TV
Veronica Lee
How could you not immediately warm to a new comedy series that has almost as its first line, “Maybe you should tuck your cock away while I make us a nice cup of tea”? And so begins Fresh Meat, set in a shared freshers' student house in Manchester (the line's speaker had just come across a chap wearing a jumper but no trousers), a sort of The Inbetweeners and Skins grown up a couple of years with a Peep Show aesthetic.That aesthetic is due to Fresh Meat being the latest from Peep Show creators Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, who readily admit they are long past their own experiences of Read more ...
josh.spero
Baking and competition are two of my favourite things, thus when BBC Two unveiled The Great British Bake Off last year, it seemed my gluttonous, pugnacious prayers had been fulfilled. Amateurs had every possible skill challenged by the good-cop-bad-cop combination of master bakers Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood, leavened (or leadened) by ever-quirky presenters Mel and Sue. (I will avoid all recipe-related puns henceforth, I promise.)But if you were expecting a cross between The X-Factor and Masterchef - or indeed Masterchef and Masterchef - as failing contestants are weekly expelled Read more ...
ash.smyth
Am I being paranoid, or are there spies everywhere these days? A quick squiz at the telly guide recently, and you'd have been forgiven for thinking that everyone in London is either employed in the security services or in making films about them. According to last night's re-opening of the Spooks case-file, anyway, there are plenty around the red-brick side-streets of Hammersmith. And when I say "spies", I don't mean Stella Rimmington at work on a novel; I mean guys in black gloves, and "accidents", and hell to pay.First rule for a new series: get all your loose ends Read more ...
Jasper Rees
And now for that difficult second album. Downton Abbey’s stately progress last autumn revived in television audiences a taste thought long dead: for populist drama offering a sepia-tinted vision of the English class system in which the well-to-do are dressed for dinner by bowing/curtsying feudal underlings. With social mobility back roughly where it was a century ago. it could almost have been a snapshot of modern UK plc. That did not stop it from being hungrily consumed as pure escapism, both here and in America where overnight it won four Emmys. And here for our pleasure is another helping. Read more ...
ash.smyth
Question. How do you kill off a TV character whom, just a few episodes ago, you and your fellow scriptwriters went out of your way to render immortal? How… and why? Over two short seasons and one Christmas special, the writers of the BAFTA-winning Misfits (Best Drama Series 2010), marshalled by Howard Overden, have proved themselves singularly adept at coming up with plot devices that justify, narrative-wise, well, pretty much anything, and thereby leave the field wide open for their surrealist brand of comic pikey super-heroism.As you may or may not recall, the super-(and-not-so-super-) Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Declaring that “everything in the world exists to end up on a postcard” is pretty courageous. But after watching the charming, gently funny Picture Postcard World of Nigel Walmsley you begin thinking that maybe, just maybe, everything was created to be depicted on a piece of card destined to be sent through the post. Holiday camps, motorways, hills, walls - all were created to become images printed on the postcards collected by deltiologists like Ronnie Barker and Michael Winner.A deltiologist is a postcard collector. Michael Winner, who appeared here, is already well known to theartsdesk for Read more ...
Jasper Rees
One didn’t keep a detailed log on the state of decomposition of each and every corpse in all umpteen series of Waking the Dead. Being cold cases, they were none of them too presentable. But did any make quite such a mess as ep one of The Body Farm, which took care to begin last night with a bang? To be more forensic, an explosion distributed blood and gristle evenly around a high-rise flat, leaving not much in the way of too too solid flesh. Or as Dr Eve Lockhart put it, “a carpet of decomposing carrion covering walls, floor and ceiling”. It looked as if the sloppier sort of decorators had Read more ...
ash.smyth
The Conservatives have been in power for years, the working man feels disenfranchised, unemployment is rife, and there’s really bad music on the radio. And then Labour’s long-awaited electoral landslide, and all is right in the world! 1997? Not a bit of it. This is 1988 – at least, in author (and former Labour MP) Chris Mullin’s imagination – and leftist radical Harry Perkins sweeps into Number 10 with his agenda of rampant socialism and public accountability. The honourable member from Sheffield wants to nationalise all the goodies, and isn’t shy about taking financial aid from Russian banks Read more ...
howard.male
Why did I dislike this programme so much? At first I put it down to the stinker of a hangover I found myself watching it through. Perhaps it was the thought that my hangover would have been easier to bear under a yolk-yellow Dordogne sun than under a glowering grey London sky, and therefore the British couples featured here who’ve made just that move caused a twinge of jealousy. But they weren’t bad company given that - on the basis of the title - I’d expected Little England to focus on the ruddy-faced lager lout variety of the Englishman abroad. So it must have been more than just that.Well Read more ...
ash.smyth
Over the course of the past weekend, not to mention over the last 10 years, it has been said often enough that there are no words to express the horror of 11 September, 2001. This hasn’t stopped people from trying, of course – and sometimes with commendable results. But basically there just isn’t much effective vocabulary when it comes to describing grief and torment on a grand scale: hence, perhaps, America’s seeming lack of closure regarding the whole episode, and the often slightly surreal and distant nature of 9/11 documentaries.Shorn of all the noisy “bigger picture”, though – the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
After the first two parts of Mark Cousins’s magisterial The Story of Film: An Odyssey, I’m still in two minds as to whether it’s fair to call the presenter a generalist. He has already managed to piece together details from the cinema cultures of almost every film-making nation on earth with the authority of a specialist – and that’s before his narrative has formally progressed beyond the arrival of the talkies, let alone colour. His 15-part documentary, developed from his book of the same name, looks set to give a new focus to traditional history-of-cinema surveys – and it looks different, Read more ...
ash.smyth
A couple of summers back, I spent an entire term with an idling history teacher who watched, in his many, many free periods, the entire back catalogue of QI on his laptop. And gave us running updates. Much as we mocked him for his pseudo-intellectual thumb-twiddling, in a staff room full of chat about timetables, syllabuses and the iniquities of the tuck shop, the regular injection of dorky trivia – and the entrenched and bitter arguments it provoked – was very welcome.That said, I cannot now tell you for certain whether the word “hello” was really invented along with the telephone, or if Read more ...