BBC Four
Arena: Everything is Connected - George Eliot's Life, BBC Four review - innovative film brings the Victorian novelist into the presentMonday, 11 November 2019
Gillian Wearing’s Arena documentary Everything is Connected (BBC Four) is a quietly innovative biography of an author whose works still resonate with their readers and the country within which she wrote. Wearing and George Eliot are a sympathetic... Read more... |
Rich Hall's Red Menace, BBC Four review - laconic comic referees the Free World versus CommunismWednesday, 06 November 2019
Who won the Cold War? Nobody, according to comedian Rich Hall in this 90-minute film for BBC Four. His theory is that after the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago, Russia and America merely “flipped ideologies”. The US government now... Read more... |
Get Rich Or Try Dying: Music’s Mega Legacies, BBC Four review – inside the RIP businessSaturday, 02 November 2019
Half a billion dollars is what the top five most lucrative estates of deceased musicians earned last year. The figure represents the cunning work of a few people to turn “legacy” into its own immortal industry. To watch a program on this theme is to... Read more... |
The Troubles: A Secret History, BBC Four, finale review - peace at last, but at what price?Wednesday, 23 October 2019
This terrifying but gripping BBC Four series about Northern Ireland’s savage sectarian war reached its conclusion with a meticulously detailed account of how hostilities were eventually brought to a close by the Good Friday Agreement, which came... Read more... |
Spiral, Series 7, BBC Four review - hard-hitting return of our favourite French cop showSunday, 20 October 2019
And welcome back to our favourite French cop show – perhaps our favourite cop show from anywhere, in fact – which has raced into its seventh series (on BBC Four) with some typically grimy storylines about death and lowlife in a very de-romanticised... Read more... |
Studio 17: The Lost Reggae Tapes, BBC Four review - a perfectly paced tale of world-shaking basslines and human frailtySaturday, 12 October 2019
If there was ever a documentary that needed you to have good speakers on your TV setup – or good headphones if you're watching on computer or tablet – this is it. It maybe goes without saying that reggae needs good bass reproduction to appreciate,... Read more... |
Spotlight on The Troubles: A Secret History, BBC Four review - Ulster's bitter sectarian war revisitedWednesday, 11 September 2019
“The Troubles” is a polite euphemism for the ferocious storm of sectarian violence and political chaos which convulsed Northern Ireland for 30 years, before being brought to a close by 1998’s Good Friday Agreement. Irish journalist Darragh MacIntyre... Read more... |
Cindy Sherman: #untitled, BBC Four review - portrait of an enigmaMonday, 29 July 2019
Cindy Sherman predicted the selfie, so goes the claim. From our current standpoint, it is all too easy to analyse her many hundreds of photographic self-portraits made since the late 1970s as cultural forebears of the digital medium. What this BBC... Read more... |
Looking for Rembrandt, BBC Four review - painter's biog is a mini-masterpieceWednesday, 24 April 2019
This final episode of BBC Four's Looking for Rembrandt, exploring the life and work of the Netherlands’ greatest painter, was a mini-masterpiece in itself. We rejoined the story in the mid-1650s, when Rembrandt found that his days of popular acclaim... Read more... |
Rock Island Line: The Song That Made Britain Rock, BBC Four review - the early dawn of BritpopSaturday, 13 April 2019
If you were a fan of “Rock Island Line” when it became a pop hit, you’d have to be at least in your mid-70s now. In 1956, Paul McCartney heard Lonnie Donegan perform it live in Liverpool, and Paul’s rising 77. How many below that age know it is moot... Read more... |
The Beatles: Made on Merseyside, BBC Four review - when the Fab Four were fiveSaturday, 30 March 2019
Documentaries about the 20th century’s most fabled quartet keep coming. There’s no special call for The Beatles: Made on Merseyside (BBC Four), which looked at the group’s Liverpool beginnings, though at a stretch it could be argued that in the 50th... Read more... |
Showbands, BBC Four review - an Irish cultural phenomenon explainedSaturday, 16 March 2019
Ask most people what a showband is and they’ll give you a blank look. But ask any Irish person (or those born in the Irish diaspora) who is north of 50 and they will probably look misty-eyed. For between the late 1950s and 1980s showbands were a... Read more... |
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