In July the BBC brought us Freefall, writer/director Dominic Savage's credit crunch drama. It was a crude morality tale of greed and gullibility, just about compensating for its blatantly schematic characters with sheer pace. With The Last Days Of Lehman Brothers (BBC2), writer Craig Warner and director Michael Samuels set themselves an altogether trickier proposition, to dramatise the boardroom power-plays that ended in the collapse of American mega-bank Lehman Brothers on September 12 last year.It was a crash that echoed around the world almost as seismically as that of the Twin Towers. Read more ...
TV
Adam Sweeting
Slickness is not always a virtue in a television presenter, and Katherine Jenkins (The Week We Went To War, BBC1) has some way to go before she risks being accused of it. Her chief weapons are her blonde hair, cleavage and searchlight smile -- she isn't so much the new Vera Lynn as one of those pneumatic dream-babes that American aircrews used to paint on the noses of their B17s -- but even so she struggles to conquer a script that wallows like a torpedoed freighter.Her dialogue with assistant-host Michael Aspel, as he reminisces about being a wartime evacuee or eating austerity-style prunes Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Oasis have split up, but The Beatles keep getting bigger. This week, in a synchronised splurge of Beatle product of almost D-Day like proportions, their complete remastered albums are being reissued, the group appear in virtual form in the computer game The Beatles: Rock Band, and the BBC continues the Beatles Week which kicked off in a blaze of Kleenex-moistening nostalgia on Saturday. The Sunday Times even managed to exhume an unpublished interview with John Lennon, in which he sabotaged the myth of the great Lennon-McCartney feud by confessing that he thought Paul McCartney was jolly good Read more ...