BBC Four
Jasper Rees
The Disappearance, shown in France a year ago, was adapted from a Spanish drama. Both shows had a more gender-specific title: Desaparecida or Disparue. A less abstract translation into English might have been The Missing, but that title had already been taken by a recent BBC drama with which The Disappearance shared a dogged fidelity to a template (see also Broadchurch, plus a lot of Nordic noir): one fresh suspect per episode, enough false leads to set up a red herring factory, and then a big reveal to finish [spoiler alert: the denouement is discussed below].The titular absentee was Léa Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The accelerating glorification, in the West at least, of the handmade is a fascinating phenomenon, perhaps a subliminal fight back against overwhelming industrialisation and the age of the robots. And perhaps nowhere is the admiration and commercial possibility accruing to the handmade artefact more evident than in British companies who can label themselves as By Royal Appointment. Four such enterprises, ranging from a two-man band in a country manor to a full-scale factory, are the subject of this series, with the silver and goldsmithing of The House of Benny, Steinway pianos and John Lobb Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One can only speculate about the mysterious allure which dictators seem to hold for Jonathan Meades, and perhaps one should keep one's conclusions to oneself to avoid reprisals. Having previously turned his perverse eye and tumultuous vocabulary on Stalin (Joe Building) and Hitler (Jerry Building), Meades arrived perforce at Ben Building, in which (with director/cameraman Frank Hanly) he took a trip around Benito Mussolini and the cultural trappings of fascist Italy.For all his militaristic grandstanding, operatic posturing and enthusiasm for quasi-imperial fancy dress, Mussolini was unusual Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Antonia Bird died in 2013 at the age of 62. The last television drama with her name on it was the first series of The Village, but the career which is celebrated in the BBC Four documentary Antonia Bird: From EastEnders to Hollywood were from a golden age of single drama. You always knew you were watching a film by Bird. She made a name with single-issue films with single-syllable titles.First off was Safe (1993) tackling homelessness, then Priest (1994), Jimmy McGovern’s portrait of the modern Catholic church. Next up was Face (1997) about gangsters with a conscience. In Care (2000) a man Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
What larks! The first run of Zoo Quest – itself the first of the wildlife programmes – started 62 years ago, in 1954. It was thought it had all been filmed in black and white, on small 16mm cameras, but in fact a condition imposed by the BBC was to shoot in colour to produce a sharper image in black and white. Discovered in the archives a few months ago were perfectly preserved canisters of colour film, six hours' worth in all. This was all a decade before colour came regularly to television.So, perfectly timed for Attenbourgh's 90th birthday, the story of Zoo Quest was retold in this Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What makes a musical performance? The final of Young Musician 2016 presented five judges with this philosophical teaser to ponder. For the previous 90 minutes three contestants with three radically contrasting styles of delivery cleared every bar in front of them, with the help of Mark Wigglesworth and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Giving the nod to one meant the elbow for the others. In the end it could hardly be disputed that cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, a young musician of extraordinary charisma, was a deserving winner.Ben Goldscheider went first with Strauss’s Second Horn Concerto, which Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
In the last century, when the BBC took arts documentaries seriously, Arena was one of the highlights of the week. Nowadays its appearance is as rare as that of a Midwich cuckoo. Money, or rather the lack of it, is the problem. In our grave new world a single promo for EastEnders can cost more than a 60-minute film.Three cheers then for Arena: All the World’s a Screen – Shakespeare on Film, a cavalcade of clips that show the Bard really is all things to all men. None of the talking heads belongs to a woman. None of the interviews is original, but David Thompson and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Through the snowy wastes we crunched. The winter scenery was overwhelmingly beautiful and almost devoid of any human habitation: gorgeous mountains in the distance, the black waters of the fjords gleaming, the winter sun shining through the pale blue sky. And lo, here was Andrew Graham-Dixon, in woollen hat and furred windbreaker, to introduce us to centuries of Norwegian art.The first episode of this three-part history focused exclusively on Norway, and was subtitled "The Dark Night of the Soul". What was exceedingly odd about the programme was its melodramatic pessimism, the narration Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Virtuoso Violinists was an hour of unalloyed informative pleasure that toured televised highlights of great violinists playing great music. Its painless excursion into the western classical canon reminded us why the BBC is the NHS of culture, and we delighted here in a guide who proved as accomplished a presenter as she is a performer of genius.Nicola Benedetti has an Italian name, a Scottish accent, and an utterly charming manner as she enthused, with immense knowledge, over a series of clips from 60 years of television broadcasts of the leading violinists of the day. She made no attempt to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Murder is entertainment, which is why crime and the legal process are on television every night. But where drama and documentary focus on criminals and the police who catch them – and the barristers who cross-examine them in court – vanishingly little attention is paid to the worker bees of the legal process. That's partly because the Crown Prosecution Service is a shy organisation. The Prosecutors: Real Crime and Punishment is the first time cameras have been allowed to watch the CPS at work.Each episode has focused on contrasting cases to illustrate the many different ways in which evidence Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
It was all a far cry from the Leeds Piano Competition. Shunted on to BBC Four after the disappearance of BBC Three to online, Eurovision: You Decide nevertheless remained true to its new channel’s original remit. In today’s no-brow, morally neutral multiverse it would be churlish to point out the thoughts that it encouraged were entirely dirty ones.The show was opened by last year’s winner of the world’s largest – in terms of viewing figures – music competition: Mans Zelmerlow and Chalk Boy performing "Heroes" (nothing to do with Bowie). The sexy Swede had swapped his tight leather Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Waldemar Januszczak always has a provoking agenda to shape his now nearly countless forays into television art history. In this four-part series he's out to challenge what he sees as the unthinking acceptance of the one-dimensional traditional and monopolistic version of the Renaissance.He assumed we all blindly agreed with that second-rate painter but potent myth-maker Vasari (born in Arezzo, lived in Florence), who, in his 1550 biographical three-volume Lives of the Artists, set out the case for the innovative supremacy of contemporary Italian art – the Renaissance. Vasari indeed was the Read more ...