TV
fisun.guner
London’s literary world must be as small as it was in the 18th century. Or at least that’s the impression you get when you watch book programmes on the BBC, for it’s the same old characters that keep cropping up. Martin Amis, Will Self, Jenny Uglow – like minor players in a picaresque novel in which the novel itself is the hero devouring new experiences, you’re sure to encounter at least two of their like in quick rotation, ubiquitous with their insights and wisdom. And so it was with BBC Two’s Faulks on Fiction and BBC Four’s Birth of the British Novel. The first aired on Saturday Read more ...
Veronica Lee
At first sight, “Afghanistan cricket team” might be labled along with “The kosher guide to cooking pork” or “How to keep your promises, by N Clegg”. But in 2008, Taj Malik, an Afghan player passionate about the game, decided to try to take his national team into the world’s elite level and this film (part of the Storyville strand), by three young film-makers, Tim Albone, Leslie Knott and Lucy Martens, followed their efforts over two years.As you might expect, Malik and co were not starting from a level playing field. As the gentle, ever-smiling coach (who rather touchingly believed the answer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They've remade everything else, so what took them so long to get around to Hawaii Five-0? Maybe the exotic Hawaiian locations of JJ Abrams's Lost helped to trigger flashbacks of Steve McGarrett & co, which would explain why Abrams's henchmen Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are co-producers of the new Five-0. And why Daniel Dae Kim, who played Jin in Lost, reappears here as Chin Ho Kelly.The refreshing thing about Five-0 (revisited) is that while it has been given a brisk 21st-century spring clean, with international terrorism, people-smuggling and a blast of ultra-modern spook Read more ...
josh.spero
Aptly for a programme whose title invokes a show which is all style, no substance, the subject of Ronald Reagan: American Idol is image. What was Reagan really like? How much of his career as a Hollywood star did he carry into office? And why have certain images of Reagan endured? The first question, alas, is the one neither the film nor his biographers nor his family and friends have come close to answering.The film, directed by Eugene Jarecki and shown to coincide with Reagan's centenary, opens with an ancient clip of Reagan talking about the fictionality of what follows. This tactic Read more ...
howard.male
A young girl runs in slow motion through the woods, the cameraman in hot pursuit: this is only the opening seconds of ITV1’s new drama series, and already I was wondering to what degree this new five-parter was going to test my cliché tolerance level. But fortunately Marchlands pulled itself together and settled down to spend most of its first hour just letting us get to know the three families who had lived in the Marchlands house over the four previous decades.Via a series of inventive dissolves we were moved with seamless ease from 1968 to 1987 to 2010, and quickly made aware that the Read more ...
josh.spero
Probably the only person who would try and tackle cancer in a "humorous" way in Britain would be Frankie Boyle, and God knows he's not funny. No doubt we'd be treated to jokes about how unattractive women without hair are, or something equally enlightening. But while the British would come at this from an unpleasant angle, it is normally squeamish American TV which is in the true avant-garde. Hence, The Big C on More4.Laura Linney, saddled with infantile Oliver Platt as a husband and a son who seems on the cusp of rebellion, gets X-ray results with those ominous black spots, and it's terminal Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"We've got a product a fella's got to have," decreed Nucky Thompson, the County Treasurer in Atlantic City the day Prohibition came into force. "Better still, we've got a product he's not allowed to have."For Nucky and his cronies running the garish New Jersey resort, with a brazen criminality that makes our homegrown likes of T Dan Smith look like laughable amateurs in the art of graft, Prohibition was the best business opportunity they were ever going to have. They'd taken judicious steps to guarantee supplies of illegal liquor, either distilled or imported, and now they could add on a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If the jewel in Sky Atlantic's crown is the award-guzzling Boardwalk Empire, great things are also expected of its new cop-opera Blue Bloods, judging by the number of trailers spattering the Sky networks. It's the Dynasty of law enforcement, chronicling the relationships and travails of the Reagan family of New York.Whether the family name was intended to convey any kind of political resonance is a matter for conjecture, though it serves well enough for a multi-generational family of Big Apple police officers of Irish descent. Actually, they're not quite all police officers – the various Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For a while in the 1990s, the NASDAQ of polar exploration knocked Scott off his plinth and installed Shackleton as Britain’s favourite Antarctic hero. To a modern sensibility, survival seemed a more laudable pursuit than sacrifice. Better a live donkey, as Shackleton phlegmatically put it when turning home 90 miles from the South Pole, than a dead lion. For decades Scott has been comprehensively, even vindictively rubbished by the revisionist historian Roland Huntford. He was the one who pointed out that someone would have had to undo those tent ties for Oates to go outside and be some time, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Say what you like about the posh – they know their place. Equipped from an early age with a sense of entitlement, they also have access to the oldest and most powerful social network there is: call it what you will, but the old boys' network remains, and you’d be hopelessly naïve to think otherwise. Where would our current prime minister be without it? Tony Parsons, who, as a working-class boy made good, is among a pitifully declining breed, thought he knew: “If David Cameron had gone to a comprehensive school he’d be lucky to be digging ditches,” he spat. That seemed unduly harsh, but after Read more ...
howard.male
Don’t you just hate it when your favourite cult show becomes everybody’s favourite cult show, and then to make matters worse even the damned Americans embrace it? But how could you not love a scarier, bloody version of the sitcom Spaced, or a funnier version of the horror movie Let the Right One In? Yes, the latter does sound particular unlikely, yet in 2008 Toby Whithouse managed to create a central trio of characters who are first and foremost endearing and achingly vulnerable, and only secondly a ghost, a werewolf and a vampire.Lenora Crichlow plays the goofily sexy, touchingly optimistic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's a strange mixture, this Tudors malarkey. The opening episode of the fourth and supposedly final series spent an age spinning through the back story as if earnestly trying to educate us in the history of the bloodthirsty English ruling family. Then the credits rolled and everything returned to business as usual, in other words murder, lust, sadism, gluttony, treachery and avarice.It makes for a televisual mixture bursting with calories and MSG, especially when combined with the opulent camerawork and Kerrygold Country Irish locations. It's a formula which has plainly rubbed off on other Read more ...