BBC Four
Tutankhamun in Colour, BBC Four review - amazing enhanced images bring fabled Pharaoh to lifeFriday, 19 June 2020
Tut in colour, and he is! The new painstaking technique of colourising vintage black and white photographs and film was touchingly exploited in this documentary for BBC Four to narrate the most thrilling and best-known archaeological discovery ever... Read more... |
Unprecedented, BBC Four review - perspectives on the pandemicWednesday, 27 May 2020
This short series of new dramas (on BBC Four) by a group of leading playwrights was commissioned by Headlong and Century Films, a week before the virus lockdown was announced on 23 March, and represents an artistic first response to a situation... Read more... |
'If they had been any closer my face would have misted up': filming 'Men at the Barre'Tuesday, 26 May 2020
“That’s Marcelino Sambé, he’s wonderful,” said the artistic administrator of the Royal Ballet as I followed her down one of the many corridors that weave throughout the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. “He’s a newly promoted Principal, a very... Read more... |
Arena: The Changin' Times of Ike White, BBC Four review - musical mystery becomes personalTuesday, 19 May 2020
The most obvious comparison for The Changin’ Times of Ike White (BBC Four) is 2012’s Searching for Sugar Man, with its story of a potential star having vanished into thin air at the brink of fame and fortune. The documentary began in the usual way... Read more... |
Wise Children, BBC online review – beautifully bizarreTuesday, 14 April 2020
Reviewing theatre now means reviewing film. Knowing that Emma Rice’s Old Vic 2018 production of Wise Children, her typically rambunctious version of Angela Carter’s last novel, published in 1991, has been recorded by The Space immediately raises... Read more... |
The Art Mysteries, BBC Four review - secrets and symbols of Van Gogh's famous self-portraitWednesday, 18 March 2020
Presenter Waldemar Januszczak suffers from something very like Robert Peston Syndrome, which makes him bellow at the camera and distort words as if they’re chewing gum he’s peeling off the sole of his shoe. Nonetheless he has a knack for finding... Read more... |
Royal History's Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley, BBC Four review - is this version more valid than anyone else's?Tuesday, 18 February 2020
Perhaps somebody at BBC Four has had a quiet word with Lucy Worsley, because in this first of a new three-part series she did hardly did any of her usual irritating dressing up. There had to be a bit, though. She appeared briefly as a monk carrying... Read more... |
Classic Albums: Tears for Fears, Songs From The Big Chair, BBC Four review - anatomy of an anthemSaturday, 15 February 2020
Roland Orzabal, co-founder and lead guitarist of Tears for Fears, laughs to himself often during this documentary — the latest in the BBC’s often-excellent, always-forensic Classic Albums series. “I agree, I agree, it sounds great,” says Orzabal. He... Read more... |
Stewart Copeland's Adventures in Music, BBC Four review - an essay on the emotional power of musicSaturday, 25 January 2020
Drums away: Stewart Copeland, drummer with The Police and a score of other groups, composer for films, video games and operas, now beams enthusiastically at us from the small screen. He’s writer and presenter of this three-part Adventures in Music... Read more... |
Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle, BBC Four review - meticulous account of a haunting American tragedyWednesday, 08 January 2020
It happened 42 years ago, but the mass suicide of 900 people at the Jonestown settlement in Guyana is still an event that freezes the blood. They were members of the Peoples Temple, the semi-totalitarian cult founded by Jim Jones, who began as a... Read more... |
Martin's Close, BBC Four review - where did the scary bits go?Wednesday, 25 December 2019
The series of short films, A Ghost Story For Christmas, became a Yuletide staple on BBC One in the 1970s. Most of them were adapted from the works of medieval scholar M R James, and drew their unsettling supernatural aura from the understated and... Read more... |
Charles I: Killing a King, BBC Four review - sad stories of the death of kingsWednesday, 18 December 2019
This three-part series by historian Lisa Hilton is a follow-up to her previous effort from last July, Charles I: Downfall of a King (BBC Four). That examined his disastrous fall from power, and this first new programme opened just before Christmas... Read more... |
