BBC Four
Mad Men: Series 4 Finale, BBC FourWednesday, 01 December 2010
And so Mad Men 4 rode into the sunset, Don perched on yet another horse (sorry, love interest), a fifth series in production, and it’s all become a soap opera rather than a drama series. It should be called Madly Men. Fast diminishing returns, one... Read more... |
Getting On, BBC FourTuesday, 26 October 2010
When Getting On, a wonderfully lo-fi and dark sitcom, debuted last year, it had a run of just three episodes, which possibly reflected the BBC’s lack of faith in audiences being able to appreciate a programme rich in subtlety in its writing, acting... Read more... |
Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death and Women, BBC FourThursday, 21 October 2010
The recurrent image in this somewhat staid documentary is a monochrome photograph of Poe’s moon of a face with its panda-like eye sockets. Occasionally the camera moves in for a close-up on those eyes - perhaps hoping they’ll reveal something that... Read more... |
The First Men in the Moon, BBC FourWednesday, 20 October 2010
Obviously the world has decided it needs Mark Gatiss, and it keeps finding things for him to do. An influential figure in the latterday revival of Doctor Who, as well as co-creator of the BBC's recent Sherlock, Gatiss's forte is turning out to be... Read more... |
The Born Free Legacy, BBC FourTuesday, 28 September 2010
If you have fond childhood memories of either the Born Free book or movie, you might want to stay away. From the opening moments of this documentary, the knowledge that lion-loving conservationist George Adamson was fatally shot in the back on a... Read more... |
Spitfire Women, BBC FourSaturday, 18 September 2010
“It was the best part of my life,” said one silver-haired lady in ringing tones, while another described it as “poetry” and a third as “the aeroplane and you were one”. What these doughty octogenarians were describing in this gem of a film was... Read more... |
Herb Alpert, Tijuana Brass and Other Delights, BBC FourFriday, 17 September 2010
I used to have a childhood fascination with the music of Herb Alpert, because I liked the tunes and always felt there was a hint of melancholy behind Herb’s breezy, nonchalant exterior. Everybody else found Alpert laughably cheesy, but happily,... Read more... |
The Road to Coronation Street, BBC FourFriday, 17 September 2010
A drama about Britain’s (and by the time Coronation Street reaches its 50th birthday in December, the world’s) longest-running soap starts with a huge advantage - its producers could just quote lumps of the brilliant original scripts, written by... Read more... |
Mad Men, Series 4, BBC FourWednesday, 08 September 2010
That sobbing musical theme resumes, so does that hospital-white dreamlike cartoon of a male figure tumbling in a Hitchcockian fall from grace past huge ads of poster girls. Actually it’s almost as much Milton as it is Hitchcock. I say that to be... Read more... |
In Their Own Words: British Novelists, BBC FourMonday, 16 August 2010
Every great novel is a world, and every great novelist responds to and recreates their own time in their own image. Therefore how could a three-part documentary series possibly cover that fertile period in British literature that took in both world... Read more... |
Domesday, BBC Two/ Treasures of the Anglo-Saxons, BBC FourTuesday, 10 August 2010
What was originally a coincidence of reviewing – two dispatches from the Dark Ages, Treasures of the Anglo-Saxons on BBC Four and Domesday on BBC Two – in fact turned into a remarkably instructive diptych of how and how not to make history... Read more... |
The Great Outdoors, BBC FourThursday, 05 August 2010
Now that Last of the Summer Wine has been strapped aboard the great Stairmaster to the Sky, there’s a gap in the market for a comedy in which the landscape has a starring role. Written by Kevin Cecil, whose credits include Black Books, and Andy... Read more... |
