TV
Adam Sweeting
Towards the end of this new documentary, an account of how he recorded his new album Letter to You at his home studio in New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen delivers a eulogy to the E Street Band. “The greatest thrill in my life is standing behind that microphone with you guys behind me,” he tells his gnarled old troupe, as they near the completion of the album (it took them four days, all of them playing live in the studio).Then, over a snowy winter landscape shot from a slow-flying drone in the rich monochrome that’s the movie’s trademark, Bruce adds a kind of valediction to life itself, mulling Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A lifelong socialist who has regularly written about the Labour party, playwright David Hare admits that in his career he has “rarely looked closely at the appeal of Conservative values”. On the evidence of the first episode of his new political thriller Roadkill (BBC One), the reason for that would be because he finds Conservative values repellent, judging by the swamp of sleazy allegations which threatens to drown his protagonist,Tory Transport Minister Peter Laurence. Nor is Prime Minister Dawn Ellison’s tone of sarcastic contempt (delivered with relish by Helen McCrory, wearing various Read more ...
Veronica Lee
After nine successful series, a Bafta and an Emmy nomination, Taskmaster has moved from Dave to Channel 4 – amusingly, the broadcaster that its creator Alex Horne first took it to but which turned it down. It has made the transition seamlessly – ie, without changing a thing – and is still utterly daft and a joy to watch. But then, when you have a great concept that's well executed, why muck around with it?For the uninitiated: in each series a different group of five comics or comedy actors solve a succession of parlour-game tasks, using just silly props and their ingenuity, against the clock Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is Emily in Paris “the dumbest thing on Netflix right now?” or a sugar-rush of escapism in the midst of our global pandemic misery? “We need things to make us smile,” commented one Parisian viewer. “In the time of Covid,we don’t need more to stress us out.”The show’s creator, Darren Star, has a genius for tickling the ratings g-spot, having been the mastermind behind Beverley Hills, 90210, Melrose Place and Sex and the City. This time, though, he’s ventured beyond traumatised teens in California and the tortuous lives of career women in New York, to take a look at transcontinental culture Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Enlisting Hollywood giant Samuel L Jackson to host a series about the history of slavery, his own ancestors having been trafficked from West Africa to the Americas, was a headline-grabbing move, and scenes where we travelled with Jackson to the historic slaving hotspot of Gabon rang with a steely sense of commitment. Elsewhere, though, the editorial focus was slack and the content rambling, as though the project (on BBC Two) had undergone a last-minute salvage job using whatever was at hand.However often you hear them, the details of the slave trade are stomach-turning – it’s estimated that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Famous dystopian novels are reliably popular with TV adapters, so it’s strange that this is the first time Aldous Huxley’s treatise on a society controlled by technology and psychological manipulation has been turned into a TV series. Of course, these days you need a pretty good fictional dystopia to surpass the one already running amok outside your window. Still, this is written and produced by David Wiener, one of the masterminds of Fear the Walking Dead, so you might at least hope for a generous helping of horror and massed blood-letting.But last week’s first episode of Brave New World ( Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Classical music TV documentaries don’t often merit comparison to buses. So it was singularly bad luck that Black Classical Music: The Forgotten History hit the TV screens the day after a very different film, John Bridcut's profile of Bernard Haitink which virtually sanctified an already great and venerable conductor and sparked heights of ecstasy amid innumerable lovers of 19th-century standard concert repertoire. In the aftermath, The Forgotten History was nearly forgotten all over again.It offered a fount of tumultuous stories, ranging across three centuries of classical composers Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Before his retirement last summer at the age of 90, Bernard Haitink worked magic on the podium, no one is in any doubt about that. Lining up one friend and musician after another to admit they don’t know how he does it hardly seems the most promising basis for a feature-length documentary. Yet John Bridcut’s film also works, rather like one of Haitink’s performances, by placing trust in his material and moulding its form with a nudge here, a pause there. The result, no less than his much admired portrait of Janet Baker, is worthy of its subject, and praise doesn’t come higher than that.There Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Sky’s 12-part documentary series The Movies is an unabashed celebration of American cinema. Barrages of clips make it an entertaining survey of Hollywood (and occasionally Off-Hollywood) through the years. Downplaying film as art, and scarcely trenchant about its engagement with society and politics, however, this chronicle errs on the side of dutiful. Enthusiasm gets you only so far.It’s also marred by its breathlessness. No sooner has a single movie or the work of an important director or actor or a significant trend been identified then it’s onto someone or something new. That’s not to say Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This warm-hearted and informative documentary series about life in a Welsh special education school probably isn’t going to be a ratings buster for the BBC but it’s one of the most touching and well-made shows I’ve seen in a long time.A Special School adheres to the classic format originated in Educating Essex back in 2011. We are rapidly introduced to a cast of quirky teachers, loving parents and the remarkable young pupils they support. Producer-director Ffion Humphries filmed the series last year at Ysgol y Deri near Cardiff, which claims to be the largest special school in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Fires are raging: by human agency – unthinking greed – in the Amazonian rainforest, by climate change, arson and accident in California and the American Northwest, and barely under control in Australia, another country whose leading politicians and media deny climate change. But these were only the awesome symbols, the underlying context, in which Extinction: The Facts reached BBC One, under the aegis of the broadcaster’s "Our Planet Matters" banner.Under attack in Extinction was the biodiversity, the ecosystems of our planet that allow life in all its guises to – well – carry on. There are Read more ...
Saskia Baron
ITV’s Sunday evening costume drama slot is filled for the next six weeks with this lacklustre adaptation of JG Farrell’s satirical novel, The Singapore Grip. Set in 1942, it was written in 1978 as the final part of his trilogy about British colonialism in Ireland, India and the Far East.In the Seventies, Farrell was at the cutting edge of reappraising English colonial history, crafting ingenious novels that were both ripping yarns with colourful characters and refreshingly clear-eyed re-evaluations of manipulative expats and the damage they wrought in the countries they asset-stripped. Read more ...