TV
Imagine: Dame Shirley Bassey, BBC OneWednesday, 25 November 2009
The mechanism for securing a publicity still from the BBC is as follows. Go to the relevant website, log in, look for the photographs that illustrate the programme, then take your pick. For Dame Shirley Bassey: The Girl from Tiger Bay there wasn’t... Read more... |
School of Saatchi, BBC Two/ Gracie!, BBC FourMonday, 23 November 2009
Thanks to the shenanigans of Brit-art superstars like Messrs Emin and Hirst, Art has become a lucrative appendage of pop culture, so it’s only logical that it should be given its own version of X Factor, with a bit of Apprentice-style... Read more... |
Cast Offs: a comedy drama about disabilityFriday, 20 November 2009
Channel 4 put six disabled people on a desert island for three months to see if they can fend for themselves. That’s the startling premise of Cast Offs - a new drama co-written by Alex Bulmer, Tony Roche and Jack Thorne. Does team writing really... Read more... |
Confessions of a Traffic Warden, C4Thursday, 19 November 2009
Who’d be a traffic warden, eh? The answer, it would seem, is any number of immigrants willing to be paid £7 an hour to be verbally abused, physically attacked and generally despised by the great British public. And Olly Lambert, writer-director of... Read more... |
Hi Society: The Wonderful World of Nicky Haslam, BBC FourTuesday, 17 November 2009
This odyssey of party-goer and interior designer Nicky Haslam frequently resembled a Private Eye diary by Craig Brown, who’s always at his best when lacerating narcissistic name-dropping diarists from earlier generations. We watched Haslam swapping... Read more... |
Enid, BBC FourMonday, 16 November 2009
Has somebody got it in for poor Matthew Macfadyen? In the recent series of Criminal Justice he didn’t even make it to the end of episode one before he was fatally stabbed by Maxine Peake. Now here he was as Enid Blyton’s adoring and supportive first... Read more... |
What Is Beauty?, BBC TwoSaturday, 14 November 2009As questions go, "What is beauty?" is quite possibly only second to "What do women want?" in the frequency of its asking and in the difficulty of its answer. As the first programme in BBC Two and BBC Four’s Modern Beauty season, What Is Beauty?... Read more... |
Misfits, E4Thursday, 12 November 2009
Filmed in the same Thamesmead locations in south-east London as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Misfits also features a gang of young trouble-makers in boiler suits. Unlike Alex and his Droogs, who face the fearsome "Ludovico" aversion therapy... Read more... |
Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain, BBC TwoWednesday, 11 November 2009
The last time I saw Andrew Marr in the flesh was at the Independent’s old offices in Canary Wharf, during a savage round of job-shedding in the late Nineties. To address the staff, editor Marr had jumped upon a table, like Keir Hardie addressing... Read more... |
Collision, ITV1/The Execution of Gary Glitter, Channel 4Monday, 09 November 2009
The premise of Collision (as well as its title) is unmistakably similar to that of Paul Haggis's movie Crash, in which a road accident provides the linking point for a cluster of disparate personal stories. However, instead of the boulevards of Los... Read more... |
Comedy Showcase: Campus, Channel 4Friday, 06 November 2009
“Green Wing, but set in a university” is one of those useful handles that reviewers were always going to grasp when discussing Victoria Pile’s new improvised ensemble comedy, Campus, the opening try-out in Channel 4’s new Comedy Showcase season of... Read more... |
Spooks, BBC OneWednesday, 04 November 2009
At the end of series seven, our tight-lipped MI5 squad risked designer shoe leather and impeccable coiffure to defuse a Russian atom bomb in London, and their boss Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) was kidnapped by dubious Russian agent Viktor Sarkisian.... Read more... |
