quickly and effortlessly that the chimp was suspected of having learnt it by rote.Welcome to a world which of course has always been there, it’s just that we’re Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Prisoners’ Wives belongs in a hoary tradition of television drama which finds women doing it for themselves. The men are always otherwise engaged, being either dead or useless or, in the case of Prisoners’ Wives, as it implies on the tin. In the old days such dramas were usually written by one of Lucy Gannon or Lynda La Plante or Kay Mellor, but here the broad brushstrokes are applied by Julie Gearey.On the evidence so far, each episode concentrates on one of the four main female characters while keeping an eye on the stories of the other three. In the opener we shared the ordeal of young Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I can never quite work out Andrew Marr. Serious political journalist? Wannabe arts correspondent? Failed actor? Celebrity superfan? Anyway here he was, following the Queen around the world on a variety of exotic junkets, shouting at the camera and waving his arms about as if he'd been standing in the sun too long. From time to time he'd try to drive home some poetic or rhetorical phrase by ladling on a bit of thespian over-emphasis, like somebody doing Larry Olivier at the News & Current Affairs Christmas party. If he hadn't been protected by his camera crew, it would have been Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC's updated Upstairs Downstairs is not a lucky show. Its three-night debut in December 2010 brought unflattering comparisons to Downton Abbey, a fate also likely to greet the imminent series two thanks to Downton's booming national-treasure status. Worse, Upstairs... is reeling from the double blow of losing Eileen Atkins's Lady Maud and Jean Marsh as Rose Buck.Marsh, who suffered a stroke last October, was eventually able to appear in two of the six new episodes, but Atkins apparently wasn't happy with the direction the series was taking and baled out altogether. Screenwriter Heidi Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Walking into a Wickes DIY superstore in Cricklewood, north London, Peter Capaldi is overwhelmed. The history there isn’t obvious as shoppers scurry about. But he knows it’s the site of Cricklewood Studios, the engine of British cinema that churned out classics like Clog Capers of 1932, the horror benchmark Dr Worm and the hilarious Thumbs up Matron. The end came in the 1980s with Terry Gilliam’s Professor Hypochondria’s Magical Odyssey and the wrecking ball. Wickes rose from the rubble.Cricklewood never had the cachet of Pinewood or Elstree. Its films weren’t as lauded as those of Read more ...