TV
Jasper Rees
Television seeks out the stories thrown up by real life. On the one hand there is the obsessive interest in the private lives of the great and good (and not so good) from Margot Fonteyn to Tony Blair. Other dramatists eagerly accept the responsibility to hold a mirror up to society in all its ills from the Ipswich murders to the travails of 19th-century lesbians. But the task that all writers have to face, whoever’s story is being told, is to make the narrative dramatic. A tale of contemporary slavery ought not to struggle there.It’s taken seven years for the awful story of Mende Nazer to be Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“The empire writes back” was Salman Rushdie’s pithy summation of the process that changed British literature during the late Seventies and early Eighties, a shift epitomised by his novel Midnight’s Children winning the 1981 Booker prize. It wasn’t just the empire. Everyone else who had been, in one sense or another, colonised (women; the working classes; those once termed "adolescents") by literary fiction began articulating their experiences in a manner that often ran counter to past orthodoxies.Subtitled Nothing Sacred, this was the last programme in an excellent three-part series tracking Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Food writer Stefan Gates seems to have spent his whole life in wilder regions, whether clambering naked up a rain-swept Giant’s Causeway (yes, that‘s the six-year-old Stefan, with his sister Samantha, on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s 1973 album Houses of the Holy), or eating sheep's testicles in Afghanistan, or whatever, in BBC Two's Cooking in the Danger Zone. His latest venture would seem to be his riskiest yet – for Gates immerses himself into the world of the widely feared E-numbered food additives (the E stands for Europe, as in EC-approved, in case, like me, you hadn’t clocked that). It’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As a journalist with a sense of pride about what we reptiles can achieve, sometimes I shudder at the awfulness of what passes for journalism. The licence fee in theory confers on the BBC some moral purpose higher than that of the base commercial stations, doesn’t it? (Given that it implies Commercial = Bad, Public Service = Good.) So a BBC Three documentary on shoplifting should probably be an example of higher journalism? Maybe something that rams home deeper truths either about the distinction between good and bad, or about disturbed individuals?Look, I know what BBC Three fare is. Just Read more ...
fisun.guner
When Simon Hales, a 20-year-old university student, fell from a 20ft wall during a tipsy night out, nobody knew whether he would pull through. He'd suffered a horrific brain injury and would spend the next five weeks in a coma. Luckily, he did pull through, though nobody could recognise the newly awakened Simon from the old Simon. His mother told us that her son "evidently wasn’t Simon”. She loved him, she said, but “what I'm looking for is the son that I had to come back". Simon emerged from his coma in what seemed at first to be a blissfully unaware state. He could remember nothing of his Read more ...
howard.male
There is a lot of talk about the contestants' experience of Big Brother but little about the viewer’s experience. During its decade on air there was a drop-off of both the red tops' shock-horror coverage and the intellectualised justifications put forward by the quality press, and inevitably this resulted in viewing figures also declining with each passing year. But I confess I remained an avid viewer. It’s not what you watch, it’s how you watch it, I would say to baffled friends to justify my addiction.But however much I spoke of how BB was an education in not taking people at face value, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
People are lured to behave like animals for TV now - Big Brother, Celebrity Jungle, The X Factor - so it merely completes the idiotic equation to have animals insistently transfigured into little humans in wildlife TV. Or big, hairy humans in the case of mountain gorillas and Martin Clunes.Horsepower with Martin Clunes (ITV1) should on paper have been dumber than BBC Two’s Mountain Gorillas, two one-hour series that launched last night in thickets of clichés. After all, he doesn’t want to make any claim to be an expert, just to be allowed to be a big soft dad with a horse (well, a dozen maybe Read more ...
graeme.thomson
This quirky, compelling little Cutting Edge film never really worked out what it wanted us to think about what we were seeing, which in the end played to its advantage. Because it avoided the sorry fate – namely, shoehorning its participants into an ironic cul de sac then pointing at them and sniggering loudly - of TV programmes whose entire raison d’être begins and ends with the creation of a cynically arresting title, the results ended up being opaque, neatly observed and even rather moving.The premise, at least, was simple: to follow two teenagers from East Anglia who worked as undertakers Read more ...
fisun.guner
After going on his murderous rampage earlier this summer, the police hunt for Raoul Moat was given rolling news coverage. Moat had critically injured his ex-partner Samantha Stobbart, he had murdered her new boyfriend and he had gone on to shoot and blind an off-duty policeman. Excerpts from the tapes he’d recorded over a two-year period, and those made during his subsequent week-long hide-out in the Northumbrian countryside, provided an audio backdrop to the story. But given that the case has been given so much coverage, given that relatives had already talked extensively to the press, and Read more ...
josh.spero
By complete coincidence, this afternoon I tuned in to Air Force, Howard Hawks's 1943 propaganda picture: chiselled young airmen fill a B-17 "flying fortress", dropping their payloads over Japan, both a news service and wish fulfilment for domestic audiences. Their sharp, sweaty features glow in the firelight. Their commanders are tough but fair. Their bombs fall crisply, in a noble cause. This is not that film.
In Bombing of Germany, you saw how well Hawks rewrote history. Surviving members of B-17 crews talked about Operation Thunderclap, the all-out air assault on Dresden, Leipzig and Read more ...
howard.male
Every great novel is a world, and every great novelist responds to and recreates their own time in their own image. Therefore how could a three-part documentary series possibly cover that fertile period in British literature that took in both world wars and their aftermath? Of course it’s an impossible task but it’s one that is neatly circumvented here because these programs are really just an excuse for the BBC to dust off some old tapes of some of our greatest writers speaking about their work.This first in the series begins with the only known audio recording of Virginia Woolf. Across Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Lucy Punch – what a great name for a comedian (or a female boxer). Unfortunately that is the only thing that’s great about Vexed, a new comedy drama written by Howard Overman, creator of Channel 4’s perky ASBO (RIP) superpower fantasy Misfits. His new show is that relative rarity, a comedy cop show, a genre of which Punch has some experience, having had a supporting role in Hot Fuzz, although it’s not in Vexed’s interests to start making such comparisons.I mean, Vexed isn't vexatious; it trots along perfectly agreeably – there were no noticeable longueurs in last night’s opener – it’s just Read more ...