BBC
Blu-ray: The Rebel / The Punch and Judy ManTuesday, 22 July 2025
Comedian Tony Hancock’s vertiginous rise and fall is neatly traced in the two films he completed in the early 1960s. The warning signs were already present when 1961’s The Rebel (★★★★) was released. Hancock’s BBC career had been enormously... Read more... |
Best of 2024: TVSunday, 29 December 2024
They say cinema is dying (you never know, they may be wrong), but you can’t help noticing the stampede of movie stars towards TV and streaming. Many of 2024’s most memorable shows had a big-screen name attached, even if it was impossible to be... Read more... |
10 Questions for Mark Gatiss, writer-director of 'A Ghost Story for Christmas: Woman of Stone'Wednesday, 25 December 2024
There are no white-sheeted ghosts in this year’s A Ghost Story for Christmas. The BBC’s annual adaptations of MR James’s best-known stories have been a holiday favourite since the 1970s.More recently, in the hands of writer-director... Read more... |
Industry, BBC One review - bold, addictive saga about corporate culture nowWednesday, 30 October 2024
All three seasons of Industry are now on iPlayer, and after watching the most recent one and then backtracking for another look at the other two, I am still in two minds about it. With its forensic display of a toxic world where people are viewed as... Read more... |
Being Mr Wickham, Jermyn Street Theatre review - the plausible, charming roué gives his version of events 30 years onTuesday, 11 June 2024
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an actor tends to take a sympathetic view of the character he inhabits, however morally questionable. Adrian Lukis, who played the handsome, roguish militiaman, George Wickham, in Andrew Davies's (still... Read more... |
The Reckoning, BBC One review - Savile saga that doesn't tell the whole storyWednesday, 11 October 2023
The problem with star casting is that the viewer can’t escape what it is: a very well known face pretending to be another very well known face. So Steve Coogan’s portrayal of Jimmy Savile in The Reckoning is both a fine impersonation of the... Read more... |
When Winston Went to War with the Wireless, Donmar Warehouse review - lively, but messyWednesday, 05 July 2023
Can things change, or must they always stay the same? The latest history play by Jack Thorne, a man of the moment whose Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is still in the West End and whose National Theatre hit The Motive and the Cue will transfer in... Read more... |
Axing the BBC Singers: four associated musicians on why it's so wrongFriday, 17 March 2023
Sent by a surely reluctant BBC PR, an ardent choral singer and supporter of new music, last Tuesday’s email had a title to make one groan: “New Strategy for Classical Music Prioritises Quality, Agility and Impact”. Very W1A. But this was no laughing... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Nineteen Eighty-FourTuesday, 12 April 2022
"Disgusting", "depressing", "sheer horror from start to finish", a "filthy, rotten, immoral play". Such were the comments from viewers published across a spectrum of British newspapers following the BBC transmission, on 12 December 1954, of Nigel... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Shoot the MessengerTuesday, 05 April 2022
“Everything bad that has happened to me has happened because I’m black,” laments teacher Joseph Pascale (David Oyelowo) in Shoot the Messenger, directed by Ngozi Onwurah in 2006 from a script by the late Sharon Foster. Handsomely produced and... Read more... |
Ruby Tandoh: Cook As You Are review - truly a trailblazerMonday, 04 October 2021
Ever since her appearance on The Great British Bake Off in 2013, Ruby Tandoh has been a breath of fresh air to the food industry. Unafraid to use her voice and stand up not only for herself but for the marginalised communities she is a part of, she... Read more... |
Kolesnikov, Aurora Orchestra, Collon, BBC Proms review - dazzling musicianship and insightThursday, 12 August 2021
It’s nobody’s fault, but – try as they might – the BBC Proms can often feel rather middle-aged. Whether it’s the lumbering albatross of a building, the ushers in their dated, casino waistcoats or the tone of zealous jollity (Have fun! But silently... Read more... |
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