BBC One
Kieron Tyler
“Will the app clicker replace the page turner?” asked Alan Yentob’s state-of-play rumination on the book. It’s a cutely phrased question and, as everyone reading this will be familiar with the digital world – this is theartsdesk, after all – a fair one. Will zeroes and ones make the book redundant, a sort of totem, or will it adapt, taking on the new forms presented by the digital world? The programme didn’t answer the questions, but at least it did show the possibilities.A hunt around the BBC’s various websites revealed that Books – the Last Chapter? was known as Books –the End of the Affair Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
That Alan Yentob gets around. I’ve run into him backstage during Jay Z's set at Glastonbury and in a jazz club in Poland, and here we found him in Rajasthan fronting a fascinating and well-shot programme, albeit workmanlike rather than really inspired, mostly set in one of the richest traditional music areas of India.Yentob (nicknamed Botney, which sounds like a furry robot) isn’t everyone’s cup of Bragg, and he isn’t that immediately likeable. Personally I prefer his lugubriousness to the overexcited and eager-to-please presenters TV bosses tend to go for. And he found the time to make a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Steve Buscemi says he’s “from the country of Brooklyn”. In the wake of Boardwalk Empire he could have said the empire of Brooklyn. Although the family history disinterred was genuinely strange, this first entry in the new series of Who Do You Think You Are? USA was no emotional roller coaster, mostly because of Buscemi’s low-key affability.At times, he looked surprised to be the subject of the programme. Yeah, he’s the cadaverous, snaggle-toothed, weasel-faced Buscemi we love. But look at those dark-rimmed eyes. Bush baby big, they’re made for surprise. He was taken aback by what the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Garrow’s Law, which returned last night for a third series, would seem to be entirely about the foreign country that is Georgian England. One of its progenitors is Tony Marchant who, give or take the odd adaptation of Dickens or Dostoevsky, has spent his packed writing life in the modern day. But they don’t seem to make his kind of searing contemporary drama any more, the type that hunts for the root cause of moral failure in individuals and society. So in order to hold a mirror up to his audience, he has turned to the 1700s. Profitably.The shrewdness of Garrow’s Law is that it has a foot in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It’s very deep, very private and full of love,” said Art Garfunkel of his relationship with Paul Simon. So private that for this examination of their swansong 1970 album Bridge Over Troubled Water the pair were interviewed apart, despite both being credited as executive producers. Whatever the nature of the love, 40-plus years on, bridges weren’t being built.Paul Simon didn’t seem too enthusiastic about revisiting his past. One of the few times a smile flashed across his face was when he recalled the journey he used to make to buy records by The Everly Brothers. Discussing the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What we're used to seeing whenever the BBC launches on one of its epic explorations of the natural world is moving pictures. But as well as training film cameras at their subects, from the largest mountains and glaciers to the smallest organisms, the hardy modern-day adventurers armed with their phenomenal hi-tech kit also train still cameras at everything they encounter. The result, thanks to Chadden Hunter, Fredi Devas, Vanessa Berlowitz, Hugh Miller, Jason Roberts and Robert Pitman - who are variously camera operators, producers and directors of Frozen Planet - is a collection of moving Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Many commentators have professed bafflement at the tangled layers of Hidden, as it probed into a sick and murky past while apparently dead characters came back to haunt the present. Right to the end, writer Ronan Bennett kept his cards carefully concealed, so we still don't know who was really behind the sinister "Helpdesk" and its slick dial-a-killer operating system. Or at least it was slick at killing everybody except protagonists Harry (Phil Glenister) and Gina (Thekla Reuten), who somehow managed to wriggle away from their pursuers on a record-breaking number of occasions.But Hidden Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been suggested that, come the revolution, the best possible of outcomes to the question of who shall be Head of State is the man off the goggle box who for innumerable aeons has been telling us about the birds and the bees, the silverbacks and the dung beetles, the fishes and the flytraps. But could we not, on reflection, do a bit better than that? If God does exist he is surely the spit of David Attenborough. White of hair, persuasive of voice, sagacious of mien, he is now to be found, in his ninth decade, standing at the top and the bottom of the world, more or less simultaneously.If Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You'd think a lengthy shoot on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe would be any actor's dream, but apparently Ben Miller found making Death in Paradise too hot and uncomfortable. That means he's perfectly cast as DI Richard Poole, a detective from the Metropolitan Police sent (as the drama would have it) to Saint-Marie, a fictional small island near Guadeloupe, to investigate the murder of a fellow British cop, Charlie Hulme.Poole can't stand the Caribbean either, because the light's too bright, the sand is too sandy, and he feels the heat especially acutely because his luggage hasn't arrived Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And now we faced the final curtain. Spooks responded with an inspired burst of hyperactivity and plots-within-plots, and even a micro-cameo from Matthew Macfadyen as Tom Quinn, the original head of Section D. Up to now this hadn't been the finest of seasons, partly because the death of Richard Armitage's Lucas North at the end of Series 9 left a void which was never successfully filled. Lara Pulver never seemed comfortable as Erin Watts, Section D's new head, because she looked as if she'd been seconded from a modelling agency, while promoting Dimitri (Max Brown) up the batting order merely Read more ...
fisun.guner
Tracey Emin once made a tent for which she gained some notoriety. On it, she’d appliquéd the names of everyone she had ever slept with – including, as a child, her beloved Granny Hodgkins. Sadly, the tent, called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, was destroyed in a fire at Momart, the art-storage warehouse, in 2004. The loss of her tent was keenly felt, and she refused to recreate it. But genealogists in Who Do You Think You Are? gave Emin something to smile about when they dug deep into her family history: Emin comes from a long line of tent-dwellers. When she was shown Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One has learned to approach high-profile BBC dramas with mild apprehension, since apparent promise and oodles of hype frequently turn out to be fig leaves for feeble plotting and a half-baked script (The Hour, this means you. And possibly you too, The Shadow Line). Too many recent series should have "promising idea, pitifully executed" chiselled into their neglected, overgrown headstones.After a single episode, is it too much to hope that Hidden may be the one that has triumphantly broken the mould? Probably, but let's enjoy the moment anyway. The first thing they got right was casting Phil Read more ...