TV
Adam Sweeting
It's unlikely that this soap-esque miniseries about America's most notorious political clan will stir up the kind of furore in Britain that has engulfed it in the States. Over there, merely to mention the Kennedys seems to conjure up visions of a lost Eden (well, Camelot) in which America stood square-jawed against the Russians, won the race to the moon and policed the planet with its colossal Arsenal of Democracy. Add in the horrific assassinations of JFK and his brother Bobby and the obliteration of all that glamour and promise, and it's a great shining myth that even Hollywood has never Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Playing a prostitute on film has been big career business for some very famous actresses, not least Jane Fonda, Elizabeth Taylor and Julia Roberts, but it hasn't worked quite the same way on TV. Unless you count Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Or Moll Flanders. Or The Devil's Whore. Though maybe not Five's brothel sitcom, Respectable.Now here's Romola Garai taking aim at the enigmatic Sugar, the hooker with a keen intellect but possibly not a heart of gold from Michel Faber's novel, The Crimson Petal and the White. Faber's 800-odd pages have been boiled down into four parts by screenwriter Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Let us begin with the nots. Fashionably weird is not enough. Edgy, whatever that means, is not enough. The repeated use of the word “vagina” is not enough and semi-improvised ensemble acting is not, in itself, quite enough. These were just some of the many not-thoughts which ran through my mind during the opening episode of the much-touted Campus. So what did picky me want? I wanted funny.Created by Green Wing supremo Vicky Pile and written by six of the same team behind that fondly recalled surreal-com, it was difficult not to make comparisons between Green Wing and Campus simply because it Read more ...
David Nice
Trouble? What trouble? There may be the odd reader who doesn't get past the Austerlitz sequence of War and Peace, and many who don't brave the master's last big novel questioning church and state, Resurrection, but that's their problem, not Tolstoy's. He is indeed - as Professor Anthony Briggs, the other star of this two-part documentary, states - the God of the novel. As a man, he was troubled to his dying day, and eventually a trouble to the state. Yet while "what is life for?" is not a phrase I like to hear fall from Alan Yentob's lips, I can't fault this beautifully filmed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ever controversial, America's Kennedy clan continues to create turbulence. On Thursday, 7 April, the History Channel in the UK will begin airing a new $30 million miniseries, The Kennedys, which traces the lives and political fortunes of John F Kennedy, his brother Bobby and their domineering father Joe. But the History Channel's American counterpart announced in January it was dropping the show (which stars Greg Kinnear, Katie Holmes, Barry Pepper and Tom Wilkinson), despite having spent two years overseeing its development. The channel, which usually specialises in documentaries and Read more ...
howard.male
Thank goodness for selective memory, because although I remember that pop music had something of a mid-life crisis between the sequin explosion of glam rock and the spittle tsunami of punk rock, I had been blissfully spared comprehensive recall of all the grizzly details. That is until I watched what turned out to be another of those cheap-to-make caffeine-charged documentaries which goes off on so many tangents that it’s hard to recall what it was meant to be about in the first place. For last night’s look at what was described as a pivotal year for the BBC’s once-essential weekly viewing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
According to her website, Martina Cole is "the person who tells it like it really is". If it's really like this dramatisation of her 1997 novel The Runaway, it's unrelentingly brutal, squalid and frightening, a televisual blow to the head from a blunt instrument. Perhaps the fact that the series was shot on a giant set in South Africa helps to account for its strange atmosphere of reality assembled from an Ikea-style flatpack.The Runaway of the title is, or is going to be in episode two, Cathy Connor (Joanna Vanderham). It's the early Sixties, and Cathy has been brought up in London's East Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
theartsdesk readers were aghast and appalled when BBC One supremo Danny Cohen cancelled detective series Zen after a paltry three episodes. However, he has made amends of a sort by commissioning a second series of Peter Moffat's legal drama Silk, after series one ended last night.And why not? Its characters and plots proved compelling, and the show's viewing figures over its six-part run have averaged around 5.9 million, when catch-up viewing on services such as BBC iPlayer and Sky Plus are taken into account.
"Maxine Peake has excelled in Silk and we're delighted to be bringing this high- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Will Silk make it to series two, or will it feel the wrath of BBC One's mad axeman, Danny Cohen? The former, we fervently hope. Despite some implausible incidents and occasionally silly plotlines, Peter Moffat's battling-barristers drama reached the end of its first series looking stronger than when it started.Much credit for this must go to Maxine Peake's superb portrayal of Martha Costello, the pugnacious girl from the north country pitted against Rupert Penry-Jones's smooth and superior Clive Reader, as both of them strive for that coveted elevation to QC. It was difficult not to feel Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Whatever you think of Friends, you have to concede it was good in the sack. If there were jokes to be had about sexual fantasy, sexual abandon and sexual incontinence, they were had. The one with free porn, the one with Rachel dressing as Princess Leia for Ross etc. The one area they avoided was sexual inhibition. It was all very refreshing, all very welcome, unless you happened to be watching with addicted youngish daughters. I was appalled at all the sex. No doubt this was a case of conditioning: in the sitcoms I grew up with sex was a dirty word. Naturally they were all British.The British Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following yesterday's season-opening Australian Grand Prix, McLaren's team boss Martin Whitmarsh was extremely unhappy that his driver Jenson Button had been given a drive-through penalty. Button had overtaken a Ferrari by cutting a corner, and should have yielded the position back, but McLaren requested guidance from the race controllers. Instead, all they got was a punishment from the stewards which retarded Button's progress by 23 seconds. "I feel a bit harshly treated," moaned Whitmarsh.Increasingly, this sort of technical quibbling is what passes for "action" in Formula 1, but back in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The history of the census is a fascinating one. The Babylonians and the Chinese held censuses mainly for military and taxation purposes, and Egyptians in order to organise the huge number of people required to build the pyramids and to redistribute land following the annual flooding of the Nile. Christians, meanwhile, give thanks for the census that recorded the birth of Jesus of Nazareth; during the five-yearly census ordered by Caesar Augustus, which required every man in the Roman Empire to return to his place of origin, Joseph and the heavily pregnant Mary had travelled to Bethlehem, Read more ...