TV
howard.male
If you know which side your bread is buttered on, you should be up in arms about the white fluffy stuff you’ve been hoodwinked into putting into your toaster, implied a positively evangelical Michel Roux Jr in this first of a five-part series on the state of the nation’s food. Real bread is something that requires love, time, kneading, and more time, and more kneading. Supermarket bread is a cad and an impostor borne of sinister shortcuts in the process of making it, and the unholy use of countless scary additives and evil preservatives.Not that anyone used such declamatory, emotive language Read more ...
Ismene Brown
You thought Black Swan was a nightmare depiction of the ballet world? Now watch Agony & Ecstasy: A Year With English National Ballet, Part 1 and squirm. Compare Natalie Portman’s tormenting balletmaster with ENB’s Derek Deane, as each of them stages Swan Lake. One tells his ballerina she’ll need to masturbate to discover her inner black swan; the other one contemptuously dismisses his ballerina as too old, too knackered, past hope. Then compare the ballerina characters: Portman miserable, wrung out, almost incapable, mentally unstable; ENB’s Daria Klimentová smiling again and again, as Read more ...
josh.spero
The two are not wildly far apart in their appreciation of the wonder of the West; indeed, Ferguson's accompanying book is subtitled The West and the Rest. Clark saw the peak of culture in the judiciously spent gold of the Medici, while Ferguson wants to understand quite why the Medici became so rich in the first place. What made the West power ahead after 1500, when China and the Islamic states had previously been so successful? After all, most Western "inventions" are easily confounded by an Eastern antecedent.It is almost as if he sneers at his modern Western audience while illustrating why Read more ...
fisun.guner
Unlike Sue Perkins, I’ve never sat on the Booker Prize judging panel. So I’ve never had the dubious pleasure of wading through 130-plus contemporary “literary” novels, of supremely variable quality, in a supremely short space of time (it’s approximately a novel a day, I’ve heard, given the allocated time). But still, I was left somewhat puzzled by the Culture Show special, The Books We Really Read, because Perkins – who was a Booker Prize judge in 2009 and is yet to recover from the experience – comes to a conclusion I found slightly odd.She concluded that the contemporary literary novel is Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Channel 4’s new flagship series is essentially a census on prejudice masquerading as a reality TV/game show hybrid. A £300,000 property is being given away in the undeniably pretty village of Grassington in the north Yorkshire Dales, the kind of place where “you have to have at least three generations in the graveyard to be a local”, as one resident put it. And with three times more over-65s than the national average, Grassington's graveyard is pretty much the busiest place in the village.Over the next eight weeks 12 families will compete for the chance to win Sycamore Cottage and live Read more ...
fisun.guner
You might justifiably argue that Jamie Oliver’s lack of academic prowess (he left school with just two GCSEs – we’re not told what in) did him no harm whatsoever. Yet he’s keen that youngsters today should be switched on to education in a way that he clearly wasn’t. So he’s recruited 20 kids to take part in Dream School – kids who, like him, all failed to attain the requisite five GCSEs at grade C and above. And he’s recruited some pretty impressive names to teach them.Who wouldn’t put their hand up for an anatomy lesson with Robert Winston? Or to polish up their Shakespeare with Simon Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For those whose only knowledge of the form is the Royal Variety Performance, this programme (part of BBC Four’s variety season) gave a nice, if all too brief, overview. The first of a two-parter was presented by Michael Grade, whose family is variety royalty - generations of Grades were performers and agents, and latterly television executives.Grade is not a natural TV performer but knew to keep his pieces to camera to a minimum (clearly a memo that failed to reach Alan Yentob’s desk) and instead was happy to listen to the anecdotes - and joyfully there were lots of them. Ken Dodd, Roy Hudd, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Meet Tom. He’s an Essex geezer with all the charm of a used toothpick, whose idea of romance is a cheeseburger on a bench in the Sainsbury’s car park. He can’t hold down a job, spends all girlfriend Cherelle’s money down the bookies, and expects her to cook, clean and run his bath – once she’s finished working two jobs of course. Enter the gum-chewing, ratings-chasing BBC Three guardian angel, ready to solve the problem in the most dramatic, exploitative and tabloid way possible. With the help of three “inspirational” female mentors, Tom must repent, change his wicked ways, and learn the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Now nearing the end of its sixth series, Wild at Heart has quietly parked itself in the middle of the Sunday-evening schedules, where it goes about its task of hoovering up ratings with single-minded efficiency. Last week's debut of South Riding on BBC One was considered a triumph with 6.6 million viewers, but Wild at Heart pipped it with 6.8 million. The week before it scored over seven million.How does it keep doing this? Evidently Stephen Tompkinson, playing Bristol vet Danny Trevanion who has transplanted himself to the Leopard's Den game reserve in South Africa, has a loyal legion of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For those not of Jewish heritage and who may not know the significance of the title, Friday-night dinner is the hub of a Jewish family’s week, when they gather together for a special dinner and prayers. It’s a (very) rough cultural equivalent of a Sunday roast or the Thanksgiving meal, and even for many non-religious Jews who dispense with the traditional menu and prayers, there’s a three-line whip on attendance.Creator and writer Robert Popper grew up in a non-religious north-London Jewish family and freely admits Friday Night Dinner is about his family, if a little exaggerated for comic Read more ...
howard.male
Why on earth did I volunteer to review this? I suppose it was because it would show me a world I had little knowledge of and therefore would be able to offer a fresh, objective perspective on. But 15 minutes in and I’m feeling like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange being subjected to images of sex and violence, his eyes clamped open and his head held fast so there’s no escape. Except of course that would be loads more fun than this new reality TV show set in a London modelling agency, which unfortunately is more like watching nail varnish dry.And the Clockwork Orange comparison isn’t as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a moment in last night’s Silk when a young solicitor turned up late for a trial. He was also an actor, he explained to his client’s counsel, and had to attend an audition. For a Head & Shoulders ad. The USP of Peter Moffat’s courtroom dramas is that, more than any writer since John Mortimer, he knows whereof he speaks. Having once been a barrister himself, the serpentine ins and outs of chambers, the politicking and skulduggery etc etc are his area of expertise. So you take it on trust that the events dramatised here are the truth and nothing but.Thus a barrister Read more ...