TV
ash.smyth
So, Birdsong is over, and for all the arts-crit ink spilled upon it I am still none the wiser vis-à-vis my three main points of concern. First: it is a truth universally acknowledged (I asked around) that the most memorable episode in the Faulks novel was the one about the blowjob. This scene was not so much absent from the TV version as, er... cunningly re-gendered. Why?! Second: there was, in the first few minutes of the "drama", a superfluous and sarky line (by a Frenchman, obviously) about modernist composers who can only work around four notes. Which was not Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It certainly started with a bang. The whirlwind opening sequence of the BBC's new four-part drama depicted a cash depot heist by a masked gang unfolding in something close to real time, and thrummed with blood and nervous tension. Security guard Chris was shot in the leg. His boss, John Coniston, was roughed up. Back at home, his family were being held hostage at gunpoint. Both men, it transpired, were in on the job, while warehouse worker Marcus was one of the armed gang. Inside Men, clearly, was going to be why- rather than a whodunnit.The heist took place in September. The remainder of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although focusing on London’s Tube network, Confessions From the Underground brought up issues that aren’t unique to Britain’s infrastructure. Increasing usage versus declining levels of staff. Employees working against targets while being pushed to cut corners. It could have been the NHS or schools, but last night's documentary about the tube allowed the staff of London Underground to raise their concerns.This could have been an eyebrow-raising selection of accidents and near misses that've been hushed up. Instead – apart from a looking into the questionable response to a dust cloud at Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not a genre which springs too many surprises. Ever since Sir John Harvey-Jones strode into shot a good 20 years ago, the template was set for the sort-your-life-out documentary. Expert enters, throws up hands in horror, delivers a quantity of home truths, exits. Like the talent contest, it’s a flexi-format, applicable to kitchen cleanliness, child-rearing, the high street and, in the case of The Hotel Inspector, mouldy B&Bs on their uppers. In The Fixer, Alex Polizzi has checked out of hotel salvage and turned her attention to putting a smile on the face of ailing businesses.In Read more ...
ash.smyth
As if by way of riposte to Birdsong’s ever-so-pensive treatment of late, last night’s Royal Marines: Mission Afghanistan brought warfare back to the 21st century with an uncompromising thump. In Episode 1: Deadly Underfoot, Chris Terrill joined Lima Company, 42 Commando, as they took over from their Marine colleagues at Toki base, in the Nad-e Ali district of Helmand. This was in the tenth year of the war – as the greatest of narratives would have it – and the Taliban, so Terrill assured us, were “on the back foot”. There was, presumably, no pun intended.For 50-odd minutes we Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may think that Whitechapel's USP would have made a third unlikely after two successful mini-series. The first was about a modern-day copycat killer in Whitechapel who was recreating the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders, while the second was about a modern-day copycat killer who was recreating the Kray twins murders from the 1960s. Now the East End of London may be, in estate agents' terms, a vibrant place, but there are only so many bloodthirsty periods from its history to spawn yet another modern-day psychopath.The third season, which started last night, consists of three two-parters and the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This adaptation of Jennifer Worth's memoirs about life as a midwife in 1950s east London has been a spectacular and instant hit, though it's difficult to believe its success can be solely due to its graphic scenes of screaming, blood-drenched childbirth. And at 8pm on a Sunday, too.Nor is the show's milieu of poverty-stricken tenements in London's unreformed Docklands, with the funnels of huge liners looming up at the end of the street, especially conducive to jollity and good cheer. The stories woven through the ongoing depiction of the lives of a group of young midwives, and the nuns of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Before The Beatles touched down there in 1964, British pop was barely a concern for America. The first in this three-part series took The Beatles arrival as the year zero for British pop’s conquering of America. An entertaining canter through an over-familiar slice of pop history, Go West was enlivened by some top-drawer talking heads including Paul McCartney and Jimmy Page. No Rolling Stones though.But it was great to see members of The Animals, Hollies, Searchers and Zombies given the chance to reminisce. American context came from veteran DJ Larry Kane, New York Doll Syl Sylvain, Jackie Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Beatles’s arrival on US TV screens in February 1964 is usually recognised as the beginning of the British Invasion of America. But this drama, focusing on chippy, upstart photographer David Bailey, his relationship with his chosen model Jean Shrimpton and their first shoot in Manhattan, floated the idea that their US visit in January 1962 was as pivotal as The Fabs’s debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. We'll Take Manhattan was significant for featuring Karen Gillan, now on her last lap in Doctor Who, in her first starring vehicle. The sense behind casting her was clear. Gillan Read more ...
ash.smyth
When I opened my e-nvitation to write up last night’s The World Against Apartheid, I was not expecting it to come bedecked with GoogleAds for hen parties, roller discos, and custom-made birthday invitations (keyword: "part/y", one assumes). Only 20 years ago, any mail on this topic would’ve been stuffed with "End racism NOW!" leaflets, discount book offers by/about Basil D’Oliveira, and pop-up Peter Hains beseeching you to boycott your local fruiterers. Twenty years ago "The World Against Apartheid" would have been a call to arms.But now it is a history programme, and one a decade in the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We’ve been this way before. A few years ago the BBC screened a series called Play It Again, in which celebrities had a crack at performing on musical instruments which they had not visited in decades. Sky Arts have revisited the concept with a series called First Love, whose first six programmes went out last year and featured a usual array of celebrity suspects starring in a game of friends reunited, the musical version. The new series includes among others Stephen Mangan on acoustic guitar, Shaun Ryder on saxophone, the inevitable Alastair Campbell on bagpipes, but it begins in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Abandoned attempts to bring Sebastian Faulks's World War One novel to the movie screen stretch from Soho to Sunset Boulevard. Most of these were prepared and discarded under the auspices of Working Title Films, so perhaps it's fitting that Birdsong has finally been made by the BBC and Working Title's new television division.One can only speculate what a cinema version would have looked like, though at one stage the leading characters might have borne an uncanny resemblance to Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley, but this telly-isation has worked a treat. Even two 90-minute episodes aren't enough Read more ...