wed 07/05/2025

BBC Four

Interview: Anne-Marie Duff plays Margot Fonteyn

Anne-Marie Duff doesn't really resemble Margot Fonteyn. Blonde, fresh-faced and blue-eyed, she has nothing of the exotic, olive, Latin complexion that Fonteyn inherited from her Brazilian grandfather. And she never learned ballet, even if, with her...

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Hi Society: The Wonderful World of Nicky Haslam, BBC Four

Nicky Haslam, social butterfly and interior designer to the impossibly wealthy

This odyssey of party-goer and interior designer Nicky Haslam frequently resembled a Private Eye diary by Craig Brown, who’s always at his best when lacerating narcissistic name-dropping diarists from earlier generations. We watched Haslam swapping...

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Enid, BBC Four

Enid Blyton (Helena Bonham Carter) curbs her enthusiasm for long-suffering husband Hugh Pollock (Matthew Macfadyen)

Has somebody got it in for poor Matthew Macfadyen? In the recent series of Criminal Justice he didn’t even make it to the end of episode one before he was fatally stabbed by Maxine Peake. Now here he was as Enid Blyton’s adoring and supportive first...

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Singles and Downloads

Slagsmalsklubben: seven inches of Scandanavian synth heaven

Slagsmalsklubben, Sponsored By Destiny (Zarcorp)When white 7" singles drop though my letter box with commercially suicidal band names, they're usually from artists just starting their career, boutique vinyl being cannily collectable in our MP3 age....

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Synth Britannia, BBC Four

Would-be axe murderers of the BBC often propose to lop off (among other things) TV channels Three and Four, but Four’s music coverage is vastly better value for viewers’ money than the executive pension fund. Synth Britannia stuck firmly to Four’s “...

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Micro Men, BBC Four

You won’t read this in Steve Jobs’ autobiography, but in the early Eighties Britain led the world in personal computing. Acorn made the BBC Micro, which sold 1.5 million units. Sinclair Research shifted shed-loads of its ZX81, despite its rickety...

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The Art of Dying, BBC Four

The Great Unknown, the Last Enemy, the Big Sleep… it’s death we’re talking about, and Dan Cruickshank’s affectingly personal film succeeded in reaching the conclusion that there is no conclusion he could comfort himself with. “What if after death...

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Electric Dreams, BBC Four

Now we've become so steeped in digital devices that we can’t count to four without the aid of a calculator, it’s the perfect moment to take a voyage back to an era when British Leyland manufactured cars in diarrhoea-beige and there wasn't any...

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