BBC Four
Best Possible Taste: The Kenny Everett Story, BBC FourThursday, 04 October 2012
Being dead – however recently – doesn’t necessarily mean reputations are immune from being rewritten or trampled on. Best Possible Taste was scheduled just before another channel’s documentary on Kenny Everett's fellow TV personality and BBC DJ... Read more... |
Lilyhammer, BBC FourWednesday, 12 September 2012
Despite Lilyhammer’s sub-zero, snow white Norwegian setting, it is initially difficult to divorce Frank Tagliano from The Sopranos’ Silvio Dante. They’re both played by Steven Van Zandt and both are Mafia men. The suit they wear is the same.... Read more... |
Arena: Amy Winehouse - The Day She Came to Dingle, BBC FourMonday, 23 July 2012
The first anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s death seems like both a temptation and an opportunity for a sensationalist, hyperbolic tribute. Refreshingly, this Arena film, which told the story of the night that a superstar in the making performed to an... Read more... |
Joely Richardson on Shakespeare's Women, BBC FourWednesday, 20 June 2012
Who better, you might think, than Joely Richardson, a member of the Redgrave acting dynasty, to front a programme about Shakespeare? He runs deep in the Redgrave-Richardson DNA, she told us, sitting in the Old Vic Theatre where her mother Vanessa... Read more... |
Punk Britannia: Post-Punk (1978-1981), BBC FourSaturday, 16 June 2012
The Sex Pistols played their final live show on 14 January 1978 in San Francisco. According to the third and final programme in the Punk Britannia series, “for many, it would be the end of punk”. It certainly was for ex-Pistol John Lydon, who'd form... Read more... |
Harlots, Housewives and Heroines, BBC FourWednesday, 23 May 2012
Ooh look, she’s at it again. Fresh from hurling insults at David Starkey (well, he started it) and provoking the ire of historian Alison Light - who presumably didn’t make it through BBC casting - for daring to try on a bonnet on the box and thus “... Read more... |
The Bridge: Series Finale, BBC FourSunday, 20 May 2012
It ended where it began, between Copenhagen and Malmö along the Öresund bridge. The journey back to square one took in issues of homelessness, mental health, immigration and child labour. Drug abuse, national identity, family break-up and the... Read more... |
Beautiful Minds, BBC FourThursday, 26 April 2012
Apart from the fact that it’s a razor-sharp piece of writing, what most delights and impresses me about Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is how it gets under people’s skin. It has generated several books in fevered opposition to it and, needless to... Read more... |
Classic Albums: Peter Gabriel - So, BBC FourSaturday, 24 March 2012
In the early Eighties Peter Gabriel was the ne plus ultra of arty, experimental margin-hangers, breaking cover occasionally with an improbable hit single before “retreating back into the bushes with my normal crowd”. His fifth studio album, So,... Read more... |
She Wolves: England's Early Queens, BBC FourThursday, 08 March 2012
“Throughout our history, women and power have made an uneasy combination." Dr Helen Castor made it clear the path to power depended on more than the right alliances, lineage, and marriage partner. Even if all those were spot on, being female was... Read more... |
Dirk Gently, BBC FourTuesday, 06 March 2012
The great problem for holistic detective Dirk Gently is that he lives in a post-Moffat/Gattis-Sherlock era. How can any private investigator shine after the wit, intrigue, technology and bromance of that show? It helps that Gently, created by... Read more... |
The Joy of Disco, BBC Four/ The Ronnie Wood Show, Sky Arts 1Saturday, 03 March 2012
The final section of The Joy of Disco illustrated how disco music grew into a vast global phenomenon. It had been brought to the popular mainstream by the success of Saturday Night Fever, was enjoyed by grannies at Pontins, and even prompted 70-... Read more... |
