TV
Adam Sweeting
From Jimmy Savile to the Rotherham scandal, child sexual abuse has become a recurring nightmare of our society, and thus is inevitably grist to the TV dramatist’s mill. It has been a crucial component in The Missing, National Treasure and Line of Duty, to name merely three recent examples.It gradually emerged again, like a monster from the deep, as the dominant theme of this second series of Unforgotten (★★★★) and writer Chris Lang had been skilful enough to thread it through the very different lives of his protagonists and deliver a finale that lived up to all that had Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
It takes a certain kind of perversity to make a true-life drama about a missing girl (Shannon Matthews) who wasn’t missing at all – the danger is that drama will be the only thing that’s missing. Neil McKay’s answer to the problem is to take a leaf out of Shane Meadows’s book of tricks and treat the whole sorry affair as a black comedy.The Moorside takes us back to the housing estate in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, that became so familiar in the winter of 2008 when the nation’s media descended upon it in search of the truth behind the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl. What they found – a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pigeons were described in this riveting programme as man’s best feathered friends, as well as an urban pest: the 35,000 of them that used to flock round Trafalgar Square deposited some 390 tons of unharvested guano – bird poo, in simpler words – annually that had to be cleaned up, until bird feeding was banned. Mess and noise made the same bird, so loved by pigeon fanciers, into dreaded flying rats, a leading public menace.But pigeons, like rats, are infinitely adaptable, hence their remarkable survival, underlined by an amazing capacity to breed. And until the 1840s, when the telegraph was Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Guilty or not guilty? Dum dum, dum dum. No, it was not just in your imagination. As the axe hovered over the neck of Yvonne Carmichael at the climax of Apple Tree Yard, and the madam forewoman waited to deliver the jury’s verdict, there was an entirely synthetic and deeply irritating pause for dramatic effect. Guilty of the murder or manslaughter of George Selway? Dum dum. Dum dum. Or innocent? Dum dum. Perhaps Mrs Carmichael also found herself cursing Simon Cowell as the hideous grammar of his talent show bled into the doings of courtroom drama. Dum dum, dum dum. Over on ITV they’d have Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In London and New York, Phoebe Fox (b. 1987) is known to theatregoers as Catherine, the niece over whom Mark Strong's Eddie Carbone went pazzo. Their physical intimacy, in Ivo van Hove’s sizzling Young Vic production of A View from the Bridge, made for an intensely uncomfortable viewing experience. For her return to the stage, Fox is in a frothier one-sided relationship. In the National Theatre’s Twelfth Night she plays Olivia, the grieving countess who falls in love with a boy she doesn’t know is a girl.Simon Godwin’s production has further fun with gender by giving the yellow cross garters Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There's nothing like a tale set in a warm, exotic climate to lure in the viewers in damp and wintry northern Europe. Send the Nonnatus House midwives to South Africa for Christmas! Shoot a ridiculous detective drama in Guadeloupe! Go back to the Raj with Channel 4's Indian Summers!It's an old trick and it always works, and it probably will here as well. The title of The Good Karma Hospital makes it sound like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel with added doctors and nurses, but thanks to a crisp and often witty script by Dan Sefton, it stands a good chance of establishing a distinctive identity Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Oh clever title: cheetahs, when fully grown at about 18 months, are the fastest mammal on earth, clocking 70 miles per hour in short bursts. For this documentary, we were in the magnificent country of Zimbabwe, in all seasons, following a cheetah family which uncharacteristically lived in forest as well as river plain.Guided by the soothing and authoritative voice of Sir David Attenborough, armed with an elegant script, we followed the fortunes over nearly two years of a mother cheetah and her five cubs, four females and a male. We were enabled to do this by the cameraman and conservationist Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
There were signs of a collision as early as the second series. The event loomed larger in the third last year and last night, after an actual car crash, it finally happened: Endeavour became interchangeable with Midsomer Murders. How are the mighty fallen.Morse, investigating the disappearance of an academic in 1962, had doors slammed in his face while Morris Men practiced their menacing moves in the picturesque village of Bramford. The local yokels were preparing for the autumnal equinox (even though the trees were covered in green leaves) just as they were when the botanist, checking Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Francis Bacon died in April 1992, aged 82, but heaven knows how he managed to live that long. The tortuous story of his life is now fairly well known, but Richard Curson Smith's documentary marshalled a formidable array of critics, biographers and celebs including Marianne Faithfull, Damien Hirst and Terence Stamp to create a portrait of a man capable of effervescent wit and charm, yet fuelled from within by a monstrous darkness.The film lit the blue touch paper by looking at Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which, when exhibited in London in 1945, did little to Read more ...
Michael Scott
The Guardian called Brexit “a rejection of globalisation.” That’s as may be, but the reality is we cannot, however much we might want to, check out of the globalised world in which we live. Globalisation has defined the 20th and 21st century and while the future is uncertain, one thing we can sure about is that it will continue to become ever more inter-connected.The question is: how best to prepare ourselves to make the most of it? This is a newly personal question for me, having become a father for the first time in 2016, with my mind now turning more and more not just to how I think about Read more ...
Jasper Rees
John Hurt, who has died at the age of 77, belonged to that great generation of British thespians who started in the 1960s and eventually, one by one, ended up knighted: Michael Gambon, Albert Finney, Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins, Ian Holm, Nigel Hawthorne, Derek Jacobi. Of them all, Hurt was the outsider. It’s impossible to imagine an alien springing from any midriff but his.There couldn’t be a more iconic signature for a career spent giving birth to weirdos, wackos, outsiders, victims, lunatics and flamboyants. Quentin Crisp, Caligula, Profumo-suicide Stephen Ward, Elephant man John Merrick Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Science has yet to determine whether thespians are the product of genetic predetermination. We all know about the Foxes and Redgraves, myriad self-spawning dynasties of actors bred of actors wed to actors, while there are plenty of others who go about their fathers’ and mothers’ business. But we also know that there will never be another McKellen. Sir Ian is the last in the line, while he has always supposed that he was also the first in the family to act. Then he was persuaded to hop aboard BBC One’s Who Do You Think You Are?The programme is a two-trick pony. One trick is to show a celebrity Read more ...