TV
Jasper Rees
“Jodie is a remarkable young woman. She’s game. She’s a good actress, and she’s willing.” So said Peter O’Toole of the first female Doctor Who. Jodie Whittaker, born in 1982, is best known for Broadchurch on the small screen and Attack the Block on the big screen. But there’s a lot more to her than those two roles.At 23 and fresh out of drama school, she starred opposite O’Toole in Venus as a surly teenager from Yorkshire who captivates a withered old actor. The role, written by Hanif Kureishi, allowed her to paint with many colours. Her character Jessie is by turns sullen, unimpressed, Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Hospital Club’s annual h.Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art, advertising, theatre, music, television and more. This year they are teaming up with theartsdesk.com – the home of online arts journalism in the UK – to add a brand new award to the line-up.The Young Reviewer Award is aimed at bold, thoughtful young writers aged 18-30 who are serious about a career in arts journalism. It will be presented to the author of the best review of any art-form that we Read more ...
David Nice
Rippling outward from the initial story of a seemingly nice WASP woman who finds herself having to adapt in a women's prison, Orange Is the New Black quickly developed into the most multilayered, almost indigestibly rich of American TV dramas. By the second series, it had become a tricky-to-balance polyphonic symphony, giving its mushrooming cast of important characters a plethora of vital story-lines, combining themes, forging unlikely alliances. Season Five, scripted by 11 writers including the creator Jenji Kohan, had a brainwave of an idea: focus on the three-day life of a prison riot, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How much plotting went into GLOW? It has been gussied up by the people who brought you the jumbo Netflix hit Orange Is the New Black. Both shows are based on a true story and feature women of all ethnicities bitching and slapping in a contained environment. In Glow there’s less orange, and less black, but even more bitching and slapping.This time the perimeter wall is not a prison but the ropes of the wrestling ring. GLOW is based on the true story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling who were a cable TV hit in the late Eighties. Netflix supplies a complementary documentary all about the real Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Detective Inspector Helen Weeks (MyAnna Buring), having finally cornered a skanky drug-dealer/benefit cheat in a blind alley – and stopped an eager PC from Tasering the woman – is punched in the stomach for her pains. How’s that for a hard-hitting start? Weeks is pregnant – she should be called Eleven Weeks – and it later transpires she’s not sure who’s the daddy.In the Dark, based on the novel by Mark Billingham, may seem like a run-of-the-mill crime drama but soon modulates into something deeper. The pre-title sequence shows someone digging a grave on a dark and stormy night. The identity Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The title gave us the true-life plot: this was a grandson’s filmed narrative of something that will touch us all, through acquaintance, friend, family and perhaps ourselves falling victim to some form of dementia. It's a word that covers a myriad of conditions, all of them affecting the mind.This was not a factual documentary examining the disease, but a specific family story which is not really typical nor stereotyped. The grandson, Dominic Sivyer, showed us affecting family films of himself as a young boy of seven or eight, and how his grandfather Tom had become the most important man in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Catholic Church hasn’t enjoyed a good press on screen lately. Nuns punished Irishwomen for their pregnancies in Philomena. Priests interfered with altar boys in Spotlight. And in The Young Pope a Vatican fixated on conservatism and casuistry elects a pontiff who sees himself as a rock star. Broken was Jimmy McGovern’s agonised absolution for a church in crisis.Over six parts on BBC One, Broken has felt like walking along half a dozen stations of the cross. McGovern’s portrait of a broken priest – and by extension, a broken priesthood – was exceptionally short on levity or solace. The Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
It’s half a century since homosexuality was partially decriminalised in England and Wales, so who better to cast his gaze over the lie of the land than stately homo Rupert Everett? The accomplished actor (and even finer diarist) started as he meant to go on in 50 Shades of Gay by disappearing down a manhole in Manchester. His mission? To relive the heady days of “cottaging” – sex in public conveniences – with a former copper whose job it was to catch men at it. And not a single mention of dear, departed George Michael.Cruising was a dangerous pursuit that could lead to exposure and ruin Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Presumably it seemed like a good idea at the time. Broadcasting juggernaut Lord Bragg would undertake a sweeping survey of the way that television has transformed our lives and reflected British society in the last 70-odd years, soaring over dramas, documentaries, current affairs, soaps, reality TV shows etc with hi-def satellite vision. Clips of key programmes from the archives would cue up bouts of discussion among hand-picked experts.Only two major problems. At two hours it was far too long, yet paradoxically each section was much too short. It felt as if a collection of long lists had Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“The northern white rhinos are just a symbol of what we do to the natural world,” as one of the contributors to this haunting documentary put it. “We witness them disappearing in front of our eyes.” The programme ended with names of endangered animals jostling for space on the screen, from hawksbill turtles and the South China tiger to whales, orangutans, the red panda and the snow leopard.This story of the 43-year-old rhino Sudan, named after the homeland from which he was whisked away as a baby to be installed in Dvůr Králové zoo in Czechoslovakia (as it then was), was a terrific Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Immigration…immigration… immigration… that’s what we need! Not the words of record-breaking, tap-dancing trumpeter Roy Castle, rather it’s the gist of a Times leader from 1853 (admittedly, fairly heavily paraphrased). It was just one of the eye-opening discoveries in Ian Hislop’s engaging BBC Two documentary about the birth of one of the most divisive political issues of the last 100 years, as he looked at surprising historical pinch points and used them to shed light on their future shocks.Britain’s open-door policy in the mid-19th century was, we were told, an issue of moral importance. For Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hugh Laurie, in his new role of forensic neuropsychiatrist Eldon Chance, tells us that he works with those who are “mutilated by life”, and we soon see that Chance himself falls into that category. He’s in the midst of a divorce, he only sees his daughter Nicole at weekends, and his work seems to fill him with a kind of morbid weariness.This is Laurie playing the flip side of Dr Gregory House, the brilliant and fearless diagnostician happy to break every rule and offend whomever it may concern in pursuit of the right result. Chance, on the other hand, is timid and full of doubt, and even his Read more ...