TV
howard.male
What a relief: Andrew Graham-Dixon got the job of presenting this documentary on one of my favourite British 20th-century artists. If it had been Waldemar Januszczak (sometimes interesting but too gimmick-laden and shouty) or Matthew Collings (sometimes interesting but too fond of the catchy sweeping statement) I would have thought twice about tuning in. But Graham-Dixon understands that the art documentary is not about him, it’s about the artist. And it’s not about trying desperately to come up with a new angle; it’s about bringing the artist alive in a new way to a new audience that isn’t Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And now we faced the final curtain. Spooks responded with an inspired burst of hyperactivity and plots-within-plots, and even a micro-cameo from Matthew Macfadyen as Tom Quinn, the original head of Section D. Up to now this hadn't been the finest of seasons, partly because the death of Richard Armitage's Lucas North at the end of Series 9 left a void which was never successfully filled. Lara Pulver never seemed comfortable as Erin Watts, Section D's new head, because she looked as if she'd been seconded from a modelling agency, while promoting Dimitri (Max Brown) up the batting order merely Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At the end of the first series, we left our bedraggled band of survivors in Atlanta, their expectations dashed that they might be able to find some glimmer of hope at the Center for Disease Control. Instead, all they'd discovered was a lone, slightly deranged scientist who had failed to find a cure for the zombie plague. Then the generators ran out of fuel, fail-safe devices kicked in and the CDC blew up.Back to the drawing board. Sheriff Rick Grimes (an increasingly haggard and stubbly Andrew Lincoln) is now leading his tattered troupe towards the army outpost at Fort Benning, where there Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Reading the pre-transmission blurb, you might have formed the impression that Holy Flying Circus was going to offer new insights into the controversy that erupted around Monty Python's supposedly blasphemous Life of Brian movie when it was released in 1979. Instead, its 90 minutes were a thin gruel of flabby fantasy and caricature.The individual Pythons were impersonated with slavish accuracy, notably Charles Edwards's Michael Palin, so much so that Life of Brian became merely an excuse for a limping parade of in-jokes and weak riffs on the Monty Python legacy. The incontinent zaniness Read more ...
fisun.guner
The scale of the operation was hard to take in, as was the extent of the cover-up. Between 1940 and 1990, it’s estimated that up to 30,000 babies were trafficked in Spain. It started under the military dictatorship of Franco, but it ended long after its fall, though why the sudden cut-off was given as 1990 we never learned. What we did learn was this: that newborn babies were systematically taken by mothers deemed to be ideologically or morally unfit, and they were often bought by couples for cash. Within hours of giving birth these mothers were told that their babies had died.So grotesque Read more ...
josh.spero
I was possibly not the right person to review this programme. I didn't do biology beyond GCSE, can't bear David Attenborough's Natural World programmes and laugh anytime someone says "homo erectus". Nevertheless, Alice Roberts, an anatomist and a woman who clearly knows all the words to "Dry Bones", made Origins of Us on BBC Two last night subtly enthralling, even if it did suffer from a certain amount of documentaryese.I've always wanted to know where I come from - saying "Edgware" or even, more distantly, "Poland" just doesn't quite capture it. So, watching Alice talk through skeletons laid Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I suspect writer Julian Fellowes's guilty secret is that he has an attic stuffed with novels from Mills & Boon, such are the luridly romantic plotlines and cliché-flirting characters in Downton Abbey. If you think you can see it coming, then you probably can.Though Downton is an original story, you get more déja vu moments than in the 27th televised version of Pride and Prejudice, and the way the speeding narrative seems to fling out another major dramatic development in between each ad break - and we know there are far too many of those - is like being trapped in a carriage being driven Read more ...
graeme.thomson
As this rampant return to our screens repeatedly underlined, one of the great joys of watching The Comic Strip throughout its 30-year frenzy of frantic - if intermittent - silliness has been never knowing what precise manifestation of oddness lurks around each corner. Where else, after all, would you find "Babs" Windsor popping up – utterly gratuitously – to give Tony Blair a meaty snog? Or Ross Noble ambling into frame as a socialist tramp, shortly to be throttled and thrown from a moving train? Or Margaret Thatcher giving full vent to her inner Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson, smeared over Read more ...
fisun.guner
Tracey Emin once made a tent for which she gained some notoriety. On it, she’d appliquéd the names of everyone she had ever slept with – including, as a child, her beloved Granny Hodgkins. Sadly, the tent, called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, was destroyed in a fire at Momart, the art-storage warehouse, in 2004. The loss of her tent was keenly felt, and she refused to recreate it. But genealogists in Who Do You Think You Are? gave Emin something to smile about when they dug deep into her family history: Emin comes from a long line of tent-dwellers. When she was shown Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Unless one has been misreading the policy stylings of the oddly named "Nigel Farage" and his merry band of isolationists, the general idea behind UKIP is that Nothing Good ever came out of Europe. Party members may therefore wish to pursue a blanket avoidance of decent crime drama, almost all of which comes from our continental neighbours. First there was The Killing which went on more or less forever and was more addictive than crack. Spiral was barely less cultish. And after the entries from Denmark and France, now a succulent Italian crime drama takes its turn to stick around for an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Never knowingly under-mythologised, U2 have chosen to mark the 20th anniversary of their album Achtung Baby with this sizeable documentary about the making of the record and the traumatic soul-searching that went into it. It dovetails neatly with the forthcoming reissue of the album itself, which will be available as a mere single CD, as well as in a vinyl box set and an "Über Deluxe" edition crammed with CDs, DVDs, luxurious art prints etc.To direct their movie, U2 went to Davis Guggenheim, a film and TV veteran who has (among other things) won an Oscar for directing Al Gore's climate Read more ...
David Nice
How can even a generously proportioned documentary do justice to one of the musical world’s greatest life forces? John Bridcut knows what to do: make sure all your interviewees have a close personal association with your chosen giant in one of his many spheres of influence, then get cellist-disciples from Rostropovich’s Class 19 in the Moscow Conservatoire – here Moray Welsh, Natalia Gutman, Karine Georgian and Elizabeth Wilson - to watch and listen to their mentor talking and playing. The result is a towering model of its kind.Even without that special dimension of on-the-spot reaction to Read more ...