TV
The Nation's Favourite Bee Gees Song, ITV1Saturday, 10 December 2011
“They’re some of the greatest pop songs ever written,” declares Sir Elton John. He’s right. The Bee Gees – Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb – are responsible for songs that will live forever, songs that are part of successive generation’s cultural... Read more... |
Without You, ITV1Friday, 09 December 2011
It's your worst nightmare. Two WPCs appear at your door and inform you that your husband has been killed in a road accident. It doesn't help that the one doing the talking looks like the uglier sister of Macbeth's witches. Then they twist the knife... Read more... |
Imagine: The Lost Music of Rajasthan, BBC OneWednesday, 07 December 2011
That Alan Yentob gets around. I’ve run into him backstage during Jay Z's set at Glastonbury and in a jazz club in Poland, and here we found him in Rajasthan fronting a fascinating and well-shot programme, albeit workmanlike rather than really... Read more... |
Black Mirror, Channel 4Monday, 05 December 2011
It was several minutes into The National Anthem, Charlie Brooker's latest dramatic output on Channel 4 after his excellent 2008 mini-series Dead Set, a zombie-laden satire about reality television, before I laughed. I say that not as a criticism –... Read more... |
Downton Abbey aims to rule Yuletide schedulesSaturday, 03 December 2011
ITV has been cunningly trailing its Christmas bumper edition of Downton Abbey, which will feature guest stars Nigel Havers and Samantha Bond and the spectacle of Mr Bates being dragged before the beak for murdering his first wife. Now that details... Read more... |
America in Pictures: The Story of Life Magazine, BBC FourFriday, 02 December 2011
Before the internet and the Kindle were invented, generations of Americans saw their lives refracted through the pages of Life magazine. In particular, through its photography, since writers at Life were largely relegated to supplying glorified... Read more... |
South Bank Show comes to Sky ArtsThursday, 01 December 2011
Three years after it was, as they say, "let go" by ITV, The South Bank Show, with Melvyn Bragg at the helm, is set to return on Sky Arts in 2012. The idea has been in the wind since Sky Arts revived The South Bank Show Awards in January this year,... Read more... |
Charlie's Angels, E4Thursday, 01 December 2011
Those of a certain age have certain memories (very certain) of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, wife of the Bionic Man and not exactly unbionic herself, especially in that poster of her in the red one-piece with Seventies enormohair and fluorescent American... Read more... |
Money: Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? BBC TwoWednesday, 30 November 2011
It’s not long until we’re told, “There is enough money in the world to make everyone in the world a millionaire.” And if everyone was? Utopia and freedom might not be inevitable. Inexorable price rises would restore some sort of balance. Or a crash... Read more... |
Digging the Great Escape, Channel 4Tuesday, 29 November 2011
The archaeological documentary is becoming the obligatory format for tackling legendary tales of the British at war. Someone seems to recreate the Dam Busters raid every six months, the wrecks of battleships HMS Hood and the Bismarck have been... Read more... |
DVD: Mildred PierceTuesday, 29 November 2011
One of the great revelations of the decade-long HBO TV invasion is that so many of their series take everything at a truly leisurely pace. Their groundbreaking MO is not to rush, as pre-millennial TV shows usually did, but to give the plot space to... Read more... |
Living With the Amish, Channel 4Friday, 25 November 2011
The life-swap doc comes in sundry guises. Emissaries of simpler cultures visit our broiling cities to gawp at streets swimming in fresh spew and rivers of piss every Saturday night. Alternatively our lot pop off to places where people shit in holes... Read more... |
